A Widening and More Complex Security Agenda for Europe (European Security Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre As European security expands and takes on new meanings, this panel gathers valuable scholarly contributions examining this widening agenda. These include contributions on new technological and scientific developments of the European security landscape, such as border control patents and small nuclear reactors, but also the increasingly securitised discourses around food security and human vulnerability.

Africa: Conflict and Cooperation (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This panel consider the challenges of the farmer-herder conflict in Nigera, the maritime disputes and energy governance in West Africa, the cooperation between Saudi Arabia and West Africa and the reslience to violent extremism in northern Nigeria.

Assessing the Emerging Illiberal Order for Trade (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre What remains of trade multilateralism, and what comes next? The Trump Administration is creating a ‘pay-to-play’ trading order in which rules are stacked against foreign partners. Yet much of the technical project of liberalized markets remains. Looking back across the post-Cold War era, this panel contextualizes the unstable transition from an unfinished system of liberal rules to an emerging arrangement in which allies purchase access to markets. To better understand the new illiberal order for trade, Froese explores the shifting currents of the MAGA movement, explaining its contradictory embrace of free market conservatism and anti-liberal forms of social protection. Calvert et al show the varieties of response to the ongoing challenge of state capitalism and its continued centrality to global governance considerations. Bober et al document the securitization of trade politics on the front lines of Sino-American competition. Siles-Brugge et al argue that despite being sidelined by geopolitics, the WTO’s work on technical cooperation continues. Finally, Shepherd looks back to WTO negotiations in the 1990s, examining how the trade in services became a foundational feature of global governance. Her work shows how our chaotic present can only be understood with reference to the history of the postwar order.

Authoritarianism, democratisation and Peace (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre Exploring the links between democratisation, the state and peacebuilding

Authority, Legitimacy, and Informality in Contemporary International Organisations (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre This panel examines how traditional approaches to understanding international organisations (IOs), which have revolved around the concepts of formal delegation and principal control, require nuancing in lights of how contemporary IOs actually function. Across diverse cases, which include human rights, peacekeeping, macroeconomic policy, and migration governance, we observe the need to theorise informal practices, relational dynamics, and struggles for authority among multiple stakeholders with competing interests. The papers collectively advance our understanding of IO design and functioning, internal and external legitimacy, accountability and control, and informality in global governance. They showcase the methodological diversity and sophistication in the field of IO studies including interviews, archival methods, participant observation, and surveys.

Beyond post-Soviet transition: the political economy of Central Asia (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre The study of Central Asian political economy is undergoing a profound transformation. Long framed through the lenses of post-Soviet transition, rentierism, and great-power dependency, the region’s growing integration into global production networks, particularly through emerging South-South partnerships, demands a rethinking of established paradigms. From automotive and energy joint ventures to textile, logistics, and digital infrastructure projects, Central Asia has become crucial testing grounds for the reconfiguration of global capitalism in a multipolar world. These changes raise new questions about how states, firms, and communities in the region navigate, negotiate, and contest external economic power while articulating their own models of development and modernity. This panel asks whether current frameworks in International Political Economy (IPE) adequately capture Central Asia’s transformations by focusing on three interrelated questions: 1) How do global production and finance reshape the political economies of Central Asia, beyond extractivism and dependency? 2) What forms of agency, resistance, and adaptation emerge among local firms, workers, and communities engaging with the increasing presence of foreign capital from China, Western Asia, Russia and the West? 3) How can Central Asia’s experiences contribute to broader IPE debates on globalisation, green industrialisation, and the political economy of development? By bringing together scholars of development, global production networks, and critical IPE, the panel situates the regions at the forefront of contemporary transformations in the global economy. It seeks to challenge Eurocentric and resource-centred readings of Central Asia, instead foregrounding its role as a laboratory of new industrial, social, and ecological experiments. The discussion contributes to BISA’s ongoing debates on the reconfiguration of global capitalism and the politics of production, offering “new directions” for International Studies to understand agency and innovation in the Global Majority.

Borders in IR: Reflecting on the Last Decade, Reimagining the Next (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre A decade ago, the so-called ‘migration crisis’ was at the forefront of news media across the globe. As thousands of people arrived on the shores of EUrope seeking safety, calls for solidarity and dignity spread across continents. But while, the summer of 2015 became known as the long summer of migration, 2016 signified a long winter of border politics. The erection of border walls within Europe; the election of nationalist and far-right governments; the vilification of the migrant; attacks on solidarity and social movements; and a wider securitisation can be seen as an impact of border politics. While the discipline of IR was called to address these issues, its approach on the border remains limited – despite calls for re-evaluation throughout the years. This roundtable brings together scholars whose work has largely focused on borders and migration who will reflect on borders in IR during the last decade and will attempt to re imagine the border for the next. Some of the questions they will try to address are: What lessons have been learnt during the last decade? Why does IR resist a more critical conceptualisation of the border? In what ways can the border be re-imagined and what would it look like in the decade to come?

Childhood as a Technology of Global Governance (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Office 13, Brighton Centre In conventions of everyday life, the social imaginary of childhood frames it as presocial, defined by incapacity and deficit relative to the idealized adult subject. In ways analogous to the operation of race or gender as governance technologies, imagined childhood is a social technology of governance, reproducing and policing the boundary between childhood and adulthood and the unequal social relations of power it sustains. As a technology of global governance, childhood is a powerful rhetorical resource in service of sovereign power as well as along circuits of civil society and IGO/NGO action, purposefully deployed in ways that undercut or enable political projects. The papers on this panel inquire into the ways in which dominant ideas about childhood bear on governance from the local to the global. From extraordinary moments of sociopolitical rupture, progressive political potentialities, or the longue durée of historical processes with global reach, each reveals important insights into how ‘imagined childhood’ functions as an ubiquitous and powerful social technology of governance. Scaling from the governance of children’s lives, through local social orders and legal regimes, to the global, they reveal how imagined childhood operates in sometimes unanticipated ways and contexts as a social technology of global governance.

Climate Change and International Order (I) (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre Today we are seeing significant challenges and shifts both in the overall structure, dynamics and norms of international politics, and in the world’s climate and associated climate mitigation, adaptation and other responses. Thus on the one hand, contemporary international politics is characterised by, amongst other things, heightened great power and regional political rivalries, an increase in major armed conflicts and military spending, weakened multilateralism, widespread impunity, and a rising tide of authoritarian, nationalist and far-right political projects. And on the other hand, the current climate conjuncture is marked, somewhat contradictorily, by the breaching of the 1.5C warming threshold, continuing rises in fossil fuel production, the rapid if uneven development of low-carbon energy infrastructures and supply chains, and a widespread stalling if not reversal of climate measures and ambitions. But what are the relationships between these two sets of shifts and challenges, and with what implications? How are global political shifts affecting or even determining climate change and climate action, and with what limits? In what ways, if at all, is climate action progressing independently from, or irrespective of, mounting international political challenges? How, conversely, are climate change and climate mitigation, adaptation and other measures affecting or even transforming international political structures and dynamics? How are such connections between climate change, climate action and international order likely to unfold in future? And what are the political, strategic and other implications of these linkages, however understood? This panel, the first of two, will address these themes using a range of cases, scales, and theoretical and methodological approaches.

Confronting Violence: Anticolonial Feminist and Queer Approaches (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1b, Brighton Centre Many urgent transnational political projects – struggles against sexual violence, movements combating economic exploitation, political exclusion and ongoing coloniality, challenges to epistemicide and epistemic injustice – remain organised around the successive imperatives of naming violence, identifying experiences of violence, devising idioms and frameworks for their intelligibility, and displacing the conditions of their production. Critical scholarship is thus often an exercise in archiving and recounting violence – a practice necessarily confronted by a range of ethical, material and epistemic challenges and questions. Feminist scholars engaged in re-presenting violence have identified the risk of miming the violences they archive (Hartman 2008); erasing female agency and reinscribing racial, imperial, sexual and class hierarchies (Kapur 2002); and buttressing rather than dismantling the conditions of (re)production of violence (Phipps 2020). Pertinent questions have also been raised around who writes about violence and what their location (in its social, ethical and political registers) allows them to witness and recount (Lugones 2003). This panel is an effort to collectively navigate some such challenges that have persistently haunted the indispensable but by no means uncomplicated imperative to research violence. Against the backdrop of heightened global violence through growing authoritarianism, fascism, ethno-nationalism, imperialism, anti-feminist and anti-gender mobilisations, this panel takes up unresolved questions around how to study violence, seeking to reckon with the ethical, methodological and epistemic difficulties researchers encounter in the process of witnessing, coming to terms with, researching and writing about violence. For us this project remains (and must remain) guided by anti-colonial feminist thinking that has long foregrounded issues of power, location and violence to shake up the worlds we inhabit and envision the worlds that are possible. In emphasising de and postcolonial approaches, we hope to bring into conversation (and occasionally hold in tension) two distinct but closely aligned epistemic and political traditions that have offered the tools to bring to the centre and interrogate power within the process of research, especially taking seriously power in processes of re-presentation (Spivak 1999). De and postcolonial frameworks have also pushed scholars to think more capaciously about the question of violence itself, recognising violence across registers (political, structural, epistemic, representational) while remaining alive to how deeply political and contentious the process of naming, recognising, and recording violence remains. Panelists respond to the following themes and questions: - What structures of power are instituted/challenged/reinscribed in the act or process of researching and writing on violence? How can research on violence remain attentive and responsive to these? - What do scholars reveal and conceal when we recognise certain acts as violent and not others? Who do we produce as violent and whom as available for violence? What sort of politics of response does this invite? - How do (and should) practices of care, reciprocity, and mutuality feature in researching violence? What impacts do they have on both the researcher and the ‘researched’? - How can researchers ethically assemble, protect, and engage with archives of violence as it is unfolding? - How do we address issues of violence in the classroom, ensuring that we remain attentive and responsive to the (often violent) institutional context within which pedagogy transpires?

Contested Currents: Water Rights and Water Injustice (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre This panel interrogates the contestation around the politics of water, its governance and the relationship to structural injustices. It brings together scholars for whom water is a prism through which existing political structures and inequalities can be studied and via which we can understand not just the implications for governance, but the political contestation around bodies of water.

Contesting Power from Below: Grassroots Resistance, Civil Society Agency, and the Transformation of Governance (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre This panel examines how civil society actors engage in resistance through unexpected channels and ambiguous spaces of power. Moving beyond traditional frameworks that position resistance as simply oppositional to state authority, the papers explore how communities, activists, and organisations navigate, appropriate, and contest institutional structures from below. The panel brings together diverse empirical cases—from climate activism in Portugal to unarmed civilian protection in conflict zones, from civil society engagement with international criminal justice to community organisations negotiating counter-terrorism funding, to peacebuilding in post-conflict Colombia—to illuminate the complex dynamics of contemporary resistance. Each paper demonstrates how grassroots actors do not merely oppose power structures but actively reinterpret, reclaim, and transform institutional spaces and discourses to advance alternative visions of justice, security, and accountability. Collectively, the papers contribute to critical debates on the politics of nonviolent action, local agency in transnational governance, and the everyday practices through which marginalised communities contest both physical and structural violence. The panel reveals how resistance operates within contested terrains where support and critique, protection and opposition, engagement and refusal intersect in ways that challenge state monopolies on security, justice, and legitimate action.

Creative and Visual Approaches to Politics (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre Creative and Visual Approaches to Politics

Critical Ontologies of War in Ukraine (War Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre The war in Ukraine has witnessed a transformation in contemporary warfare with widespread ramifications for population impacts and experiences. Russia’s full-scale invasion has brought the systematic targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, widespread impact of social media, rise of small drone warfare, and multiple impacts of toxic munitions on ecology. At the same time, it has catalysed multiple creative acts of resistance that are reshaping how we understand war. These include the resurgence of arts and culture as direct responses to violence, repurposing of critical infrastructure as sites of resilience, new forms of transnational digital activism, life-centered ecological resistance, and the emergence of alternative visual ontologies through war-related photography. The complexity of this experience is, however, poorly captured in current ontologies of war, which also continue to understate the agency of war-affected populations to adapt to and resist war (Griffiths and Redwood, 2024). Turning to frequently ignored sites, spaces and processes, this panel looks to better understand contemporary experiences of war and reflect on the consequences of this for the emergence of new ontologies of war.

Critical Torsions, Contorting the Critical: Ontological Security Studies and the Epistemological Politics of Self-Critique (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre How critical has Ontological Security Studies (OSS) been? After nearly two decades of innovative scholarship examining the intersection of emotions, and the psychosocial dimensions of security, its critical purchase remains underexamined. Much as Critical Security Studies challenged traditional security approaches, OSS scholars claimed to have advanced a conception of security beyond physical threats, proposing instead a 'security of the self'. Yet OSS's theoretical resonances with and epistemological departures from critical security studies more broadly remain scarcely explored, as it is the boundaries of the self, whether in its psychological, ontological, or analytical dimensions. This panel undertakes a reflexive interrogation of OSS, deploying a double gesture: turning the critical apparatus of OSS upon itself whilst simultaneously examining its epistemological and political relationship with critical security studies in IR. It proposes a 'critical torsion', twisting OSS to reveal its constitutive limits, assumptions, and silences, whilst also 'contorting the critical' by interrogating how critique itself operates within and through OSS frameworks. We welcome papers addressing: • Has OSS reached theoretical saturation, or do unexplored avenues remain? • How can the security of the self provide genuinely critical perspectives on international politics? • How does OSS epistemologically relate to, and diverge from, Critical Security Studies? • Might OSS offer novel frameworks for theorising the critical role of theory and the theoretical role of practice?

Emerging challenges in the (geo)politics of AI governance and regulation (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre As the field of AI governance and regulation has become a space of (geo)political dynamics, this panel calls for investigating various frameworks to govern AI, as well as their political, legal, ethical, and other implications for international politics and security. The panel’s presentations explore the shifting landscape and emerging challenges of governing AI technologies in both civilian and military domains. They highlight three particular, interconnected challenges in AI governance. The first is the increasing fragmentation and distributed nature of AI governance across actors from both the public and private sectors, such as states, international organizations, and tech companies. The second is the power dynamics forming AI governance frameworks at the national, regional, and global levels. The third is how AI governance emerges from a site of political contestation between various actors’ discourses, narratives, and practices, including those related to risk perceptions, international humanitarian law, multilateralism, and ethics. By highlighting these emerging trends, the panel contributes to the ongoing theoretical conceptualization of AI governance in IR and global security. It also forms an empirical contribution by examining different states (the UK, South Korea, the US, France, China, Japan), international organizations (the EU, NATO), and the private sector (Palantir).

Gender, Resistance and Governance: Women’s Agency in Post-Conflict Societies in the Global South (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre This panel explores the intersections of gender, resistance, and governance in post-conflict societies across the Global South, foregrounding women’s multifaceted roles as peacebuilders, negotiators, and agents of transformation. While international frameworks such as UNSCR 1325 have institutionalised the “Women, Peace and Security” (WPS) agenda, women’s lived experiences within transitional contexts extend beyond these global normative frameworks. This panel examines how women’s participation both aligns with and challenges dominant models of peace governance, revealing tensions between global normative frameworks and local agency. Drawing on case studies from conflict-affected societies, the panel’s papers interrogate how women navigate structures of exclusion and transform post-conflict governance landscapes. Topics include grassroots peace activism, women’s groups as brokers of gender politics, the role of international institutions during conflict, and the reconfiguration of gender norms in post-war governance. In discussing these topics, the panel's papers apply diverse theoretical frameworks and methodological tools. Collectively, these papers illuminate how women resist marginalisation while redefining the meaning of justice, peace, security and authority in post-conflict societies. The panel contributes to critical feminist and postcolonial debates in International Relations by centring the voices and strategies of women who challenge hegemonic understandings of peace and governance. It also engages with the peace and conflict literature by asking questions about how gendered resistance reshapes political orders and state-building processes in the aftermath of conflict. This panel will be of interest to scholars of gender, peace and conflict studies, critical security studies, and global governance.

Imagining Politics Otherwise: Popular Culture, Security, and the Aesthetics of Disruption (British International Studies Association) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre As International Studies looks ahead to the next fifty years, this panel argues for the transformative potential of popular culture as a space for rethinking political futures. Engaging with film, music, literature, videogames, and comics, the papers collectively explore how cultural production challenges dominant narratives of security, identity, and apocalypse, offering new directions for research and pedagogy. The panel explores the creative practices within and associated with popular culture to think anew about world politics considering, for example, interrogating both cinematic representations of nuclear apocalypse and their real world imaging, via disrupting linear narratives to expose the silences structuring nuclear imaginaries. Relatedly, science fiction’s temporal elasticity allows for critical reflection on historical trauma and contemporary anxieties. Music can be similarly used and the panel explores how David Bowie’s can be used to critique existential insecurity to envision inclusive futures through dystopian aesthetics. Thinking anew about both popular culture and world politics also features in the discussion of superhero narratives and videogames, with the former being seen as a producer rather than mirror of US security imaginaries. Videogames also contain representations which can subvert gender norms and provoke reconsideration of representation and resistance. Together, these papers call for methodological innovation and interdisciplinary engagement, urging International Studies to embrace cultural analysis as central to understanding global politics. By foregrounding aesthetics, affect, and imagination, the panel asks: are we ready to take seriously the cultural forces shaping the political landscapes of the future?

Political Theologies Against the Colonial State (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre This panel explores how religious traditions have imagined forms of authority, community, and resistance that exceed or unsettle the modern state. Drawing on debates in international political theory, political theology, and decolonial thought, it foregrounds figures and traditions that unsettle familiar categories such as sovereignty, territory, hierarchy, and universality. By treating revelation, exile, prophecy, mysticism and messianism as conceptual resources rather than anomalies, the session asks how these repertoires illuminate the theological and moral architectures necessary for resistance at the limits of state-centric assumptions. In this way it seeks to articulate alternatives to the state-based international order that could offer pathways for relationality and reconciliation. The panel brings together people working at the intersection of post-/decoloniality and political theology with the aim of rendering visible the plurality of grammars through which political order has been imagined and enacted beyond the state, and to consider what this plurality means for the methods and scope of resisting coloniality today.

Populism and Foreign Policy in a Changing International Order (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre Populism is an emergent and vibrant topic of research in international politics as over the last years we have seen a growing number of experiences in the world that use the international as a spring broad to legitimate their projects at home. The set of international actions and behaviours of these leaders and governments are not innocuous. Yet, the effects, dimensions and consequences of how these actors do foreign policy and international relations still need further theorisations and empirical analyses building from the rich landscape of populist experiences around the world. Against this backdrop, this panel analyses the emerging topic of populism at the interplay of foreign policy analysis and international relations. The panel overarching goal is to unpack key drivers, ideas, psychological aspects, and motivations of populist leaders and governments in different regions of the world regarding their positioning towards international issues and different type of external relationships with other states and international institutions.

Reframing Korea in Contemporary International Studies: Narratives of Identity, Memory, and Power (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel International Studies is increasingly urged to reconsider how knowledge, identity, and power are constituted in a world where familiar boundaries and assumptions no longer account for changing realities. Long treated as a site of economic success or geopolitical tension rather than as a source of theoretical insight, the Korean Peninsula offers fertile ground for such rethinking. Its history of colonisation, division, and accelerated modernisation has produced contested narratives of progress, memory, and identity. These narratives reveal how unresolved historical legacies intersect with emergent domestic and international tensions, turning the region into an experimental arena for exploring how international order coexists with the past, while imagining a range of possible futures. As contemporary international conflicts increasingly draw lines between 'us' and 'the Other,' this panel posits that the study of memory and identity politics is not a peripheral concern but a central frontier for International Studies. Through four perspectives spanning migration narratives, environmental politics, popular culture, and international development cooperation, the papers collectively examine how stories and discourses reproduce, negotiate, and occasionally unsettle established hierarchies of recognition and belonging. Taken together, they illustrate how South Korea’s postcolonial experiences, geopolitical insecurities, individual life stories, and transnational cultural flows each shape, challenge, and reconfigure narratives of identity and memory in both domestic and international contexts. In doing so, the panel positions Korea not merely as a case but as a vantage point from which to theorise how symbolic, historical, and cultural forces configure power and order in contemporary International Studies. Recasting narrative and recognition as analytical bridges between the everyday and the international, the panel suggests new conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical directions for a more reflexive and inclusive discipline.

Religion and (dis)information: establishing a new research agenda (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre Research on the impact of religion on societies has increasingly had to acknowledge how religion is being reconfigured in alignment with global mass media, information and entertainment trends. Accordingly, various case-based studies have interrogated mainstream religious actors’ engagement with (dis)information and its implications in various global settings. Others have interrogated the relationship between extreme or fundamentalist religious belief and belief in false information and conspiracy theories. Yet despite this empirical boom, little work has made the cross-case comparisons necessary to conceptualise the ways in which religious actors can function as information actors beyond the religious realm, or how religious organisations’ engagements with information relate to the nature of their host regime or the broader global media ecology. This panel offers such a new direction. It combines insights from across IR, Religious Studies and area studies and touches upon the religion-information relationship across Eastern Orthodoxy, Slavic Paganism, Turkish media-politics, the Catholic Church in the Philippines, Falun Gong in China, and Rastafari online spirituality. Building on this broad base, the panel seeks to build some conceptual and analytical coherence to the exciting work currently being undertaken on the topic of religion and (dis)information.

Same Foundations, New Directions: Examining Trust Across Different Levels and Contexts in International Studies (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel While trust research within International Studies emerged at a time of significant global change - the end of the Cold War - and sought to understand how trust helped understand change, the current generation of scholars have rapidly expanded this previously narrow agenda into a much broader unpacking and exploration of trust at the international level. In doing so they have drawn on new thinking both within and outside of the discipline to better understand the present and the future as well as the past. This panel draws together a number of papers exploring the concept of trust across a variety of different levels of analysis, from the individual, to the interpersonal, the interstate and the systemic. In doing so, the papers seek to understand how trust operates in a variety of contexts from the role of dispositions shaping individuals, state leaders managing adversarial relations, UN and EU diplomats working in the multilateral space, to challenges raised by disinformation on public perceptions. Overall, the panel demonstrates that there is much more to understand regarding the concept of trust and that new directions for research can aid scholars and practitioners in navigating challenges and opportunities in an ever changing global context.

Spaces of / for Resistance, Agency and Activism in Global Politics (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel Spaces of / for Resistance, Agency and Activism in Global Politics

Technologies of violence (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre A panel created by the CMS Working Group Convenors of existing paper abstracts.

The IPE of the United Kingdom (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

The militarisation of UK security politics (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel In recent years, UK security policy has exhibited a shift toward militarised approaches, in line with broader trends among other Western states. The government's commitment to increasing defence spending, as well as the framing of the 2025 National Security Strategy, reflects a growing prioritisation of military threats—particularly from Russia and other so-called ‘hostile states’. This reorientation has often come at the expense of addressing non-military challenges, such as the climate crisis or economic inequality and has been accompanied by substantive budget cuts to aid and development. Official rhetoric has increasingly invoked a language of deterrence and military power, a shift that is mirrored in segments of the media which amplify narratives of geopolitical confrontation and the necessity of military preparedness. This panel will explore the political, cultural, and institutional drivers behind the UK’s turn toward militarism, its implications for global security and what alternative security paradigms remain.

The security landscape of West Africa in a changing regional and international context (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel After being a theatre of major insurgencies in the 1990s, West Africa was perceived in the early 2000s as a recovering region, also due to the extensive involvement of the UN in peacebuilding and the growing assertiveness of the Economic Community of the West African States (ECOWAS) in addressing crises. However, since the outbreak of the 2012 insurgency in Mali, the region is experiencing new forms of instability that existing institutions seem unable to address effectively. New conflicts affecting the Sahel and, to some extent, the coastal countries, involve a variety of insurgent groups, including jihadists affiliated to Al Qaeda and the Islamic state. Communal conflicts often feed into, and are at their turn exasperated, by insurgencies. Meanwhile, coups d’etat have made a comeback. Military regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso in Niger have left ECOWAS and have rejected help from long-term security partners, turning instead to new actors like Russia for military and political support. This panel reviews the changing security situation in West Africa, looking at how the emergence of new actors, geopolitical changes and climate change are affecting the region. It also examines the responses of West African governments and their international partners to new forms of insecurity.

Theories of Change for Nuclear Disarmament (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel How should we theorise "change" in relation to nuclear disarmament, and what are the theories of change that underlie different nuclear disarmament projects? Do the methodological tools of mainstream International Relations allow us to apprehend change, or do we need to look further afield? What needs to change to make nuclear disarmament possible; what might need to stay the same? This panel engages with interdisciplinary perspectives on "change" - social, political, technological, temporal, material - to try and address some of these questions. Panelists will each speak on questions of change and/or stasis, taking place at different locations and at different scales across the globall uclear complex, with each paper addressing how different kinds of change might produce political or intellectual implications for the project of global nuclear disarmament.

Refreshment break Room: Foyer, Brighton Centre

Centring Palestine 1 (British International Studies Association) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre N/A

Climate Change and International Order (II) (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre Today we are seeing significant challenges and shifts both in the overall structure, dynamics and norms of international politics, and in the world’s climate and associated climate mitigation, adaptation and other responses. Thus on the one hand, contemporary international politics is characterised by, amongst other things, heightened great power and regional political rivalries, an increase in major armed conflicts and military spending, weakened multilateralism, widespread impunity, and a rising tide of authoritarian, nationalist and far-right political projects. And on the other hand, the current climate conjuncture is marked, somewhat contradictorily, by the breaching of the 1.5C warming threshold, continuing rises in fossil fuel production, the rapid if uneven development of low-carbon energy infrastructures and supply chains, and a widespread stalling if not reversal of climate measures and ambitions. But what are the relationships between these two sets of shifts and challenges, and with what implications? How are global political shifts affecting or even determining climate change and climate action, and with what limits? In what ways, if at all, is climate action progressing independently from, or irrespective of, mounting international political challenges? How, conversely, are climate change and climate mitigation, adaptation and other measures affecting or even transforming international political structures and dynamics? How are such connections between climate change, climate action and international order likely to unfold in future? And what are the political, strategic and other implications of these linkages, however understood? This panel, the second of two, will address these themes using a range of cases, scales, and theoretical and methodological approaches.

Constitutive Technologies: Violence, Sovereignty, and Decolonial Futures (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre As International Studies looks towards the next 50 years, the discipline must necessarily confront how technology both continues and ruptures patterns of relations simultaneously as instrument, infrastructure, and epistemology of power. Such inquiries are particularly urgent in this contemporary moment when technology has become intrinsic to the processes through which borders are drawn, populations are governed, violence is legitimised, and futures are foreclosed or imagined. Interrogating how technology, broadly defined, reinscribes historical circuits of domination even while producing novel forms of violence demands analytical frameworks attentive to the constitutive force of technology. Alongside such critiques, we suggest that future oriented interrogations of technology must also contend with its transformative potential particularly when anticipating decolonising technological futures. This entails for instance, examining digital sovereignty movements, Indigenous data protocols, and abolitionist refusals as serious political projects that crucially inform potential visions for technological governance. This panel brings together scholars working on these issues particularly those working at the intersections of technology, violence, and international relations with a focus on the colonial, imperial, racial, and gendered dimensions of technological power. Alongside these critiques, these papers extend analysis beyond narratives of disruption and violence to contend with technology's potential for care, reparations, and reimagination. In extending these interrogations, this panel seeks to proffer an understanding of technology that interrogates the conceptual and material limits of what counts as technology in the first place.

Corruption, Integrity and Defence & Security Institutions (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre What does bringing attention to corruption and integrity lens bring to how we understand the current context of rising militarisation and defence budgets, decreasing development funding and declining interest in investments in peace? Can a view towards the principles and practices of integrity help navigate through any current problems or reveal hidden insecurities that we need to pay more attention to? This panel explores how an integrity and anti-corruption lens adds to addressing global governance and security challenges within and linked to defence and security institutions. Integrity is a concept and practice connected to anti-corruption measures, in which various practices, institutions, oversight and accountability systems and structures are in place to prevent and address multiple types of corruption. In recent years, there is an increased focus on corruption risks and anti-corruption measures in defence and security institutions. But an integrity lens also invites us to critique the gap between policy and practice, for instance in various protection frameworks, including RtoP, WPS, and POC, as well as the role of values and norms in implementing these frameworks. Defence and Security Institutions are one set of actors, among others, meant to be operating in implementing these frameworks.

Doing Refugee Law Empirically: Reflexivity from the Field (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Office 13, Brighton Centre The field of forced migration has engaged with the empirical studies with refugees for a while. There have been calls for a shift from research about refugees to research with refugees, underscoring the need for participatory approaches. However, international refugee law has been a latecomer to these discussions, as its study has traditionally tended towards top-down doctrinal analysis. The last couple of decades have witnessed an increase in qualitative research in refugee law as well, particularly among socio-legal scholars who critically analyse legal principles and norms in their particular social and political settings. Nevertheless, there is not much reflexive work among legal scholars on the design and conduct of empirical research with refugees. This panel brings together legal researchers who have conducted extensive fieldwork with refugees and NGOs in Turkey, Jordan, Germany, and Bangladesh. Building on researchers’ own experiences and encounters, the papers offer reflexive accounts that touch on the theoretical, methodological, ethical, and emotional dimensions of conducting empirical research. Each paper examines hidden and overlooked aspects of field research and reflects on the ways researchers dealt with them through their personal strategies. The panel contributes to the growing discussions on the ‘reflexive turn’ in legal scholarship on displacement and highlights how knowledge production has been shaped by researchers’ identities, subjective experiences, influence of power relations, and research participants. By foregrounding reflexive empirical approaches, the panel explores how rethinking methodology in refugee law can yield more grounded insights and meaningful responses for the displaced.

Engaging Europe: Recalibrating UK–EU Relations in the Post-Brexit Era (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre This panel explores the evolving forms and meanings of engagement between the United Kingdom and the European Union in the post-Brexit period. While formal membership has ended, diplomatic, political and societal channels of interaction continue to structure relations across multiple levels (Martill and Carrapico, 2025; Wolff and Piquet, 202). The papers collectively interrogate how engagement operates as both a policy instrument and a legitimacy practice in this new phase of UK–EU relations. Tobias Hofelich, Carolyn Rowe and Ed Turner analyse how EU norms and procedural reflexes continue to shape bilateral engagement through a detailed study of UK–German relations. Julie Smith and Birgit Bujard assess the Kensington Treaty as a high-profile experiment in bilateral re-engagement and a potential pathway toward renewed UK–EU cooperation. Benjamin Martill and Pauline Schnapper examine how the Starmer government’s attempt to “reset” relations reflects competing understandings of engagement within UK domestic politics. Finally, David Phinnemore and Katy Hayward explore stakeholder participation and legitimacy-building in the operation of the Windsor Framework. Together, the panel develops a multi-dimensional understanding of engagement as a process of reconnection, negotiation and adaptation that defines the contours of the continued post-Brexit European order.

Environmental Political Economy (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre This international political economy panel focuses on how environmental politics and international political economy interact and what that means for the past, present and future of discussions about what we value, how we value and whose values are protected in the context of the climate change and planetary boundaries.

Exploring the relationship between imperialism, coloniality and environmental degradation I (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre This panel recognises that many researchers are working at the intersection of environment and colonial / post colonial / decolonial research, especially during a time when the realities of this intersection between colonialism, empire, and the environment have never been more clear. This moment makes evident the interconnections between militarism and settler colonialism and genocide and ecocide, and therefore the need to situate our knowledge and approaches within anticolonial, indigenous and translocal perspectives. These papers recognise the importance of scholarship that addresses these issues, and address how imperialism / colonialism / extraction / capitalism are in relationship with environmental degradation. This is both on a material level, where the functions of occupation and extraction lead to environmental destruction, and on a more discursive level, where hierarchies of life are used to justify and naturalise ongoing violence against certain people and places.

Foreign Policy Strategies in Eurasia (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre This is a panel on Foreign Policy Strategies in Eurasia.

Latin American perspectives on Migration Governance (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This panel brings different lenses (politics of ambiguity and ad-hocracy, political economy, deportability, Synchronization, visual methods and together with Children in IR) to reflect on diverse angles of Latin American migration governance: responses to Venezuelan displacement in Latin America and Brazil; Darien Gap crossings; Central American caravans; Haitians and Afghans migration to Brazil, the creation of the El Salvadorian Minister of Diaspora, Trump deportation policies and its impact in the Mexico-US borders and Venezuelan migrant children in Brazil to problematise the asylum concept. By using different methodologies, all the authors contribute to recognising the voices and research from Latin America and to bringing innovative reflections on the idea of migration governance.

Local and Regional Development (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

Masks off: Critical Theory after Liberalism (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre This roundtable considers what the current conjuncture, marked by the unravelling of a liberal order, means for critical theorising. Critical scholarship in the field of International Relations has long been preoccupied with exposing liberalism's contradictions, illuminating how it functions to mask social violence on a global scale. Yet as liberalism declines, this raises questions over whether such analyses are equipped to diagnose and address the morbid symptoms that characterise the present ascendancy of the global far right. As recent interventions have underscored, notions of homonationalism and pinkwashing, as well as critiques of liberal inclusion more broadly, appear to address a set of concrete conditions from another time. This roundtable asks how we got here, and whether critical theory has the tools to help us navigate what many refer to as the current ‘masks off’ moment. Participants will consider how social reproduction, race, sexuality, and class have become sites where liberalism’s disintegration is most acutely felt, and how critical theory might reimagine its project beyond the ruins of the liberal international order. The panel asks: What is lost, if anything, in the rubble? And what is the role of critical thought under ascending fascism?

Middle Space Powers? The struggles and opportunities in space beyond the 'great powers' (Astropolitics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre N/A

Military Peacekeeping and the Politics of Protection (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre UN Peacekeeping operations are increasingly judged on their ability and willingness to protect civilians from threats and atrocities. Protection of civilians is enshrined in key UN strategic and operational documents and has been likened to a new norm for the UN. Similarly, local communities hold protection expectations of UN peacekeepers including, but not limited to, active military protection from imminent threats. While the robust turn in peacekeeping has provided detailed debates about the challenges and potential pitfalls of militarizing the UN, we know surprisingly little about how exactly UN peacekeepers use military force and, crucially, how such use of force for protection is perceived by local communities. This roundtable focuses on recent debates that shine more detailed light on the operational, community-focused, and local aspects of peacekeeper’s use of force. Specifically, this roundtable addresses variation in local community’s legitimacy perceptions of peacekeepers’ use of force; how and why UN peacekeepers use force for protection purposes and they are trained in doing so; and how we can theorize protection from threats and atrocities in a pluralistic manner.

Ontological (in)security and the politics of state personhood (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre One of two panels on new approaches to state personhood, this panel explores the generative tension between Ontological Security Studies (OSS) and more traditional security concerns with sovereignty, territoriality, and statehood. While often thought of as opposite ends of the sub-discipline, these approaches to security intersect more profoundly than routinely acknowledged: territory is irrevocably bound to the symbolic and affective work of constructing, maintaining, and repairing notions of self. Contributions on this panel explore how space, territoriality, sovereignty, and corporality form the material and existential basis of being, developing new arguments for why the state can, and perhaps should, be seen as a person. In the process, they also make new empirical contributions to, inter alia, the study of hostage diplomacy, community-building, alliance politics, and climate change.

Ontological Security and the Populist Radical Right (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre This panel explores the insights offered by ontological security when it comes to studying the populist radical right (PRR). Through four empirical papers with different geographical and thematic focuses, we apply concepts from ontological security studies (OSS) to better understand and conceptualise how ontological security can be applied to explain the rise of the PRR as a modern phenomenon, the contestation of biographical narratives by PRR actors from within, and how PRR parties mobilise national symbols of belonging and popular anxieties. The papers on this panel engage with a range of case studies including Turkey, the UK and Germany, allowing space for comparative reflection and discussion of ontological security at both the global and the local level. Some contributions focus on modernity and the societal level, as well as perceived threats to national identity, while others explore responses to the PRR at the elite level. In this way, the panel applies an OSS lens not only to different cases, but to different levels of analysis, providing a dynamic picture of the diverse and promising applications of OSS to the study of the populist radical right.

Pandemic governance in historical and contemporary perspective (Global Health Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre Pandemic governance in historical and contemporary perspective

Preparing for war in the 21st century: Lessons from Ukraine (War Studies Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre Friedrich Merz stated that the West was neither at war or peace with Russia and war at the sub-threshold level appears to be ongoing between the West and parts of what John Ikenberry has referred to as the Global East. This roundtable looks to consider what this might mean for the West. As part of this it will consider amongst other things the following questions: 1. Is the West a useful prism? 2. To what extent is technology transforming the battlefield? 3. What does the Russia's illegal war in Ukraine tell us about the future of war? 4. What is the future for NATO and European security under a Trump Presidency? 5. Is the nuclear taboo at an end?

Preparing for what comes next? Civil and military preparedness in and beyond the Nordic model (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre In the current geopolitical context, with increasingly unstable great-power relations and threats to the rules-based liberal order, volatile U.S. foreign policy, and Russia’s war in Ukraine, European countries are scaling up their defences. In this endeavour, many are looking to the ‘Nordic model’ of total defence. Although the ‘Nordic model’ is often used in the context of peacekeeping, it has become increasingly associated with preparedness and defence policies. Since the end of the Second World War, across the Nordics, a strong defence has been synonymous with the involvement of civilians in preparedness for crisis and war. As such, civil and military defence have been deeply intertwined across the Nordics. In this panel, we gather papers that discuss narratives of wars and crises, and preparedness for such events in both military and civil defence terms, in the Nordics and beyond. How are the coming crises envisioned? Who is responsible for defence? How are Nordic histories of preparedness engaged in contemporary policy? How is civilian preparedness enmeshed in total defence strategies?

Reflecting on the first decade of the journal Critical Military Studies (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre The interdisciplinary journal Critical Military Studies was established during 2015 with a remit to challenge military power; a decade on from its first publication, a Special Issue of the journal was commissioned to critically reflect upon its endeavour as an intellectual project. Chaired by one the Critical Military Studies Special Issue Editors, this Roundtable consists of several authors - from across the academic career stages, from PhD to Professor - involved in the ‘CMS@10’ Special Issue, including one of the Special Issue’s Guest Editors. Each speaker will discuss their contribution to this bespoke collection of articles with a view to facilitating a reflective and constructive conversation about the 10 year anniversary of Critical Military Studies, and ways forward for the journal into the next decade.

Rethinking Crisis Management in a World of Multiple Nuclear Adversaries: New Thinking for a Dangerous Century (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel The contemporary global order is characterised by overlapping and interconnected adversarial nuclear relationships. This multiple adversary world poses challenges and complexities that did not exist in the bipolar international system of the Cold War. A key question posed by the new complexity of nuclear relations is the viability of the concept of nuclear crisis management, one of the core ideas in strategic studies. Are the tools developed during the Cold War to reduce nuclear risks in moments of acute danger fit for a world of multiple nuclear players and intertwined theatres of competition? Reflecting on the Cuban Missile Crisis decades later, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara remarked that “‘managing crises’ is the wrong term: you don’t manage them because you can’t manage them” (McNamara in Blight 1991, 192). This panel asks whether McNamara’s stark warning is even more compelling in today’s nuclear era — one shaped by rapid technological developments in AI, cyber, and quantum systems, and the growing interconnectedness of escalation pathways across domains and regions. The panel brings together scholars and practitioner-researchers to examine nuclear crisis management with particular focus on South Asia and U.S.–China dynamics. We explore innovations including security dilemma sensibility and strategic empathy, crisis communication and trust-building, AI-augmented decision-making, Track 1.5 dialogues, and the value of crisis simulations and wargaming as tools for de-escalation. Contributions draw on interdisciplinary approaches — from psychology and diplomatic studies to wargaming and futures analysis — to reimagine escalation control and crisis prevention in a fragmented nuclear order. By foregrounding diverse perspectives and engaging both policy and academic communities, the panel directly answers BISA’s call to consider what the discipline must become to meet future global challenges. It demonstrates how renewed thinking, methods, and pedagogies can ensure that international studies remains relevant, normatively grounded, and practically capable of reducing nuclear risk in a dangerous century.

Rethinking Ideology in Asia at end of the Liberal International Order (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre The end of the Cold War did not mark the end of history or the human struggle over ideology. While ideology remains a powerful force in global politics, there has been a significant decline in the academic study of ideology in International Relations. This was largely because liberal internationalism was so hegemonic that it became the unacknowledged ideology, something that becomes increasingly apparent as the liberal international order unravels. Unlike during the Cold War, ideology today is less easily contained within the grand philosophical and political frameworks of established ‘-isms’. How then does ideology operate in contemporary international politics? How can we conceptualise it within the discipline of International Relations? This panel addresses these questions by exploring the role of ideology in the international politics of Asia. The papers show how the legacies of past ideological struggle underpin competing visions of modernity that propel contemporary Asian politics across multiple scales, from techno-globalism in China, to illiberal peacebuilding and rebel developmentalism in Southeast Asia, and ideological bricolage in Central Asia. The panel's discussion also serves to reflect on centre-periphery dynamics within Asia, and their implications for the study of international politics in Asia.

Rethinking climate and development (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel This panel examines how global and local actors confront intertwined climate and development challenges.

Sites of security, control and resistance (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel This panel explores the spatial and political dynamics through which security is produced, contested, and transformed. Bringing together perspectives on state repression and resistance, the papers interrogate how spaces - from borders and regions to courtrooms - become sites of control and contestation. By situating security practices within their material and spatial contexts, the panel foregrounds how power operates, while also tracing the everyday practices that unsettle these logics. The contributions illuminate how security governance is embedded in social and spatial orders and practices, such as arms control regimes. They engage with and extend debates in security studies on how security orders operates and how acts of resistance can reveal the fragility and contingency of those orders.

Taxation and the current moment in International Political Economy (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel Taxation sits at the core of political relations in and of the state. Taxation concerns not only the relationship between the state and the market, but also between capital and labour, and between the global North and the global South. Studying taxation thus enables a fine-grained understanding of relationships between political and economic subjects in and across states, as well as of the state itself. In IPE, these questions have received varying patterns of attention over the years, revealing something both about the state of IPE as a discipline and about broader political questions of the time: while the ‘corporate escape’ studies of the 1960s and 70s were informed by the co-evolution of IPE with studies of international business, the 1990s’ focus on tax competition mirrored academic and policy debates about the impacts and potential downsides of economic liberalisation. The recent surge of interest in international tax policy in IPE, in turn, emerged in parallel to the (re)politicization of tax policy after the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis amid “gridlocked” global governance and polycentric forms of governing the global economy. In this panel, we take up the idea of taxation as being reflective of relationships between political and economic subjects and transfer it to the realm of international economic relations. What can we learn about current developments in international political economy (both as an area of study and as a discipline) by taking taxation as a starting point? What can the study of taxation tell us about political and economic relations within and of the state in today’s global economy? The contributions to this panel use methodologically diverse approaches to study current developments in the global economy from the perspective of taxation. This concerns questions about the sources of tax competition and its link to growth models, the configuration of tax competition since the adoption of the Global Minimum Tax, the drivers and effects of regional and global tax cooperation, and the link between tax policy and domestic resource mobilisation. With this panel, we hope to open a room for broader debates about the contribution that the study of taxation can make to IPE.

The Art of Politics: Aesthetic Dimensions of Repression, Resistance, and Reparation (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel This roundtable explores the political power of art in contexts of repression, resistance, and reparation. Art has long made visible both direct and structural violence experienced by women, racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+ communities, migrants, political dissidents, and other marginalised groups. Its sensory register - visual, auditory, tactile, and more - shapes how political realities are experienced and understood. As Bleiker (2017: 262) observes, aesthetic engagement can challenge what is visible, thinkable, or debatable in politics. The discussion will examine how art functions across three dimensions: 1. Repression: How states and institutions deploy aesthetic regimes to control narratives, reconstruct history, and reinforce exclusionary identity narratives. 2. Resistance: How artists and social movements expose injustice, contest power, and mobilise publics through visual, performative, and participatory practices. 3. Reparation: How art contributes to collective memory, recognition, and societal healing, offering alternative frameworks for justice and reconciliation. By integrating scholarly and practice-based perspectives from academics and artists, this roundtable highlights the politics of art as a lens for understanding and transforming global political dynamics. It will showcase how artistic interventions can both illuminate structural inequalities and act as catalysts for social and political change.

The opportunities and challenges of AI in International Relations Research (British International Studies Association) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre This roundtable brings together a group of scholars to discuss use of AI in their research. How and why are they using it and if not, why not? What are the implications for AI in academia and for IR as a discipline?

Tourism, Power, and Postcolonial Politics: Critical perspectives on global mobility and governance (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This panel explores tourism as a key site of geopolitical production, postcolonial negotiation, and everyday resistance. It brings together critical perspectives that challenge dominant narratives of tourism as a benign or apolitical force, instead foregrounding its role in sustaining global hierarchies and shaping political subjectivities. A central theme is the governance of mobility, where tourism is shown to operate as a mechanism of control, privileging certain mobile subjects while marginalising others. This includes the reproduction of an (im)mobility regime that obscures the structural causes of displacement, dispossession, and environmental degradation. The panel also interrogates the commodification of colonial histories, examining how tourism marketing and heritage spaces – such as cruise ship advertisements and luxury hotel boutiques – sanitise and repackage colonial pasts. These practices reinforce racialised narratives and contribute to the ongoing exploitation of the Global South. Finally, the panel considers tourism as a form of everyday resistance. In contexts such as post-revolutionary Iran, travel becomes a subtle political act, enabling citizens to navigate and contest state-imposed restrictions. Together, these papers offer a critical rethinking of tourism’s geopolitical implications, calling for a shift toward mobility justice and a deeper engagement with the racial, colonial, and political dimensions of global travel.

What next for Feminist Foreign Policy? (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel What next for Feminist Foreign Policy?

Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group annual general meeting Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre

International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group annual general meeting Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre

Affective Rhetorics of the Far Right and International Politics (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre International Relations has long been attentive to questions of power, legitimacy, and political order, yet it has only recently begun to take seriously the emotional and rhetorical dimensions through which these foundational concepts are constituted. The international political landscape is currently reshaped by the global resurgence of right-wing movements - populist, nationalist, and otherwise - animated in particular by affective energies. This roundtable will shed light on how affect and rhetoric work in tandem as instruments of political mobilisation and legitimisation. It will show that emotions such as fear, pride, resentment, and joy are not merely epiphenomena of political discourse; they are integral to the construction of identity, the delineation of enemies, and the justification of violence and exclusion at both domestic and international levels. By bringing together scholars working across different methodological and theoretical traditions, this roundtable seeks to advance a dialogue on how emotional and rhetorical practices underpin the international legitimacy and transnational diffusion of right-wing politics, and their practical impact on the liberal international order. Focusing on the nexus between rhetoric and emotion in right-wing politics from an International Relations perspective, it will explore how affective appeals shape foreign policy narratives, geopolitical imaginaries, and global hierarchies and in what ways emotional registers sustain visions of national destiny, sovereignty, or civilisation in the face of perceived decline or threat.

After (human) rights? What's next. (Centre for Rights, Reparations and Anticolonial Justice, University of Sussex) Room: Syndicate 1, Brighton Centre In the context of multiple contemporary global crises for progressive and radical politics, how do we understand the meaning, value and future of human rights? What does it mean to think 'after' rights? Should we aim to do so? Why or why not? This roundtable critically evaluates the 'After Rights' research project led by Prof Louiza Odysseos and Dr Bal Sokhi-Bulley, and charts next steps and new research directions stemming from this project's contributions and insights. Drawing from across multiple disciplines including IR, politics, philosophy and law, and bringing early career researchers together with more established scholars: contributors will discuss emerging directions and trends in human rights theory and practice, including: the vernacular; the more-than-human and less-than human; rethinking concepts of responsibility and commitment; de-centring the law; and re-centring rights struggles. The roundtable also showcases the work of the Centre for Rights, Reparations and Anti-colonial Justice, based at the University of Sussex, the local host for this year's BISA conference

Ask me Anything: IR journal publishing (British International Studies Association) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre This AMA is your chance to pick the brains of the editors of six leading IR journals on matters large and small. Where do they stand on making research data open? Is AI going to turn the publishing world on its head? Why do desk rejects seem to be more common these days? Are there too many journals or too few? Whatever happened to the book review? Why did they decide to become an editor, and do they enjoy it? Ask them anything…except why they rejected that paper of yours two years ago!

Bipolarity, Tripolarity, or Multipolarity? The contested shape(s) of the new international order (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre The demise of the rules-based liberal international order has rapidly accelerated since the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025. Despite this, the contours of any new order are at best slowly emerging and there is no consensus among scholars about what will emerge, how, why, and when. This roundtable will explore different views on possible and probable trajectories of the current re-ordering and offer insights on how different theoretical and normative perspectives on international order shape our understanding of what is likely to emerge and whether and how possible trajectories can be shaped towards what would be desirable to emerge.

Book Roundtable: Occupying the Everyday and discussion on Coloniality, Militarisation and Anticolonial Queer Feminist Politics (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre This roundtable is focused around Niharika Pandit's new book, Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir. The roundtable invites anti-militarist, gender and queer thinkers to speak to the book's key ideas on militarisation as a logic of coloniality; transnational anticolonial feminist politics; and how settler/occupier states enforce sovereign control in everyday life as opening new directions and possibilities in gender, sexuality and anti/decolonial thinking within international studies. The roundtable participants will reflect on the broader questions of anticolonial feminist politics, the co-option of gender and sexual freedoms in colonial projects, the importance of thinking with marginalised geographies in the Global South, contemporary (post)coloniality, global militarisation and the politics of solidarity by engaging Niharika's work with their own research, thinking and organising.

Capitalism, Materialism and Revolution (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre Capitalism, Materialism and Revolution

Circulating Violence and Capital: The (Geo)Political Ecologies and Geographies of Military Technologies 1 (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre Military spending, production, and innovation has reached historic highs, while sites and conditions of armed violence across the globe proliferate and intensify. The development and deployment of military wares is happening in the context of – and exacerbating – rising global temperatures, ecological collapse and the devastation of lived environments at multiple sites across Palestine, Ukraine, Tigray, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan and beyond. This panel invites contributions that trace and interrogate the production and circulation of military technologies and their position within global circuits of violence and capital. How do military hard- and software circulate? What actors, cultures, social and power relations have emerged to facilitate and profit from their circulation? What political ecologies and geographies are found along the before-, mid- and aftermaths of weapons systems? Put differently, what socioecological harms link sites of extraction, production, testing, use and disposal? What are the climate impacts of armed violence? And how are the production, circulation and profiteering from military technologies normalised and legitimated?

Conflict and contestation (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre This panel explores how conflict and contestation unfold across diverse global contexts.

Critical Pedagogies and Action Research in Peace and Conflict Studies (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre Recent scholarship has underscored the urgency of interrogating and dismantling the epistemic and structural violences that underpin knowledge production in Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS). As PCS grapples with enduring global crises, structural inequalities, and calls to “undiscipline” its disciplinary boundaries, there is a need to explore methodological and pedagogical avenues to reconnect scholarship with the lived realities of conflict-affected populations. This panel examines how critical pedagogies and Participatory Action Research (PAR) can reconfigure the bridge between theory and practice of “doing peace,” particularly in ‘postconflict’ contexts. The panel’s contributions critically engage with participatory and dialogical methodologies as sites of resistance to dominant, Eurocentric epistemologies that have historically shaped the field. Centering experiential and situated knowledges, reflexivity, and collaborative inquiry, such methodologies can advance participatory and ethically grounded forms of research and teaching. By prioritizing co-creation and knowledge production in solidarity with communities, the panel seeks to democratize epistemic practices and reimagine the pedagogical foundations of the field. While engaging with the methodological and ethical tensions inherent in action-oriented research, the panel contends that critical pedagogies and praxis are vital for sustaining PCS as a relevant, inclusive, and transformative discipline committed to justice, epistemic plurality, and social change.

East Asia in turmoil? domestic and international challenges (British International Studies Association) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre

Games, Seriously? The proliferation and possibilities of wargames and simulations in International Relations (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre Until the early 2010s, International Relations' (IR) engagement with games was limited a few historical case studies, occasional classroom roleplay, and some student experience enhancement. Focused on the serious business of statecraft and war, games and play were assumed by the field's mainstream to be steadfastly outside IR's remit. With the turn to the study of popular culture as an important site of global politics over the past fifteen years, however, an important literature on the politics and possibilities of videogames played for entertainment has developed. Moreover, as the use of games across business, health, education, government, and defence has expanded apace more recently the field has become interested in so-called serious gaming. The serious applications of games now range from recruiting and training military personnel and first responders, to experimentation with conflict scenarios and disaster relief, to forecasting consumer and voter behaviour, and much more besides. At the present time, scholars in IR are scrambling to keep pace with these developments, and are seeking to establish the requisite sub-fields and methods necessary to effectively study and utilise serious games of various kinds. This roundtable brings together leading scholars of serious games to evaluate the state of the field, showcase the important work done to date, and scope possibilities for future research.

Gender and resistance in environmental politics I (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel comes at a time of (at least) two forms of gendered resistance: 1. Growing resistance to measures that combat climate change and environmental destruction, a form of resistance that is often masculinised 2. Ongoing resistance against environmental destruction, a form of resistance that is both discursively constructed as feminine and that manifests as a form of burden that is often borne by women and other marginalised peoples Against a backdrop of the target of 1.5 degrees warming looking increasingly unlikely, and a ‘green’ transition currently reliant on new geographies of environmental and human harm and exploitation, any meaningful progress towards global environmental targets is stalling. Resistance to these forms of harm and efforts to transition away from fossil fuels are at a critical juncture. At the same time, there is a surging right-wing politics globally, part of which acts as a defence of industry and environmental harm. This form of resistance is directed at transition itself. These papers explore the intersections of gender and resistance in relation to environment or climate politics. Approaches include ecofeminism, political ecology, and feminist political economy.

IPS@20: Contesting Big Tech, Digital Transformation, and Infrastructures (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre This roundtable features authors who have contributed to the International Political Sociology 20th Anniversary Special Issue. The roundtable will explore the implications of big tech, digital transformation, and infrastructures on the international, the political, and the sociological in the present and into the future. The roundtable will be conducted in a "Question Time" format.

Keynote: Waging war, making peace from South Africa to Northern Ireland, the Middle East to Ukraine: an IR perspective (War Studies Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre N/A

Liberalism and the Geoeconomic turn in trade policy: beyond crude binaries (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre It is generally agreed that international trade discourse and policy has shifted from a liberal to a more ‘geoeconomic’ approach. There is indeed pervasive political intervention in trade policy, adding considerations of power, relative gains and security to commercial/market logic. Yet apart from the US, major economies have not resiled from trade agreements and talk of deglobalisation looks premature. Furthermore, the old liberal or neoliberal era was also infused with power politics in different senses. This Panel incorporates a set of papers that explore the relationship between liberalism and geoeconomics on different dimensions and for specific empirical case studies. It includes papers that are sceptical of the idea of a geoeconomic turn and others that are more accepting of the concept but offer nuanced precise analysis of how this is working. The major focus is on the European Union, transatlantic relations and China. The papers also offer methodological innovations, including the use of AI for quantitative and qualitative research. As such it very much fits with the themes of IPEG and with the overall conference theme of new directions in a volatile world. I’m hopeful that it would be well attended and lead to productive research outcomes.

Migration and Borders: Contesting Sovereignty, Protection, and (In)Security (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre Contemporary borders are increasingly fluid and contingent – operating through everyday border checks such as the Hostile Environment in the UK (Goodfellow, 2020; Yeo, 2020; Yuval-Davis et al., 2019), externalisation and off-shoring border practices (El-Enany, 2021; Shachar, 2020), and the increasing use of AI and algorithmic bordering across the world (Amoore, 2006; Amoore and Hall, 2009; Jablonowski, 2023). Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives, including poststructural, feminist, and postcolonial approaches, the panel’s contributions sit at the intersections of Critical Border and Migration Studies and Critical Security Studies. We critically examine the insecurities faced by migrants and racialised minorities, the shifting practices of border governance, and the political and ethical dilemmas inherent in migration and border regimes. Collectively, the panel aims to contribute to ongoing debates on novel ways of understanding the increasingly indeterminate and contingent nature of state border and immigration regimes as ubiquitous instruments of power that target racialised people regardless of their legal or migration status. Ultimately, the panel seeks to generate critical insights into alternative imaginaries of, and approaches to, border(ing) and migration in the twenty-first century.

Pillars of Authoritarianism in Eurasia (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre This is a panel on Pillars of Authoritarianism in Eurasia

Political Mysticism: Dialogue, Dissonance and the Divine. (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre This roundtable seeks to bring together mysticism and political theory. Mysticism can be understood as an aspect of theology and spirituality that focuses on devotional practices that attempt to enact some form of union with the divine. In this interpretation mysticism can arguably be discerned in all the world’s theological traditions, with these variegated practices also inspiring quite un-traditional explorations of spirituality outside (and often against) any institutionalised faith. The political implications of Mysticism hold the potential for both a subversive voice of social justice and a ritualised vehicle for social harmony, aspects which have been long discussed and debated in various traditions. Mysticism has influenced a full spectrum of political engagement from anarchists who argue that union with the divine translates to opposition of all worldly power structures, to more institutional interpretations which emphasise the social cohesion brought about through ritualised devotion to the divine. The apparent paradox of emphasising both unity and differentiation simultaneously lends mystical theology to various conversations currently underway in political theory; from post-anarchism to relational ontologies and pluriversality. The roundtable brings together some experts who share an interest in mysticism but approach it from different angles and backgrounds with the aim of demonstrating that the political aspects of mysticism offer a basis for dialogue between and across the worlds that make up the “international”. In this way, it seeks to foreground ways of conceptualising global politics that provincializes western approaches as just one among others, whilst also centring questions of justice and ethics. The hope, and expectation, is that we can learn from each other and encourage others who might share the interest but not know where to start.

Studying Peacekeeping in Transition: Responding to Institutional Change and Geopolitical Transformation (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel This roundtable launches a newly published forum in International Peacekeeping that speak to central questions about the past, present, and future of peacekeeping studies. The forum considers how peacekeeping should be studied at a moment when multidimensional UN missions are closing and the overall number of deployed peacekeepers is in sharp decline. While some interpret this as the end of peacekeeping, contributors argue that what we are witnessing is not disappearance but transformation. The forum identifies new directions for research: moving beyond mission-level analysis to the study of practices and legacies; situating UN operations in a broader repertoire of international conflict management, including regional interventions and special political missions; and analyzing peacekeeping itself as a dependent variable shaped by geopolitical, institutional, and host-state dynamics. Taken together, these interventions call on scholars to rethink the conceptual and methodological foundations of peacekeeping studies, ensuring that the field remains responsive to both academic debates and evolving practice. Bringing together contributors of this forum, this roundtable provides a space for reflection on how we study peacekeeping, what questions should drive the research agenda, and how peacekeeping scholarship can continue to inform international efforts to manage conflict in an era of shifting global order.

The Importance of Leaders in Foreign Policy (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel A panel featuring five papers on the importance of leaders in foreign policy.

The Securitisation of Solidarity: Terrorism Frameworks, State Complicity, and the Repression of Palestine Activism in Europe and Britain (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel We have witnessed an escalating and systematic use of counterterrorism and extremism frameworks by European governments, particularly in the UK, to suppress and criminalise Palestine solidarity (especially) since October 2023. This widespread repression is not incidental but constitutes a deliberate strategy to silence opposition to the Israeli genocide and safeguard Western states' deep-seated political, military, and economic complicity in the Israeli settler-colonial and ethno-nationalist project. These Europe-wide counterterrorism measures, however, do not constitute an exceptional state of violence, but a normalised and continuous practice of racialised government. The core mechanism of this practice is the weaponisation of vague counterterrorism legislation, e.g., Terrorism Act 2000 and the Prevent strategy in Britain, Germany's Associations Act, and France's dissolution powers, to target solidarity with anti-colonial resistance. These measures leverage legal mechanisms that are historically reminiscent of colonial emergency laws used to maintain imperial dominance and racial hierarchies. Specifically in Britain, this repression has manifested through the proscription of groups like Palestine Action, exploiting the Terrorism Act 2000's expansive definition to criminalise property damage as ‘terrorism’. The UK context further reveals a pattern of repression orchestrated through close coordination between British authorities and a transnational network of Zionist lobby groups (e.g., UK Lawyers for Israel, Elbit Systems) and Israeli state ministries. The panel seeks to deconstruct the architecture of repression to analyse how domestic counterterrorism measures function as an extension of geopolitical interests. This process involves the racialised conflation of Palestine solidarity - and Arabs and Muslims more broadly - with inherent ‘terrorism’ or ‘extremism’, thereby justifying pre-criminal surveillance (e.g., Prevent referrals in UK schools and universities) and administrative repression (lawfare, injunctions, and weaponised bureaucracy in universities).

UK Grand Strategy in Africa. (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel The Labour government that came to power in the United Kingdom in 2024 immediately launched a consultation on how to shape its approach to Africa. The consultation reported in June 2025, arguing that the United Kingdom aimed to develop a new approach to Africa that is ‘based on genuine partnership, rooted in mutual respect, and reflecting how Africa, the United Kingdom and the world have changed.’ The need for a new approach assumes that the previous approach was not fit for a ‘changed Africa, the world and the United Kingdom.’ However, the current policy debates do not clearly articulate the approach the United Kingdom seeks to abandon or the new approach it seeks to adopt. This roundtable will facilitate a discussion between leading experts in African Studies to debate ideas which can contribute to a better UK approach to African affairs. The debate will seek to answer two questions: What type of grand strategy could the United Kingdom employ in its African affairs to increase the prospect of achieving its interests? How might the interests of African states also be considered in analysing this process?

UK-EU foreign and security cooperation post-Brexit: Divergence or convergence? (European Security Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel Panel Abstract: This panel takes stock of the evolution of UK internal and external security policy post Brexit, encompassing the UK’s subsequent relations with the EU, as well as how the UK can achieve its foreign policy goals. In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the UK’s position as a key European foreign policy partner becomes critical as Europe addresses steps to push back against Russian aggression and support Ukraine’s self-determination, a key European value. It is evident that whilst UK-EU cooperation in this field is necessary and desirable, this cooperation has to be adapted to the post-Brexit environment, incorporating more informalised ties. The papers in this panel focus on various angles of this relationship, from exploring the reason behind variations in internal and external security cooperation, to the adaptation of existing UK security and diplomatic frameworks, highlighted through venue repurposing. Finally, two papers are founded on the idea of the European Defence Ecosystem. The first of these explores the conceptualisation of the term, whilst the second highlights UK-EU defence cooperation as a part of the ecosystem. Overall, the panel introduces novel ideas around how we can explore UK-EU relations at a critical juncture in European security.

UN at 80: opportunities and priorities for the organisation in a fragmenting order (British International Studies Association) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre UN at 80: opportunities and priorities for the organisation in a fragmenting order

Weaponised critical mineral supply chains - taking stock of responses in Europe and the Americas (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel A central feature of the trade disputes between the US and China has been China’s choice to build bargaining leverage by signalling restrictions in access to critical mineral supply chains and battery components. US and Europe have responded by further intensifying their efforts to diversify and build ‘resilience’ in supply. This panel takes stock of these efforts and highlights how the differing responses to China’s leverage offers insights into contemporary approaches to economic statecraft and the nature of economic power in the changing international system. The panel features presentations by scholars operating at the intersection between business and academia and draws on unique insights into evolving responses in both industry and policy making communities.

What’s next for gender and IR? New thinking, new directions (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel Departing from this year’s conference theme, this roundtable seeks to establish and discuss what’s next in the field of gender(ing) and IR. This includes both persisting trends and themes, as well as discussions of what might await in the future. Potential examples include the increased pushback against and opposition towards ‘gender’ within global politics; milestones of 25 years of the Women, Peace and Security agenda; the (continuing) struggle for equal rights and rights of bodily autonomy; increased processes of militarisation and war-making; and the need for intersectional solidarity. Beyond topics of scholarship, we also encourage discussion of our work environments; how to navigate increasingly hostile, ever-precarious structures and the shrinking space afforded to feminist voices. We ask participants to both reflect on their past and existing work within this field, others’ work as well as what they are turning their attention to in the years to come.

Where Politics Happens: Gendered Everyday Life (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Double Tree Hotel This panel examines how gender shapes everyday politics and resistance across diverse contexts. We focus on how power moves through mundane routines, care practices, non-state interventions, (im)mobility, and subtle refusals - not only through open contestation or formal political arenas. Looking across cases reveals how power circulates in households, streets, workplaces, and communities, bringing into view forms of agency that conventional International Studies often miss. Bringing together four perspectives, this panel explores how gender intersects with everyday politics and resistance. Elisa argues that HarassMap’s interventions in Cairo redirected gendered governance towards everyday conduct and subject formation yet also reproduced neoliberal hierarchies and exclusions. Hazel analyses women’s everyday resistance under Iran’s religious authoritarianism, drawing on interviews to trace how repression both channels contention from streets to intimate spaces and catalyses durable routines of care and quiet defiance. Katherine analyses the political role that motherhood plays in Brazilian and Argentinian nation-building projects, starting from a historical perspective and continuing through to contemporary data from recent interviews. Belen draws on 12-year longitudinal data to show how adolescent girls in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic become political through everyday negotiations of familial and community constraints on their bodies and mobility. Taken together, this panel shows that politics is made in daily interactions as much as in formal arenas. They demonstrate how non-state interventions can redirect governance; how women turn authoritarian control into leverage, relocating and intensifying their resistance; how motherhood organises national belonging; and how girls’ negotiations build political subjectivities. We emphasise centering less visible yet more enduring everyday practices is crucial to explain contemporary gender and International Relations.

Worldmaking: advances in a new agenda (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre Worldmaking is a new development within the context of the International Relations (IR) discipline. It holds the potential promise for analysis of globe-spanning phenomena like the advent of nuclear weapons, the transgression of planetary ecological boundaries, and historical and contemporary processes of colonisation. The aim of this panel is to highlight recent advances in worldmaking theory, bringing together scholars who make theoretical, empirical, or normative interventions into the worldmaking discussion, taking a broad view of the theoretical and empirical approaches that can add to a worldmaking agenda. It deploys an array of approaches including temporality, theory-building, post-colonial history, and analysis of worldmaking’s potential as praxis, and seeks to identify a range of possible objects amenable to a worldmaking analysis, locate these objects in space, and describe some nascent methodologies for conducting worldmaking enquiries. Our intention is to develop a mutually-intelligible approach to worldmaking for scholars working on questions relevant to the study of the international regardless of disciplinary background. By doing so, we will advance IR’s capacity to reimagine critical alternatives at the global level and to play a role in shaping counter-hegemonic and ameliorative projects.

‘From Technosystems to Cosmotechnics: Thinking security politics among the machines" (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre This panel draws together a range of new and emerging ways to thinking and analysing security politics and practice that draw on different relational ontologies, Science and Technology Studies, and indigenous cosmologies. Each paper foregrounds new ways of thinking technology and technological practices ranging from weapons, drones, infrastructures, AI, surveillance practices etc. Collectively the conversation will unpack and generate new conversations on security and technology.

Refreshment break Room: Foyer, Brighton Centre

AI and the academic research, writing, review, and editing process (Review of International Studies) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way that scholars work, both as an opportunity and a challenge. Often, the rate of AI-led change outpaces our current capacities to vet and reflect on its evolving meaning within academia. This roundtable gathers journal and press editors to examine how writing, researching and reviewing have been impacted by the increasing presence of Artificial Intelligence in the publishing process, and how best to proceed in an increasingly AI-driven world. To facilitate an organic discussion on generative AI in academia, participants discuss their own experiences and roles, providing perspective and issuing advice for authors, prospective editors, and reviewers for navigating the use (and abuse) of AI in scholarship.

Author Meets Critics: Marina Duque's The Making of International Status (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre Scholars have traditionally assumed that status is a function of state attributes, particularly material capabilities like military and economic resources. Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of research, Marina Duque argues instead that status depends on patterns of state relations. To understand how international hierarchies of status are established, Duque traces their roots back to key transformations that magnified global inequality at the foundation of the modern international order. As Europeans turned to imperialism in the nineteenth century, status distinctions legitimized inequality by drawing a boundary between “civilized” Europeans entitled to sovereignty and “uncivilized” non-Europeans unable to govern themselves. Once established, status distinctions reinforced inequality via cumulative advantage mechanisms: the higher standing a state enjoys, the more it attracts additional recognition. It is no coincidence that, to this day, status evaluations rely on governance ideals associated with the West. By analyzing the global network of diplomatic relations since the early nineteenth century, *The Making of International Status* develops a theory of status that situates the concept at the heart of contemporary international politics.

Challenging Nuclearism: Memory, Militarism, and Everyday Practices (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre This panel brings together critical perspectives on nuclear politics to examine how norms, knowledge, and practices sustain (and challenge) the nuclear status quo. The contributions explore diverse sites of engagement and resistance, from multilateral treaty processes and think tank knowledge production to grassroots activism, cultural memory, and the afterlives of nuclear infrastructures. Collectively, these papers interrogate the practices that constitute and maintain a violent status quo while illuminating the everyday dimensions of nuclear politics and the forms of contestation emerging in the nuclear age.

Circulating Violence and Capital: The (Geo)Political Ecologies and Geographies of Military Technologies 2 (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre Description: Military spending, production, and innovation has reached historic highs, while sites and conditions of armed violence across the globe proliferate and intensify. The development and deployment of military wares is happening in the context of – and exacerbating – rising global temperatures, ecological collapse and the devastation of lived environments at multiple sites across Palestine, Ukraine, Tigray, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan and beyond. This panel invites contributions that trace and interrogate the production and circulation of military technologies and their position within global circuits of violence and capital. How do military hard- and software circulate? What actors, cultures, social and power relations have emerged to facilitate and profit from their circulation? What political ecologies and geographies are found along the before-, mid- and aftermaths of weapons systems? Put differently, what socioecological harms link sites of extraction, production, testing, use and disposal? What are the climate impacts of armed violence? And how are the production, circulation and profiteering from military technologies normalised and legitimated?

Co-Constituting Sexuality, Gender, and the International Order (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre This panel interrogates how sexuality and gender interact with global politics to co-constitute the international order. Rather than viewing sex as a marginal topic in IR, the papers in this panel place contestations about sexuality and gender at the centre of common IR debates around sovereignty, nationalism, warfare, and economics. Viewed from this angle, sexuality and gender operate in powerful ways to (re)produce and/or (re)imagine key global relationships. The papers in this panel similarly question how diverse actors – including states, activists, international institutions, and artificial intelligence tools – employ ideas about sexuality and gender norms in their political contestations. Seeing the world through this queer analytical lens thus creates space for understanding the nuanced yet influential effects of sexuality and gender in (re)ordering international politics.

Discourses of development, revolution, and soft power in the 'Global South' (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree hotel Discourses of development, revolution, and soft power in the 'Global South'

Ethics and politics of inter-faith and educational dialogue in times of international crisis (British International Studies Association) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre International crises events, such as the October 7th 2023 Hamas attacks against Israeli citizens and the subsequent Israeli state’s genocidal war against Gaza through to the delicate present (Oct 2025) ceasefire and unfolding humanitarian tragedy, continue to impact communities worldwide, often extending to diaspora and non-diaspora communities who may feel duty bound to respond. These differences become particularly apparent within faith communities and secular educational settings, traditional locations of engagement and exchange of views which have become contested within this crisis in particular. Indeed, communities of faith groups and educational settings, may align themselves differently in response to the conflict, in accordance with regional and family ties, religious identities, and historical-political solidarities and may find difficulty in establish clear dialogic spaces for discussion. Recognising that how faith groups respond to international crisis can promote healing, political action, and calls for peace on the one hand, but can also fuel divisions within and between communities, raise tensions, and lead to silencing and repression on the other, we ask what the role of inter-faith dialogue might be in fostering community cohesion and solidarity during this time of international and local crisis. Similarly, whilst educational settings have traditionally been places of exchange and discussion, many now claim they have become, for some, places of silence and repressed contestation in this current crisis raising concerns about democratic and fair self-expression and impacts on hinterland communities of students. We ask what the adjustments are required to re-establish open and trustful dialogue without fear of recrimination. We explore the ethics and politics of inter-faith and educational dialogue by questioning how such conversations can be staged and managed in ways that enable people from different faith traditions to speak openly about their response to crisis.

Gender and resistance in environmental politics II (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre This panel comes at a time of (at least) two forms of gendered resistance: 1. Growing resistance to measures that combat climate change and environmental destruction, a form of resistance that is often masculinised 2. Ongoing resistance against environmental destruction, a form of resistance that is both discursively constructed as feminine and that manifests as a form of burden that is often borne by women and other marginalised peoples Against a backdrop of the target of 1.5 degrees warming looking increasingly unlikely, and a ‘green’ transition currently reliant on new geographies of environmental and human harm and exploitation, any meaningful progress towards global environmental targets is stalling. Resistance to these forms of harm and efforts to transition away from fossil fuels are at a critical juncture. At the same time, there is a surging right-wing politics globally, part of which acts as a defence of industry and environmental harm. This form of resistance is directed at transition itself. These papers explore the intersections of gender and resistance in relation to environment or climate politics. Approaches include ecofeminism, political ecology, and feminist political economy.

IPS@20: Positioning International Political Sociology in Challenging Times (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre This roundtable features authors who have contributed to the International Political Sociology 20th Anniversary Special Issue. The roundtable will explore the implications the Anthropocene, the discipline, and the far right on the international, the political, and the sociological in the present and into the future. The roundtable will be conducted in a "Question Time" format.

In the Face of Authoritarianism: Contesting Power across Migration, Policing, and Crisis Politics (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre The contemporary international order is witnessing a marked authoritarian turn, as states and transnational actors deploy new technologies, securitised discourses, and legal architectures to consolidate control. This panel interrogates the multifaceted rise of authoritarianism across different domains —migration, policing, and surveillance— and across different geographies, from Brazil to the Mediterranean, to reveal their interlinked logics and sites of resistance. From fortified borders and biometric monitoring to the criminalisation of protest and the securitisation of social and political crises, authoritarian practices are increasingly justified through appeals to crisis. Yet, alongside these consolidations of power, diverse forms of resistance are emerging: migrant solidarities that challenge state boundaries, community movements contesting racialised policing, and activist networks reimagining democratic participation in the face of planetary emergency. Bringing together scholars and scholar activists working across different disciplines, this panel explores how authoritarianism is produced, normalised, and contested in the twenty-first century. It asks how authoritarian strategies travel across policy fields and borders, and how practices of resistance—formal and informal, institutional and grassroots—reconfigure the political imagination locally and globally. By tracing these interconnections, the panel advances debates within critical international studies on power, legitimacy, and emancipation, while foregrounding the urgent need to theorise and support transnational resistances to authoritarian rule in an era of intersecting global crises.

Individuals in United Nations Peace Operations (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre Individuals matter. This panel investigates why and how individuals in peace operations matter. It highlights how personal agency and characteristics, professional judgment, and everyday practices shape the functioning and legitimacy of multilateral interventions. Moving beyond institutional and mandate-centered analyses, it explores—through a micro lens—how uniformed peacekeepers and civilian staff interpret and enact the complex normative, political, and operational demands of contemporary missions. The panel advances the study of peace operations by mobilizing diverse theoretical perspectives, including practice theory, organizational theory, and public administration. The contributions reveal how individuals both sustain and subtly transform established practices. In doing so, the panel situates peace operations within broader debates on agency, practice, and legitimacy in international relations. It argues that understanding the human dimension of peace operations is crucial to grasping how global security governance is enacted and adapted in contexts of persistent uncertainty and contestation.

Laughing Matters: The Global Politics of Humour (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 11, Brighton Centre This panel foregrounds humour as a significant force in global political life, with a particular focus on its affective and emotional dimensions. The papers reveal how digital visual cultures use humour to shape feeling, identity, and authority within international relations. From refugee memes in Germany to political cartoons in India and the affective charge of MAGA imagery in the United States, the papers highlight how humour does more than “just” amuse. It intervenes in the production of political emotion, negotiates belonging, and exposes deep ideological tensions in public discourse. The panel situates memes, GIFs, and cartoons within wider structures of governance, circulation, and perception. It shows how visual humour moulds collective feelings about migration, democracy, and national identity. The discussion traces how digital jest normalises affect, mobilises emotional communities, and reinforces or disrupts dominant narratives. Close attention to repetition, incongruity, and affective resonance in visual forms underlines the ethical and political significance of humour in world politics. The speakers draw on theories of humour and affect to show how the visual politics of humour influences emotional life on a global scale. It works as both a gesture of critique and an instrument of political control.

Palestinian Dabke Workshop

• Marya Abulawi
• Abdullah Abulawi

Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre Join this beginner Dabke workshop to explore the history and cultural significance of Palestinian Dabke while learning the basic steps and rhythms of the dance. With lively music you won’t be able to resist moving your feet to. This workshop is a fun and welcoming introduction to one of Palestine’s most celebrated traditions. This workshop is sponsored by The University of Brighton's Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics.

Power and Knowledge Production in Global Health (Global Health Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre Power and Knowledge Production in Global Health

Queering the Crisis: Stuart Hall and the International (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre Stuart Hall's work is vital to academic understandings of culture, race, media representations, discursive formations and historical epochs (specifically that of neoliberal capitalism). That being said, it is rarely engaged within the field of international relations, which remains sceptical of cultural and sociological approaches to research. Despite its huge contributions to cultural studies, a gap in Hall's work exists with regards to sexuality and gender. Responding to both of these silences, this roundtable brings together a range of leading IR scholars who deploy aspects of Hall's work in ways that are attentive to sexuality and gender to make sense of crisis/transformation in world politics. Included in the panel are innovative applications of Hall's work to diverse topics including global capitalism, contemporary moral panics, migration, anti-gender politics, security and (post)coloniality.

Reparations between Momentum, Co-optation and Elite Capture (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre Convenors: Victoria Klinkert and Laura Kotzur Discussant: Jenna Marshall Chair: Laura Kotzur Reparations movements have gained unprecedented momentum in recent years, with grassroots organising across multiple contexts, the African Union declaring 2025 the year of reparations, or Commonwealth leaders putting reparations on the agenda. Yet this visibility brings profound risks. This panel examines how reparations discourse, rooted initially in radical demands for material redistribution and structural transformation, risks being appropriated by political, economic, and social elites who strip these demands of their liberatory roots. As reparations enter mainstream political discourse, we ask: Who controls the narrative? What happens when calls for reparative justice become absorbed into existing institutions? Are they transformed into symbolic gestures that leave power relations fundamentally unchanged, or do they provide opportunities to open new windows for change? The panel looks at the mechanisms through which reparations politics become co-opted, whether through neoliberal commodification of identity, institutional capture that prioritises elite interests, or the narrowing of solidarity across differences, but also the opportunities that arise within this process. Reparations at this crossroads point to challenges of International Relations as a discipline: Which lenses and approaches help us to understand the discursive and material forces at play? How can International Relations intervene in this fast-moving debate? And what are the ethical and political implications for global challenges of international politics?

Revisiting Gulf Politics Amid Shifting Regional (In)Securities (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This roundtable aims to explore the transformations in Gulf affairs through the intersecting lenses of domestic, regional, and global politics. Against the backdrop of shifting regional insecurities in the broader Middle East, the discussion brings together diverse perspectives on the evolving political, economic, and social dynamics of the Arab Gulf monarchies. Adopting a multilayered approach, the roundtable will address developments in international relations, domestic governance, energy politics, and social change in the Gulf. As an annual scholarly recap, it seeks to provide a comprehensive platform for critical reflection on the past year’s key trends and trajectories in Gulf politics and their implications for regional order and stability.

Science and the (Re)Making of World Order: From Standards of Civilization to Planetary Governance (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre International Relations (IR) has traditionally conceived science as primarily an instrument of state power, perceiving areas such as science diplomacy and science governance as primarily tools for the pursuit of state interests. This roundtable questions that narrow understanding of the role of science in IR and proposes an expansion of the way science can be thought of and researched within the discipline. Science is here understood as a primary site of social struggle where different conceptions of human beings’ relations with each other and the rest of nature are advanced, contested and reshaped, and consequently where world orders are made and remade. Bringing together scholars working on the historical role of science diplomacy in defining 'standards of civilization', the political ecology of ecocide, and the contentious knowledge politics of geoengineering, we explore science as a constitutive force of global politics. We discuss how scientific practices and technoscientific communities have historically shaped the hierarchies and institutions of international society; how science expresses the division lines between particularistic and planetary orientations in global international society; and how contemporary techno-scientific fixes seek to reshape collective understandings of possible global futures? Moving beyond a conception of science as a tool, this roundtable investigates it as a battleground where the very terms of planetary order and future civilization are being contested and defined.

Security cooperation and alliances in uncertain times (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre This panel considers the way governments in different settings are responding to the challenge of navigating security alliances and multilateral cooperation in uncertain times. As the world moves into a more multipolar order, many states are actively rethinking their role and relationships within regional and global configurations. This panel explores these dynamics, paying particular attention to the way smaller states are seeking to navigate an uncertain global environment. In doing so, the panel advances debates on the modes, dynamics, and potential for cooperation within an increasingly uncertain global order.

Shaping a Discipline- The Legacy of Groom, Mayall and Spence in British International Relations (British International Studies Association) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre Shaping a Discipline- The Legacy of Groom, Mayall and Spence in British International Relations

Society and Security in the Asia-Pacific: Mutual (De)construction and Governance Challenges (Asian Political and International Studies Association) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This panel investigates how security practices and societal transformations in the Asia-Pacific are mutually constitutive, shaping the region’s evolving political orders and govern-ance dynamics. The papers collectively interrogate the tension between security imperatives and democratic accountability, revealing how militarization, identity formation, and external intervention interact in processes of (de)securitization. More specifically, Brendan Howe situates Southeast Asia’s governance challenges within the broader dialectic of human and state security, highlighting the regional spillover of insecurity. Carmen Wintergerst theorizes in her presentation elite recruitment as a subtle form of militarization that erodes political accountability in Indonesia and the Philippines. Christian Schafferer employs latent class analysis to trace how shifting generational identities in South Korea reconfigure the mean-ing of unification and security. Heidi Wang-Kaeding and Malte Philipp Kaeding explore Taiwan’s dismantling of Cold War military infrastructures as a rearticulation of ontological security and post-authoritarian memory. Finally, Sojin Lim in her comparative study of North Korea and Myanmar examines how international aid mediates the interface between external norms and domestic authoritarian resilience. Together, this panel advances theoreti-cal and empirical insights into how society and security co-construct legitimacy, order, and resistance in the contemporary Asia-Pacific.

Soft Power and Discursive Competition (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel This is a panel on Soft Power and Discursive Competition

Teaching for the Future: Pedagogical Innovation in International Studies (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Meeting Group 1d, Brighton Centre The future isn’t coming — it’s already here. This roundtable dares to ask: what if the way we teach International Studies is the very thing holding it back? As global crises grow more interconnected and student expectations shift, traditional models of lectures, seminars, and assessments appear increasingly outdated. Bringing together pedagogical innovators, the roundtable rethinks how we teach, who we teach for, and what we teach toward. It will explore what kinds of teaching practices can address the complexity of global politics, how diverse methodologies shape students’ understandings of international realities, and what pedagogical innovation means in a world of crisis, inequality, and digital transformation. It also asks: are our students ready — or are we the ones who aren’t? How can we, as International Studies educators, take the next steps in exploring what is possible — and what is needed — in contemporary education? Contributors will share examples of experimentation and risk-taking in pedagogy, including immersive simulations, decolonised and multilingual teaching, digital innovations using AI or VR, and student-led curriculum design. Together, these discussions aim to advance a more adaptive, inclusive, and future-oriented International Studies pedagogy.

The IPE of the European Union (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

The state, personified: Whither IR’s contested subject (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel One of two panels reflecting on the concept of state personhood 25 years after the seminal forum in Review of International Studies on the ontological status of the state, this panel offers critical interrogations and novel formulations of IR’s contested subject. While the idea that states may be usefully understood as unitary, rational actors is at the very heart of the discipline of International Relations (IR), descriptions of states as affective, phenomenological persons remain controversial despite the productive theoretical engagement that this assumption has generated. Nevertheless, intersecting evolutions in the global political environment and shifts within the discipline of IR itself are pushing IR scholars to engage anew with questions about not only the type of actor that the state is, but also the normative-ethical stakes of how we name them, recognise them, and hold them accountable. Theoretical reflections on ethics, epistemology, and ontology in the papers on this panel complement exploration in a second panel on the uses and limits of state personhood discourse in critical security studies.

Value Struggles in Contemporary Capitalism (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel The question of how value is created, appropriated and distributed is at the centre of current international political economy discussions. What is the ‘value’ of things, services and experiences? Who decides what value they have? How is value imbricated with moral, ethical and political ‘values’? What valuation processes are employed to assess value? What are the struggles around value creation and appropriation, and how do they change in time? How do we account for the material, immaterial and experiential elements of value? These are all key questions that inform the way power is exercised in the pursuit of economic activity, including in global value chains. In other words, struggles around ‘value’ are key for understanding key dynamics in contemporary capitalism, including their distributional consequences for producers, workers and nature – both in the global South and the global North. The roundtable brings together scholars who have engaged with various forms of analysis on value creation, capture, and redistribution from a range of perspectives and in different locations. The panellists are invited to reflect on how these processes have informed their work and the IPE field more broadly – and to reflect on what insights the concept of ‘value struggles’ could bring to thinking about current economic transformations and challenges. The panel coincides with the 2025 publication of Stefano Ponte’s book ‘Value struggles: Looking at capitalism through the wine glass’ (Bloomsbury Academic), which this panel also seeks to celebrate. Stefano’s book examines three sites of struggle: place, nature and people (class, race and gender) and how different ‘worlds of valuation’ are leveraged by specific groups of actors to maintain existing power imbalances or to attempt to challenge them.

War and Civilian Harm (War Studies Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel This panel explores the many ways civilians are harmed in war, from how local actors coordinate violence to how essential resources like water become tools of coercion. The papers consider both the material and symbolic dimensions of suffering, including how violence is represented, governed, and justified. Taken together, they highlight the complex forces that shape civilian vulnerability across contemporary conflicts.

What next for UK climate and environmental politics? (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre This panel examines the state and future of UK climate and environmental politics working across ecofascism, populism, democratic participation and resistance.

Art, Images and Affects: Rethinking IR through Aesthetic Practices (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre N/A

Atrocities and the Architecture of Global Accountability (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre Atrocities and the Architecture of Global Accountability

Blue Justice: What research agenda for a sustainable and inclusive ocean (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre This roundtable will explore how International Relations and Politics can, or should, approach emerging global challenges in the ocean and advance blue justice in the context of growing blue economy developments and “blue acceleration” (Jouffray et al, 2020). While International Relations and environmental politics have only recently begun to engage with the ocean space, this neglect largely reflects dominant Western imaginaries, which have historically overlooked the ocean from a social science perspective. In contrast, other regions and cultural traditions have long recognized the ocean as a vital site of social, political, and epistemological significance. An increased interest in the past 15 years has resulted in further research and academic publications on the human geography on the marine environment and on ocean governance and policy. Yet, judging by the limited number of publications on the ocean in the main academic journals dedicated to environmental politics, further work is critically needed to address the interplay between blue development, power asymmetries and access to marine resources, sovereignty claims, global ocean sustainability, and the role and recognition of coastal communities in these processes. In other words, it is crucial to deepen our understanding of how future ocean developments can be just and fair (Germond-Duret et al., 2023) and to shape a “new politics for the ocean” (Armstrong, 2022). The roundtable will explore: ▪ how International Relations and Politics can approach emerging global challenges in the ocean ▪ how it can provide alternative knowledge on the very concept of ocean justice; not just why it matters and what it means, but who it matters to and what it means for whom ▪ barriers to enable different stakeholders, particularly ocean dependent communities to have fair access to the ocean and have their say in research and ocean policy ▪ creative approaches to bring ocean-dependent communities’ voices into research and decision-making processes ▪ actionable recommendations for scholarly agendas, funding priorities, and policy engagement In addition to insights from the panellists, the roundtable discussion will incorporate visual material from around the globe (e.g. photographs, short video clips) offering diverse perspectives and grounding the conversation in lived experiences and global contexts.

Cities and Infrastructures as sites of struggle over freedom and power (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre Cities and Infrastructures as sites of struggle over freedom and power

Co-producing Knowledge in International Studies: Challenges, possibilities and futures (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre Contemporary scholarship in International Studies is increasingly engaging with collaborative, co-produced, and participatory approaches to knowledge production, which seek to create knowledge with those directly affected. Despite this, they remain marginal in formal methodological discourse, and many scholars do not self-identify with the label "participatory". This roundtable convenes voices from across disciplines, fields, epistemic traditions, and geographic contexts to bring these diverse and long-standing practices into conversation. Our aim is to reflect on the promises and limitations of collaborative inquiry in international studies, identify areas of shared terrain, and ask what comes next for co-production in the field. Together, we ask: What are the specific benefits and obstacles to co-production in international studies research? How do different disciplines and fields navigate the constraints and opportunities of collaborative inquiry, and what best practices might be shared? Are our institutional systems and cultures set up to support co-production, and if not, what changes might be needed?

Contested Europeanness: Integration, Identity, and Power (South East Europe Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre This panel explores the shifting meanings and practices of Europeanness in the context of South East Europe’s complex relationship with the European Union. Drawing on perspectives from political discourse analysis, critical EU studies, and regional politics, the papers collectively examine how European integration is both a project of power and a site of contestation. Together, the contributions illuminate the discursive, temporal, and relational struggles that define EUrope’s borders - both geographic and symbolic - in the contemporary moment.

Critical and creative approaches to teaching IR (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre Critical and creative approaches to teaching IR

Critiquing Horizons of Power: Rethinking Revolution, Silence and World Politics (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre Critiquing Horizons of Power: Rethinking Revolution, Silence and World Politics

Decolonial and discourse-centred approaches to 'terrorism' (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre This panel brings together papers that discuss the discursive ways the terrorism label is produced.

Discourses in (In)Security (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre This is a panel on Discourses in (In)Security

Exploring failure and frustration: solar radiation modification and simulation work as a research method (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre Over the past year, we have developed an innovative methodology to explore the geopolitical challenges posed by solar radiation modification technologies that are being researched to cool global temperatures. We have designed and run a series of open-ended, research-driven simulation workshops designed to investigate decision-making in non-ideal scenarios, drawing on the expertise of a network of interdisciplinary participants. Wargames and crisis simulations are common research tools employed in a variety of settings to understand how actors will behave in a given scenario and to assess possible outcomes. However, many wargames and simulations focus on how participants might ‘win’ or produce the optimal solution to a predetermined scenario where clear rules and structured relationships are fixed (Shephard 2017; Solinska-Nowak et al. 2018). In the case of SRM, the anticipated solution is often an effective governance framework. The aim was not to push actors towards an ideal-type solution, but explore the cooperative and conflictual interplay between power, prestige, and environmental reality under conditions of complex uncertainty. Rather than assuming predetermined parameters, the methodology employed in this project advanced an open-ended simulation where, through their engagement with each other, participants collectively co-produced a shared understanding of the geopolitical and environmental stakes involved in SRM deployment, the evolving relationships between key global SRM actors, and potential points of failure when it comes to governance. Developing interactive, interdisciplinary research methods may be a key means of understanding and untangling complex political debates in the context of faltering global climate cooperation.

Gender, Sexuality and Civil Society (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre Sexuality and gender are inherently relational, but those relationships are not limited to the intimate or private sphere. This panel explores the production of sexuality and gender in community, organising and charitable spaces and groups. What meanings are attributed to gender and sexuality when they are produced collectively? What impact do the activities conducted in such organisations have on the forms sexuality and gender take? How do the power structures within these groups and in which they are situated influence gender and sexuality? How is the productive power of collectives constrained by external forces of capitalism, colonialism and state power?

How to prevent civil war recurrence: learning from failure (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This roundtable will discuss the main findings of a new book published by OUP on the successful management of protracted peace processes. Based on a multi-year, USIP-funded collaborative research project by scholars at the universities of Birmingham, Duesseldorf, and Hamburg, the key insight is that on average the incorporation of measures to include women in post-conflict society in a peace agreement reduces the probability of conflict recurrence by 11%. Even more significantly, if this process occurs alongside UN leadership, the probability of conflict recurrence is reduced by 37%. These results were obtained through the application of a novel multi-method, multi-stage framework combining machine learning, statistical analysis, and in-depth case studies.

Human Protection (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel Strategies in unarmed protection, armed group behaviour and localised dynamics

Implementing National Strategies (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel This panel comprises a tightly organised group of papers exploring a common theme: how to implement defence and security strategies. Much of the focus of commentary looks at strategy in terms of choices and outcomes but doesn't examine the connecting organizational processes that are in play. The authors all perceive a gap between the declared intent of strategy and the way this plays out in practice. The panel combines empirical insights and efforts to theorise strategic implementation to promote new theory and understanding in this area. Why implementation matters: fixing the hole at the heart of national strategies.

Introduction to Book Publishing (British International Studies Association) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel This roundtable is intended to provide a valuable service to the BISA community by offering an overview of book publishing, especially for first-time authors. This international group of experienced editors represent both university presses and commercial academic presses. They will both describe and demystify how to get published, what you should expect throughout the process, and what you should do after publication to help make your book a success.

Maximizing impact: Communicating research to diverse audiences (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel Academics dedicate enormous time and effort to undertaking and publishing their research, yet communication surrounding research findings remains an after-thought. This challenge is especially acute for scholars from marginalized communities and early career researchers, who face systemic barriers in academia and additional challenges in reaching their targeted audiences. This roundtable brings together a diverse range of communication experts to present and discuss various formats, strategies, skills and best practices for maximizing the reach of our research publications. Key questions include: What does it mean to communicate research effectively and why does it matter? How can we measure the true reach and influence of academic work? What tools and methods can scholars employ to broaden their audience? From academic blogging, to podcasting, book reviews and social media assets, join us to discuss how different technologies can help address these critical questions and learn how to make research more inclusive, influential and far-reaching.

Memes, Microbes, and Mockery: Popular Culture as Political Praxis (British International Studies Association) Room: The Exhange, Maldron Hotel This panel examines how popular culture artefacts such as virus imagery, internet memes, inflatable costumes and fictional flags serve as dynamic tools for political expression, resistance, and reimagination. Across diverse contexts, the papers explore how visual and digital culture challenges conventional understandings of governance, security, and geopolitical identity. Our papers centre on how the digital and ‘offline’ world cohere in fields such as health and finance and the power of humour and subversion in blending offline and offline activity in myriad forms. Papers explore the visual semiotics of viruses in pop culture, arguing that their representations shape the health-security nexus by materialising invisible threats and deepening public engagement with biomedical discourse. In the realm of finance, visuals in the form of ‘meme finance’ show how digital humour and viral content destabilise traditional financial governance, questioning the authority of economic expertise and reframing investment as a gamified, participatory spectacle. Satire is also at the foreground of online artefacts like Polandball and Kekistan, which are fictional entities and digital spaces that foster alternative forms of organisation for citizens that blur the boundaries between satire, nationalism, and protest. Relatedly, we explore how ‘performative transgressive frivolity’ in the form of inflatable frog costumes and absurdist protest tactics disrupt authoritarian aesthetics and reframe resistance through humour and spectacle. Together, these papers illuminate how popular culture operates as a site of political contestation and creativity. Whether through visualising invisible threats, mocking financial orthodoxy, or embodying resistance in inflatable form, the panel demonstrates that cultural artifacts are not merely reflections of politics but are active agents in shaping political imaginaries and practices in the digital age.

Middle powers and development (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This panel explores how middle powers such as BRICS countries, Turkiye, and Japan pursue their developmental goals within an increasingly complex and multipolar global order.

New Directions in Discourse Analyses of Foreign and Security Policy (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Syndicate 1, Brighton Centre This panel takes up the conference theme of "new thinking, new directions" to discuss how discourse analytical approaches to foreign policy analysis may be revitalised and pushed towards more rigourous analyses that are consistent with its assumptions. The papers build on recent calls for including discourse analysis in the canon of FPA work, yet at the same time claim that there is already a lot of work that we can build on in this endeavour. While clarifying the scope of such an undertaking and situating their approaches in the broader field, they take different avenues in the formulation of discursive approaches, from pursuing explanatory analyses to pushing critical interrogations. All panelists have previously contributed to discourse analysis in IR, and as such their papers also reflect critically on their own work.

Securitisation, security logics, and exceptional politics (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre This panel explores how security discourses and practices reshape political life by producing states of exception, redefining threats, and legitimising extraordinary measures. Drawing on securitisation theory, critical security studies, and political sociology, participants will examine how actors construct ‘security problems’ and how these constructions enable particular logics of governance. The panel combines empirical, theoretical, and conceptual contributions that interrogate the power relations, normative stakes, and democratic implications of governing through security.

Small Revolutionaries: Participation of Children and Youth in the Vietnam War (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre This roundtable will discuss the recently published book Small Revolutionaries: Participation of Children and Youth in the Vietnam War by Mai Anh Nguyen (Cornell University Press, 2025). After initial comments by the author, Helen Berents, Synne Dyvik, Seb Rumsby, and Claire Smith will offer their reflections on the book. Q&A will follow. From the book’s description: In Small Revolutionaries, Mai Anh Nguyen analyzes the life histories of young Vietnamese who participated in the military struggle against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies from 1955 to 1975. Their contributions took many forms: intelligence gathering, camp care and maintenance, even the building and destruction of roads using simple tools. Through these activities and others, young people contributed to the victory of the Vietnamese revolutionary forces. At the same time, they displayed significant political awareness, kindness, and empathy, as well as remarkable resilience while navigating the physical dangers and emotional challenges of war. Nguyen examines the predominant social order at the time, which emphasized family loyalty, collectivism, and concern for one's community, as well as communist ideology, which children and youth internalized as part of their lives before joining the military effort. Together, these forces influenced the broader Vietnamese concept of childhood and the wartime experiences of young recruits. In Small Revolutionaries, young people emerge as active, socially engaged, and intelligent individuals with valuable and insightful stories to tell.

Technology and War – AI and Military Robotics (War Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre This panel looks at how AI and military robotics are changing today’s security environment, from nuclear decision support to battlefield sensing and drone use in active conflicts. The papers show how states and societies are adapting to rapid technological change, sometimes effectively, sometimes with major misunderstandings. Together they offer a clear picture of the risks, opportunities, and emerging debates shaping the future of drones and autonomous warfare.

Waiting for Disaster? (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre Waiting for Disaster?

When Solidarities Break: Learning from the "Beefs" of Liberation (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre Why do radical alliances so often splinter? This roundtable reframes the infamous "beefs" within liberation movements—from the disputes over tactics and strategies to the very definition of liberation—not as failures, but as crucial diagnostics of power. We argue that these clashes between artists, organizers, and intellectuals are inevitable symptoms of working within systems of racial, capitalist, and imperial violence. By examining these broken solidarities, we uncover how power co-opts and corrupts. Moving beyond viewing these "beefs" as simple personal dispute our conversation focuses on the critical stakes for contemporary organizing: how can movements learn from internal conflict to build more resilient and self-critical praxes that actively trouble the structures they seek to dismantle?

Refreshment break Room: Foyer, Brighton Centre

Capitalism, state violence, and non-aligned humanisms (Centre For Global Political Economy, University of Sussex) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre N/A

Computer Says “War”? AI and Resort-to-Force Decision Making (Prospects, Peril, and Proposed Policies) (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre Computer says, ‘war’? Our question is intended as a provocation. Yet, it is not the product of futuristic forebodings directed at ‘the singularity’, a hypothetical point at which artificial intelligence (AI) would surpass our human capacities, escape our control, and (some argue) threaten our existence. Rather, it aims to paint a picture that is more mundane and more immediate. It depicts a scenario in which existing AI-driven technologies influence state-level decisions on whether and when to wage war – either through AI-enabled decision-support systems or various manifestations of automated self-defence. Such a scenario is soberly informed by what we maintain are impending changes in strategic decision making – changes that we have robust reasons to anticipate and can already observe in nascent form. This panel, which marks the final stage of a 2.5-year collaborative research project funded by the Australian Department of Defence, will address themes of trust, responsibility, nuclear deterrence, and institutional change as it explores the risks and opportunities that will accompany AI infiltrating state-level deliberations over war initiation. Moreover, panellists will propose policies to mitigate the former and enhance the latter as we anticipate this transformation.

Debating Multilateral Responsibilities in a Contested World Order (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre Multilateralism, the UN Security Council, and international norms

Decolonial Approaches to the non-human (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre Decolonial Approaches to the non-human

Ethics and/of Migration: Research and Policy (Ethics and World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre None.

Fiction, Fantasy and Politics (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre The role of fiction and fantasy in IR scholarship – both as a pedagogical tool and as data for analysis – is garnering well-deserved attention. There is a growing recognition amongst critical scholars that the world building and fantasizing inherent in fiction shapes the way that individuals and societies experience and understand politics in the present. Indeed, individuals always engage in politics as a fantasy: it is an unknown and unknowable domain for many and so understanding of what happens behind closed doors will always bn constructed through the consumption of political materials. Understood this way, fiction is just as important as formal education, social media, or news, in shaping fantasies of political life. This panel will analyze political fantasizing in three distinct ways. First, panelists engage with previously overlooked cultural artefacts which construct alternate political systems. These include genres of literature, film, or video games which are dismissed as apolitical or appealing only to specific populations, which often includes pop culture that is specifically catering towards women. Consider, for example, the myriad articles written about Game of Thrones and the comparative dismissal of the so-called “Romantasy” genre, or the interest in House of Cards, but blind spot for Scandal. Second, scholars engage with cultural artefacts which fantasize about existing political systems, such as books or movies which take place in political settings. Here again, the focus is not on “political” pop culture, but instead on materials which fantasize about politics as part of storytelling. Third, scholars examine how these fantasies are brought into the “real” world, through the reimagining of pop culture as central political artefacts.

Foreign Interference and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre The problem of foreign interference (or the related concepts, such as foreign influence, or hybrid warfare) has gained increased attention by both practitioners and analysts of foreign policy. Malign activities by external actors – typically Russia and China – are seen as a potential source of influence not only in domestic affairs, but also, and perhaps primarily, as constraints on foreign policy. Yet, the concept of foreign interference itself is malleable and open to contestation and abuse. Therefore, this panel will start with a paper that discusses the existing conceptualizations and provide a working definition. This will be followed up by three other papers bringing together a range of case studies unified by their focus on the ‘second image’ of foreign policy-making – domestic politics. It will compare the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Czechia and Lithuania, as countries which are all coping with the problem. Using different theoretical perspectives, the panel will evaluate how foreign interference manifest in different layers of foreign policy-making, including the formation of governmental discourse, the bureaucracy-led writing of official strategies, and the influence on public opinion. In all of these context, foreign interference – in its different forms and extents – as a factor that needs to be addressed.

Global Queer Activism: Challenges and Opportunities for LGBTQIA+ Social Justice in times of Backlash (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel This roundtable brings together queer scholars from the Global North and South with area expertise in South Africa, Nigeria, East Asia, the Middle East, South America, North America and the UK, to discuss the urgent and emerging challenges and opportunities for queer activists and academics committed to social justice for LGBTQIA+ communities. Queer struggles and communities have long been sidelined by gentrified forms of LGBTQIA+ advocacy, often located and expressed at mainstream, commercialised Pride events, by business advocates and in normative rights terms, such as same sex marriage. The rise of transnational anti-gender and homophobic political forces have led to a significant backlash against LGBTQIA+ rights and a shift in homonationalist discourses returning to forms of homophobic authoritarianism. The reduction of international development spending and the resurgence of traditional security priorities directly threaten queer security. The cancellation of USAID and PEPFAR funding have had exacting and negative impacts on LGBTQIA+ communities in the Global South. Transnational homophobic advocacy, directed by transnational Christian and pro-family groups in the Global North, has encouraged a rollback of LGBTQIA+ rights in a number of Global South locations. Evolving forms of homocapitalism, with a retreat of commercial sponsors at Pride events and the cancellation of EDI programmes by many big businesses, creates dilemmas for LGBTQIA+ organisers and advocates. This roundtable will explore these global dynamics and what they mean for theories of homonationalism, homocapitalism, 'Pink Washing' and diversity politics. Furthermore, the panel will highlight cutting edge queer research and discuss the emerging priorities, needs and responses that we, as socially and politically committed researchers, should chart in the face of these challenging times.

Governing Agriculture and Agrarian Transformations (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel examines how in the context of a warming world agricultural governance reshapes power, accountability, and everyday practices across diverse agrarian settings. Bringing together research on gender-inclusive governance, dairy–climate regimes, critiques of climate-smart agriculture, and environmental compliance in frontier commodity systems, the papers highlight how climate interventions work across existing inequalities and regulatory contexts.

Harm and its hierarchies (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre A panel created by the CMS Working Group Convenors of existing paper abstracts.

International Relations as Area Studies: Debating the Provincial Foundations of the Discipline (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre In his famous 2014 ISA Presidential Address, Amitav Acharya called for International Relations (IR) to transcend the division between western and non-western IR scholarship and embrace ‘global international relations’. Central to ‘global IR’ is the idea that IR discipline is Western-centric and marginalises scholarship from non-Western societies. Ten years later, this provocation has led to significant scholarship that takes Acharya’s call seriously, from dismantling the Western-centric foundations of the discipline to analysing many forms of non-Western scholarship. Taking this call further, this roundtable debates one specific notion in the 'global IR' conversation: that IR as a discipline has been essentially ‘Area Studies’. The way IR scholars understand international politics has been characterised not only by Western-centrism, but also the fact that there are many IR scholars who are European or American specialists with narrow regional expertise but generalising their knowledge as 'international relations'. As such, IR scholars tend to prioritise or privilege one area over another and embrace a provincial viewpoint when discussing regions deemed ‘other’ from the Euro-American vantage point. This roundtable debates whether, how, and to what extent the exisitng international relations discipline is a form of area studies, and discusses the implications for 'global IR'.

Lived Experience Academics’ and Researchers’ Network (LEARN): Embracing Subjectivities (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre International Studies has traditionally been shaped by Realist perspectives that prioritise objectivity in research, policy, and decision-making. However, the phenomena examined within the discipline can be complex, intimate, and deeply entangled with scholars’ own lives and contexts. To remain relevant and responsive to global realities, International Studies must recognise and embrace the emotional and subjective dimensions that drive individuals who have lived through events such as displacement, discrimination, migration, postcolonialism and political crises to become researchers of their own experiences. This panel introduces LEARN - the Lived Experience Researchers’ and Academics’ Network. Increasingly, academics choose to study topics connected to their personal histories. These choices may stem from recognised gaps in institutional knowledge, a search for personal understanding, a commitment to challenging injustice, or a dedication to amplifying underrepresented voices. Researchers with lived experience enrich their disciplines by broadening access to marginalised communities and contributing unique insights that conventional methodologies may overlook. Lived experience can inform research in multiple ways - through direct engagement with personally experienced events, or through the application of theoretical frameworks shaped by them. The LEARN panel brings together scholars whose work demonstrates how integrating lived experience, including its emotional, relational, and subjective dimensions, can illuminate hidden perspectives and reveal new forms of knowledge.

Meet the editors (British International Studies Association) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre n/a

Mini Zine Making: A Hands-on Approach to Creative Methodologies (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel In the present moment, when our theorizing and witnessing is situated in a constant stream of crises of rising authoritarianism, climate collapse, and genocide, we invite researchers to question the how and the why of their knowledge production through a non-traditional format. Our workshop asks researchers to question: Who are the stakeholders? Who are we speaking to? How are we shaping our research methods so that knowledges from outside the academy are brought into our conversations? This workshop offers a hands-on opportunity for researchers to engage with the possibilities of Participatory Action Research in International Studies through creative mediums in including photography, textiles, and zine-making. Beginning with brief introductions to the practitioners’ own research projects, the bulk of this workshop will be the guided production of mini (8-page) zines through which participants can consider how they would share their own projects through this medium. Researchers/participants will be provided with art supplies and guided prompts to engage with questions of knowledge production and dissemination. The workshop will close with a short discussion of possible impacts for consideration of ‘the international’ through non-traditional research methods. In this format, participants will learn more about the potential for creative methods in IR, and also consider new avenues for disseminating their research findings.

Narrative futures in International Studies: What stories are we telling? (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel Narrative approaches to global politics have emerged to complement and rethink the ways in which International Studies produces, legitimates and circulates knowledge. Since the so-called ‘narrative turn’ (Roberts 2006) in International Relations, narratives have been used as sources of data, method of conducting international relations, and a type of scholarly intervention (Freistein, Gadinger and Growth 2024). This roundtable discusses the present role of narratives in research and explores the frames and opportunities enabled by narrative-based methods to reimagine International Studies in the next 50 years. The speakers in this roundtable will address questions such as: How do narrative method and theory currently contribute to International Studies? What opportunities and limitations are associated with these interventions? What stories does International Studies tell of the discipline and its future? How could narrative approaches contribute towards more plural, relational, and situated forms of knowledge? What institutional and methodological innovations are needed to realise the opportunities of these approaches? The roundtable seeks to position narrative inquiry as a critical intervention and a creative horizon for an International Studies discipline that continues to expand and diversify in order to explain, understand and respond to the complex global events in the future. The speakers’ research focuses on global crises such as climate change, war, and the challenge of establishing peace. They bring forth interdisciplinary perspectives at the intersection of social, political and climate science and policy. The insights in this roundtable connect scholars across career stages and different types of higher education institutions and include: Professor Miriam Prys-Hansen, GIGA, Hamburg Professor Nick Caddick, Anglia Ruskin University Professor Ben O’Loughlin, Royal Holloway University of London Dr Mirko Palestrino, Queen Mary University of London Dr Anna Katila, City St George’s, University of London Chair: Dr Alexandria Innes, City St George’s, University of London

November's midterm elections: report card or death notice for Trump 2.0? Sponsored by The Conversation (British International Studies Association) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre .

Nuclear Futures: Norms, Technologies, and Geopolitics (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel This panel examines how emerging technologies and shifting geopolitical dynamics are reshaping nuclear governance and deterrence. Together, these papers interrogate the complex interplay between new technologies, norms, and strategy in the context of evolving geopolitical tensions and the erosion of arms control agreements.

Palestine Solidarity in the face of Genocide (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre Palestine Solidarity in the face of Genocide

Russian Warfare in Ukraine and Beyond: A Global Threat? (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 created a dramatic new challenge to European and global security that took large parts of the international studies community by surprise. How has international studies research responded to this challenge in the four years that have passed? How has the brutal war against Ukraine changed our understanding of the Russian regime’s use of armed conflict in its foreign and security policy? What are the implications for the future of Russia and the threat it poses to other countries? And how does international studies research need to adapt to better understand them? Our panel will address these overarching questions with presentations on five key aspects of Russian warfare, a better understanding of which is crucial for the future of international studies and the future security order: hegemonic ambitions, internal repression, nuclear threats, proxy warfare, and Ukrainian agency.

Scarring the Wound: The Politics of Memory and Trauma (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel N/A

The Climate Dimensions of the UK’s National Security Strategy 2025 (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel The UK’s 2025 National Security Strategy positions climate and nature as central to national security and economic resilience, pledging to “restore the UK’s position as a climate leader on the world stage.” At the same time, the strategy also foregrounds state-based threats, especially Russia, and announces a significant increase in defence and security spending. This dual positioning raises critical questions about how climate and environmental concerns are (or are not) embedded in Britain’s short and long-term concept of national security. This panel brings together researchers and civil society experts to examine the climate dimensions of the 2025 Strategy across multiple levels: the strategic (how climate risks are framed in relation to geopolitical and economic priorities), the institutional (how spending and capabilities align, or fail to align, with climate goals), and the societal (how security policies will affect communities and intergenerational fairness). In keeping with the conference theme, “Is International Studies Ready for What Comes Next?”, we interrogate what kinds of methods and interdisciplinary thinking are needed to understand national security in the Anthropocene. Does the strategy’s framing represent a genuine shift, or a rhetorical adaptation? How can International Studies scholars bring climate science and environmental justice into mainstream debates about UK security? And what new pedagogies or research approaches can move us beyond siloed understandings of ‘security’ and ‘sustainability’? By examining climate security through lenses including gender, conflict impact, civil society accountability, and military emissions, this panel will challenge traditional security orthodoxies and demonstrate the importance of interdisciplinary, justice-centred approaches to governing collective security in a warming world.

The EU and European Defence: Challenges of a New Era (European Security Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel The EU and European Defence: Challenges of a New Era

The Once and Future World Order: Book Roundtable (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre Drawing on his new book covering 5000 years of history, Acharya argues that world order has never been the monopoly of any civilization or nation. Structures of world order: independent states, empires, tributary systems, as well as mechanisms such as diplomacy, inter-state cooperation, freedom of the seas, humanitarian values, religious accommodation and many more, first emerged outside of what we call today as “the West.” Neither does the West have an exclusive patent over are ideas about human rights, republican government, and democracy. Yet, centuries of dominance have bred both arrogance and ignorance in the West; in which the ideas and contributions of other civilizations through history have been forgotten or dismissed. Acharya also reminds that all civilizations combine pacific and aggressive tendencies, and civilizations often progress by learning peacefully from each other, rather than purely on their own steam or through conflict. The future world order, Acharya concludes, will not be shaped by one, two or a handful of great powers, but by a “global multiplex,” with many consequential state and non-state actors and in which diversity and interconnectedness will co-exist. While no world order can be free from conflict, the end of Western dominance need not mean the collapse of world order. On the contrary, it will help mitigate the West-versus-the-Rest divide, and create a more equitable and mutually respectful global arrangement. This book roundtable brings together a distinguished panel to discuss Acharya's ground-breaking book on the past, present and future of the world order.

Undoing the terra obscura: IPE scholarship, post-Soviet space, and theory without history (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre This roundtable brings together editors, authors, and critics to explore the subject matter of the homonymous SI published in Globalisations. It addresses the rather non-homogenous "post-Soviet space", its makeup, political, economic, and intellectual object and subject in (G/I)/(C)/PE so violently exposed by the "debates" around Russo-Ukrainian war and of Russia(n) Federation itself as an object and a subject in politico-economic sense. The terra obscura is "produced" through scholar(ship) superiority biases, evidential and analytical gaps, deliberate selective evidence bricolage for the sake of dogmatic pleading, methodological straightjackets that preclude honest and ethical scholarly engagement with the object of study or the carriers of local and indigenous knowledge (research ethics protocols are too a problem), historical ignorance and ignorance of old and new history(-ies) by the producers of knowledge in and outside academia, and more. How spatio-temporally unique intersectional social make-up and division of labour in production and socio-ecological reproduction, racism and othering, (de)coloniality, trade, mobility, migration, and displacement are made and experienced in each case is the question that needs answering if fitting theoretical frames are to be developed off and for them, not imposed on them, if the aim to understand the loci and the agency of concrete persons, groups, institutions, their foreign and (inter)state relations, including trade, security, and military aggression.

Unfulfilling the 'China threat' prophecy: complicating and expanding Western knowledge production on China (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre In the current context of geopolitical tension and perceived hegemonic change between the United States (US) and China, the debate has largely focused on ascertaining China's threatening potential and assessing the latter's material capabilities and/or intentions. However, Western fears of and perceptions surrounding China's rise shape the scholarly and political debate, revealing the 'autobiographical nature' (Turner 2014) of these historically contingent discourses. This panel investigates the interplay between discourses, histories and identities that underpins the current 'China threat' debate. Exploring US, European Union (EU), foreign policy, (state-)media and scholarly discourses, the papers complicate wider Western knowledge production on China, examining how ideas of China as 'dangerous', 'geoeconomic competitor' or 'civilizational Other' have been historically and discursively constructed, reproduced and embedded within global power relations. Rather than treating the 'China threat' as an objective reality or strategic given, the panel explores it as a relational construct that cannot be separated from Western attempts to stabilize identities, anxieties and hierarchies, and which contextualizes China's efforts to project a peaceful identity. Given the US focus of three of the papers, the panel sheds light on the ‘China threat’ narrative in the US context, bringing to the fore previously underexplored dynamics of US empire, as well as critiques of the ‘New Cold War’ paradigm, its assumptions and associated analogies. The panel also goes beyond the US and its deeply influential scholarly debate, complementing the discussion with the case-study of EU actors—mainly firms and industries—and their perceptions of China. To fully flesh out the implications of Western knowledge production on China, the panel also reflects on the Chinese perspective and China’s own efforts at self-categorization in light of external threat perceptions. Collectively, these papers uncover the discursive life of the 'China threat', revealing the co-constitutive of nature of identity-formation, threat-making and world-ordering processes. The panel then problematizes the enduring dichotomies that have shaped perceptions of a 'China threat' across historical epochs and geopolitical contexts, while substantiating the implications of this enduring discourse for contemporary politics and policy outcomes.

What future for peacebuilding? (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre Amidst increasing fragmentation in many conflict settings, peacemakers are struggling to pursue coherent, effective mediation leading to comprehensive peace agreements. Trends towards repressive governance, inequality and polarisation are exacerbating known causes of violence all over the world. Funding is also collapsing for peacebuilding and multilateral peace and security efforts. In this context we reflect on the context for peacebuilding and what peacebuilders with experience in a range of settings believe the future holds for the sector.

Centring Palestine 2 (British International Studies Association) Room: Syndicate 1, Brighton Centre N/A

Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Working Group early career paper prizes (Review of International Studies)

• Anand Sreekumar
• Catherine Chiniara Charrett (University of Westminster)
• Sarah Gharib Seif (King's College London)
• Susy Williams (University of York)
• Andy Hom (University of Edinburgh)

Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre

Cooperative Research: Conceptualising, Reflecting and Debating Socially Engaged Inquiry (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre This panel introduces and develops the idea of cooperative research by conceptualising its theoretical, practical and methodological aspects. Cooperative research is a form of social inquiry which involves dialogue and solidarity with civil society or community-based organisations, networks and voluntary initiatives. Instead of approaching these actors as research subjects, they become partners in research, which is pursued for the benefit of both sides. The panel explains the assumptions of the cooperative approach, which is rooted in feminist, participatory, activist and action research, and draws on decolonial and critical theory perspectives. It reflects on various cooperative research practices to show that cooperative research can be helpful in proactively dealing with challenges of access in the field, safety, ethical problems and questions about the implications and impact of research. Through an interactive, debating format, the panel probes how cooperative research offers new ways forward in current discussions on methods in political science and IR, anthropology, security, peace and conflict studies, and social sciences generally. With its pragmatic, hands-on outlook and through solid theoretical and methodological grounding, the panel serves as a space for dialogue and inspiration for both established and early-career researchers, graduate students, as well as for professionals in and beyond academia.

Crisis in the Air: Securitised Feelings and the Geopolitics of Stalled Affects (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre N/A

Domestic Ideas, International Consequences (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre A panel featuring five papers considering the role of domestic ideas on foreign policy.

Ecological Imperialism and Ecocide (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel Ecological Imperialism and Ecocide

Emerging Frontiers in Religion and International Studies: Ready or Not for What Comes Next? (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre This panel brings together a nuanced discussion on the evolving role of religion in global politics. The contributions adopt an interdisciplinary lens and diverse methodologies to explore how religious beliefs, institutions, and frameworks influence foreign policy, conflict mediation, and peace processes. Dickson investigates how ministries of foreign affairs have rationalised greater attention to religion-related foreign policy in line with secular norms. Hachen examines how international humanitarian law (IHL) can and should be used to defend FoRB during armed conflict. Gaudino traces how Pope Francis advanced a de-securitizing agenda. Klocek's study illustrates how the role of religion during conflict impacts its role after the fighting stops, linking two phases of conflict typically studied in isolation. Rice explores the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, which shows that religion can act as an adaptive mechanism to foster social cohesion, regulate cooperation, and manage conflict. Collectively, these papers reflect the multidimensional and contested presence of religion in international relations, providing fresh insights for scholars and policymakers on the power, limits, and evolving nature of religion in shaping global peace and conflict trajectories. This synthesis highlights the imperative to rethink traditional assumptions about religion’s role and to anticipate future challenges and opportunities in religion and international affairs

Energy and Europe’s North: Multifaceted Security Challenges (European Security Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre As the geopolitical role of the Arctic and the high North intensifies, this panel explores the challenges and opportunities emerging for security cooperation in the region. This includes reflections on the Baltic states' energy transition and energy security dependencies in the European region more broadly.

Feminist Foreign Policy in an Age of Anti-Feminist Mobilisations (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre This roundtable explores how Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) can meaningfully operate within international contexts, moving beyond symbolic commitments to enact transformative change in global politics. Drawing on recent thinking and scholarship - including the edited volume Feminist Foreign Policy: Energy and Resistance (2026) published by Bristol University Press and the special section in Politics and Gender (2025) the discussion interrogates the potential of FFP to challenge entrenched power structures and offer alternative visions of security and care. Bringing together scholars across career stages, the roundtable addresses pressing challenges such as the afterlives of empire in global politics, the manifestations of gendered violence within bordering and mobility regimes, and the friction of militarised solutions into violent conflicts. Through a facilitated dialogue with brief opening statements, contributors will reflect on how FFPs or gender-responsive foreign policies manifest across different domains and contexts. Central to the conversation are questions about what FFP praxis is; how it can be reimagined through the lenses of intersectionality, decoloniality, and abolitionism; what recurrent blind spots persist within FFP frameworks; and how these policies can effectively confront the rising tide of anti-gender backlash globally.

Gender in Popular Culture and Digital Politics (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre Gender in Popular Culture and Digital Politics

Imaginaries of Governance and Citizenship (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre Imaginaries of Governance and Citizenship

Imperial Logics of Genocide and Settler Colonialism (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre Imperial Logics of Genocide and Settler Colonialism

Is Japan ready to face its harshest post-1945 security environment? (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre Change was high on the agenda for Japan’s late Prime Minister Abe Shinzo who strongly advocated transforming Japan’s security and defence policies during his long tenure. As Abe’s successors continue to grapple with rapid shifts in the geostrategic environment, Japan’s 2025 Defence White Paper has warned that “International Society Faces Its Greatest Trial of the Postwar Era”. While Abe’s protégé Takaichi Sanae has been elected the first female leader of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the relative domestic political stability of Abe’s tenure has been replaced by tumult and flux. The fraying of the LDP-Komeito coalition that lasted 26 years is accompanied by the rise of right-wing parties. What changes will it take for Japan to attain proverbial “match-fitness” and fundamental reinforcement of its defence capabilities? How can new thinking, methods and practices of security help? This roundtable evaluates key dimensions of Japan’s security and defence policies including deepening partnerships with like-minded states, increasing multilateral military exercises and unprecedented overseas deployments, the societal consensus underpinning policymaking, critical infrastructure protection such as undersea cables, and defence industrial and tech reforms.

Knowledge Politics I (Relationality and Coloniality) (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel is the first of three examining knowledge politics around climate and environmental politics. It specifically interrogates knowledge politics across relationality and coloniality focusing on how knowledge is produced, what language is used in the these processes and how we can allow for pluriversal accounts of the climate crisis.

New Research on the History of International Thought in the 20th Century (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Office 13, Brighton Centre This panel brings together new research in the burgeoning subfield of the history of international thought (HIT) to challenge foundational assumptions within international studies. Rather than treating the discipline’s core concepts, thinkers, and scholarly subcultures as timeless or self-evident, the papers historicize their emergence, contestation, and transformation. Showcasing a range of methodologies and approaches - including conceptual history, archival research, oral history, and personae studies - the panel highlights the diversity of approaches within HIT. One paper reconstructs the history of the World Order Models Project (WOMP) as an effort to forge a new transdisciplinary scholarly persona, ultimately laying the groundwork for the emergence of critical international theory. Another excavates the neglected concept of attraction in the realism of Kennan and Morgenthau. A third recovers the intellectual and personal dispute between Schwarzenberger and Lauterpacht to illuminate competing realist visions of international law. The final paper traces the etymology of the ‘domestic analogy’ in international relations, challenging its presumed conceptual stability. Together, these papers demonstrate how historical inquiry can serve as a generative mode of theorising in international studies - unsettling taken-for-granted categories and narratives, and opening space for critical reflection on the field’s future theoretical and normative commitments.

Ontological Security in Global Encounters (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre N/A

Pacifism and Nonviolence: New thinking for new directions? (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre Pacifism and nonviolence have been gaining scholarly attention in the last couple of decades, evidenced by growing publications in international relations (Jackson 2018, Christoyannopoulos 2022), political theory (Butler 2020, Frazer and Hutchings 2020), and civil resistance studies (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, Chenoweth 2023), alongside the establishment of the Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence. Yet this scholarship does more than add another perspective. It undertakes a dual critical project: interrogating how militarism becomes naturalised as inevitable common sense within policy and academic discourse, whilst simultaneously developing theories, methodologies and practices that disrupt this hegemony and expand our repertoires of nonviolent resistance, defence and security provision. This panel examines how pacifist and nonviolent scholarship denaturalises militarised assumptions embedded in concepts from sovereignty to protection, whilst elaborating alternative frameworks for understanding and enacting security. Papers will explore how this work interrogates the reproduction of militarism within International Studies as a discipline, and what alternative theories and practices it offers for global challenges, including ending ongoing wars, preventing new conflicts, contesting democratic backsliding, and addressing economic and environmental crises, among other challenges.

Pluriversal Politics in Thought and Action (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre This panel begins with the notion of a pluriverse – a world of many worlds – and interrogates its potential for re-shaping how we think, teach and practice international relations. By foregrounding ontological multiplicity and the radical interdependence of plural realities, it highlights diverse ways of knowing and forms of being that are frequently marginalized, invisibilized, or erased by dominant epistemological frameworks. In doing so, the panel invites us to engage with knowledge practices both inside and outside the discipline, framing these as ethical and political relationships to pasts, presents, and possible futures. Such engagement opens pathways to generate new forms of thought and action that are oriented toward anticolonial critique and (self-)transformation. Methodologies of collective writing, critical reading and reading-through, the reflexive composition of a textbook and negotiations of “pluriversal diplomacies” help us reimagine and connect with what care, belonging, struggle, solidarity, critique, collaborative research or resistance might mean in both local and global contexts.

Rebels, Insurgents and Non-State Actor Conflict (War Studies Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre This panel examines how rebels, insurgents, and other non-state armed groups shape the dynamics of conflict across different regions and historical moments. The papers explore how these actors govern, adapt, and endure, as well as how airpower, organizational change, and external intervention affect their trajectories. Together they offer a wide perspective on the strategies, pressures, and environments that define non-state warfare.

Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Role of Narratives and Discourses in Attempts to Influence Society and Foreign Policy (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel This panel explores a range of discourses and narratives that the Russian state authorities are using in attempts to shape the perceptions and views of society (both in Russia and abroad) about the war, but also the role of narrative and discourse in foreign policy, including the interpretation of Russia's participation in wartime negotiations in the past and the influence of Russia's narratives about the war on the Trump administration and on the New Right in the United States.

SPERI Presents… The global impact of China’s technological leadership and offshoring: Towards a second China shock? (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel Scholars in International Political Economy (IPE) have long grappled with the implications of globalisation, but the reconfiguration of production networks led by China poses a fresh set of theoretical and empirical challenges. The shift from China as the ‘world’s factory’ to China as a leader in green and hi-tech supply chains, offshoring production abroad, unsettles existing paradigms of development, dependency, and power in the global economy. As China exports its production models abroad, from electric vehicles and batteries to renewable energy and digital infrastructure, scholars and policymakers alike must rethink the frameworks they use to study global production from the systemic to the everyday levels. This roundtable asks whether the discipline of IPE is ready for these transformations by focusing on three key questions: What new directions in theory and method are needed to analyse China’s offshoring and leadership in hi-tech and green industries? How do host states, firms, and communities negotiate and contest China-led supply chains, and what does this reveal about agency in the Global South? How do these dynamics challenge established debates on economic statecraft, global value chains, and green capitalism in IPE? By bringing together scholars of Chinese political economy, global value chains, and critical IPE, the roundtable will situate China’s transformations in production networks as a test for the discipline’s capacity to engage with what comes next. The panel advances BISA IPEG’s debates by rethinking how China’s evolving role as both a leading and offshoring power challenges Eurocentric accounts of globalisation, while foregrounding agency in the Global Majority and the everyday experiences of workers, migrants, and local communities. In doing so, it follows this year’s conference aims to offer “new thinking” and “new directions” for International Studies to engage with future challenges. The roundtable will be recorded as a live episode of SPERI Presents…, the podcast of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, which will boost its public engagement, bridging academic debates with broader audiences in policy, media, and civil society.

Security and desecurity in the postcolonial: borders, nations, entanglements (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel Security and desecurity in the postcolonial: borders, nations, entanglements

Speaking truth to power: Organisational silencing, uncomfortable knowledge and critical friendship in the contemporary Uniformed Public Services. (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel Our Uniformed Public Services are struggling to bring about the cultural change required to redress crises of legitimacy, recruitment/retention and unacceptable behaviours. Hierarchy, patriarchy and racism perpetuate silencing, secrecy and non-learning, encouraging ignorance to persist. This roundtable brings together academics, from PGRs for Professors, researching across the sector to explore how power manifests in control over knowledge production and the frailties of knowledge mobilisation practices. Speakers will further consider how institutional systems and processes can create inequity of behaviours, experiences, and outcomes; the relationship between organisational culture and psychological/emotional silencing; and the role of leadership and external scrutiny. They will be asked to address the following questions: • How does power and control over knowledge production manifest in UPS institutions? • How does academic knowledge go unheard and how can it be harnessed to foster tangible change? • How can we challenge organisational silencing and foster transparency around uncomfortable knowledge? • What is hampering collaboration and shared knowledge transfer at the intersection between academia and these institutions? • Is critical friendship enough?

The IPE of Welfare and Public Services (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

The Political-Economy and International Law in Outer Space (Astropolitics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre N/A

The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Care in Global Health (Global Health Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Care in Global Health

What would UK Security policy look like under Reform? The Security Politics of the Right (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre In recent years, the UK has increased police powers to suppress protest, expanded counter-terror laws, adopted an increasingly hostile stance on immigration and asylum, put itself on a war footing, increased defence spending and cut foreign aid. Yet more change may lie ahead. From Reform garnering significant public support, to well-attended demonstrations for far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson who enjoy the global solidarity of figures such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, there are signs that the most right-wing government in history may soon come to power in the UK. These UK dynamics echo the rise of the right in many other polities, within and beyond Europe. Drawing on our understanding of right wing security politics both within and beyond the UK, this session discusses the security politics of the right, and specifically how security policy might evolve in the UK if Reform took office at the next election.

Where next for peace? A conversation across theory, policy and practice with the British Council. (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre The British Council brings together experts from research, policy and frontline practice to explore how approaches to peace are changing in today’s more dangerous and divided world, sharing examples from MENA and Eastern Europe and asking how we can develop peace in ways that are more local, culturally nuanced, practical and rooted in trust and relationships. As the global peace and conflict landscape undergoes profound shifts, the British Council brings together voices from global academia, policy and practice to explore the future of peace and social cohesion in an increasingly fragmented world. The roundtable will examine how communities are adapting in a world where conflicts are deadlier, aid is shrinking, global politics is more multipolar, and disinformation divides societies and undermines trust and cohesion. The discussion will surface practical innovations in programming from MENA and Eastern Europe, highlighting pragmatic models for supporting peace rooted in belonging, cohesion and locally legitimate social action that address underlying grievances and inequities. This roundtable will consider, from the British Council’s foundation in 1934 during the rise of fascism through to the heavily securitised world of 2025, the enduring power of cultural relations to rebuild trust, sustain dialogue and foster the mutual understanding that anchors lasting and transformative change.

‘Woke gone too far’? Emerging research on gender relations in contemporary state militaries (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre From Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policies to arguments around the integration of women for operational effectiveness, military gender relations have been a hotbed for critical debates among researchers, military members and practitioners alike for decades. United States ‘Secretary for War’ Pete Hegseth recently claimed that the ‘woke military’ undermines battle readiness, cohesion and threatens military culture. On the other hand, feminist and queer scholars demonstrate the harmful consequences of the institutionalization of “femmephobia” (Connell, 2025) and the “Band of Brothers myth” (MacKenzie, 2015) in military contexts. In this panel, we move beyond the US case to compare and contrast narratives circulating in other state militaries, from Azerbaijan to Sweden, around the integration of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals to explore contemporary military gender relations. Hegseth’s comments come at a time of broader gender backlash, democratic backsliding and the rise of fascism in multiple global spaces. The implications of US policy extend beyond the national context and may influence how other militaries resist, adopt or rearticulate their own policies. We ask, how can Critical Military Studies meet an uncertain historical moment in debates of military gender relations? What can we learn from other state militaries’ anxieties, priorities and silences and from the lived experiences of vulnerable service members and those who resist service in these militaries? We ask the the panelists to engage with the following questions: • Which particular narratives related to gender relations do you identify in your particular research context? • How have military gender relations in the military you study been affected or not by broader gender backlash, democratic backsliding and the rise of fascism? • How do you navigate gender backlash and institutional barriers following it as a researcher studying these topics?

Bristol University Press reception - Feminist Reimagining of International Studies series launch Room: Bristol University Press stand, Foyer, Brighton Centre Join us for the launch of the exciting new series, [Feminist Reimagining of International Studies][1] at the Bristol University Press stand. Series Editor Toni Haastrup introduces this major new series exploring the structures and diverse practices of global politics through critical feminist lenses. [1]: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/feminist-reimagining-of-international-studies

Refreshment break Room: Foyer, Brighton Centre

Affective Archives: Fragments of Contested Histories, Memories, and Aspirations in South East Europe (South East Europe Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1b, Brighton Centre What kinds of feelings reside in archives, and what kinds of archives are made of feelings? What feelings do archives evoke in different people? This panel explores the entanglements of affect and archival practices across South East Europe ethnographically asking how different public feelings shape what is remembered, forgotten or imagined for the future. From state repositories to digital platforms and community collections, archives emerge as unstable terrains where histories are contested and futures are aspired to. Drawing on theories of affect (Navaro, Berlant, Cvetković, Stoler, Ahmed, Stewart) and cultural memory (Stoler, Appadurai, Assman, Hirsch, Erll), the panel invites discussion on the archival as a living, affective process rather than a static record. How might anthropology of archives illuminate the everyday politics of remembering, and how do affects; hope, nostalgia, longing, grief, fatigue, frustration, desire, disappointment, disillusionment become modes of worldmaking in a region marked by transition and transformation?

Africa: Politics and Intervention (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel The discussions will focus on the decline of democracy in Nigeria, the question of agency and identity in peacekeeping, responses to coups in Africa, and the US and military intervention in Nigeria.

Beyond Editorial Cold Wars: Ideas, institutions and AI in next generation global policy and IR (British International Studies Association) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre Around the world, there is a growing debate about the cultural context of knowledge production, with some arguing that the ongoing contentions and transitions must also be evident in the institutions of academic publishing. As the editors of Global Policy: Next Generation, a journal that aims to enhance the profile of early career scholars, especially those from beyond the Global North, we seek to consider and engage with these debates and find answers to the core issue: what is next for scholarship on global policy in times of growing polarization within and across world orders? As editors from different regions of the world, we want to showcase ways in which academic publishing is adjusting to the new world realities, bringing into focus themes and trends, while also comparing and contrasting these with the wider trends in international relations and within the specific field of global policy. We aim to open a dialogue about radical divisions in the global ideological environment, new models for collective action that transcend the state, and both the potential and threats of new technological and AI based infrastructure. This will take place alongside a discussion about the shifting publishing environment for young scholars, on subjects like academic gate-keeping, the ever increasing demand to publish, and the unjust, and even violent, impact the IT revolution has had on knowledge production.

Biography and International Relations (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre Biography has long been central to political and historical scholarship, but its presence in International Relations (IR) has been more muted and uneven. IR has seldom treated biography as a self-conscious method with distinct evidentiary standards, analytic benefits, and implications for disciplinary history. This panel explores the significance of biography for IR, arguing that biographical approaches offer crucial insights into how individuals shape, inhabit, and contest global political orders. While IR has traditionally marginalized the individual, privileging structural or systemic explanations, a growing body of scholarship in foreign policy analysis, histories of international thought, affect theory, and feminist and postcolonial theory have reintroduced lived experience to the field. Could IR scholars not only be consumers of biography but also producers—biographers who write lives that traverse intellectual, political, and disciplinary borders? This panel advances the proposition that biography can constitute a distinct mode of inquiry in IR rather than a supplementary narrative device.

Building Resilience through a Whole-of-Society Approach to Security and Defence in Europe (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Syndicate 1, Brighton Centre Russia’s war on Ukraine, the uncertainty over the transatlantic relationship, hybrid warfare attacks against Europe, and the impact of a potential ceasefire in Ukraine, all have increased war and crisis preparations on the continent. This includes a pledge among NATO members to spend 5% on defence, with 3.5% on hard security and 1.5% resilience to foster a ‘whole of society approach’, which has gained different meanings across national contexts (‘total defence’ in Sweden and Finland or ‘whole society mobilisation’ in UK). However, the rise of populism and authoritarian politics coupled with backlash against gender and women’s rights, the rollback on equality and inclusion initiatives, and the deprioritisation of development aid are exacerbating existing gaps in public services like health, education and social services, all of which have been greatly affected by Covid-19, environmental degradation and ongoing economic and social insecurity. Against this background we are bringing together a variety of papers interested in the different understanding of resilience: as a concept, as a policy, as a lived experience. We ask questions such as: How is resilience integrated in the security and defence of states or alliances? How does populism, disinformation or conspiracy theories affect the development of a resilient defence and security and what are the tools through which these effects can be mitigated? What is the link between resilience, trust and communication? What is the role of civil society in building resilient states or alliances? How is resilience experienced or fostered at the personal, local, national or international level?

China in world politics (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre This panel brings together different perspectives on China’s impact in world politics, from the circulation of British IR ideas in China, to the development of Marxist approaches in Chinese IR, to the political vocabulary Beijing employs in framing its relationship with Taiwan.

Coloniality, identity and embodiment in the military (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre A panel created by the CMS Working Group Convenors of existing paper abstracts.

Conflict-Related Sexual and Gender-Based Violence: Norms, Silences and Survival Strategies (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre Conflict-Related Sexual and Gender-Based Violence: Norms, Silences and Survival Strategies

Creative methods in Critical Military Studies (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre Creative methodologies in critical military studies (CMS) can “offer a process through which new realms of critical possibility can be opened up” in order to “produce a new space for thinking differently” about military organisations (Cree, 2023, p. xv). CMS scholars have taken up creative methodologies in a variety of ways, including theatre, dance, music and filmmaking (Cree, 2023), with the aim of catalyzing societal changes as relates to militaries, war, and violence. Decades of research also demonstrates how uniformed public services personnel often experience discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault as a result of sexualized and hypermasculine cultures (Eichler, 2016, Murray 2025, Taber, 2020, West & Antrobus, 2023). Less is known about the use of creative methodologies to specifically understand how the individual gendered experiences in uniformed public services are structurally interconnected with organizational cultures. In order to build on understandings of how creative methodologies can support new understandings of international studies to support critical change, this panel focuses on ongoing research as relates to 4 ongoing CMS research projects with military veterans, in Canada and the UK: voice work, expressive writing, participatory filmmaking, and participatory futures.

Critical Border Studies (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre Critical Border Studies

Cyber Operations and Diplomacy (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre A panel on offensive cyber operations and wider politics of cyber security.

Ethics of War and Violence (Ethics and World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre None

Gender and Russia's War Against Ukraine (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre This panel explores a range of gendered issues and actions related to Russia's war against Ukraine, including gendered practices by Ukrainian women refugees, masculinity and Ukrainian men who refuse to fight, embodied protest acts of anti-war resistance by Russian women and gendered discourses of youth militarisation in Russia

Global Politics and British Psychoanalytic Theory (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre This panel explores the unconscious foundations of global politics. It draws on the works of British psychoanalytic theorists, including Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and John Bowlby, to examine how psychological processes shape political identities, collective anxieties, and relational dynamics. These processes occur not only within individual minds but also across states, organisations, and institutions, where they are a constitutive part of decision-making and broader political structures. The panel considers how British psychoanalysis provides conceptual tools to trace invisible forces that underpin the affective and relational substrata of power, conflict, and cooperation, paying useful attention to group dynamics and relational identity formation. This focus on the unseen psychological architectures of international life challenges conventional IR frameworks and shows how unconscious, relational, and emotional dynamics constrain and enable political action. The panel demonstrates that psychoanalytic perspectives offer novel insights into the emotional and relational foundations of global politics. It argues that British psychoanalytic theory encourages scholars to re-theorise international relations and asserts that understanding the unconscious proves essential for grasping both the possibilities and the limits of human and institutional behaviour. This underscores the value of integrating psychoanalytic thought into contemporary debates on global governance, security, and collective political life.

Knowledge Politics II (Futures and Limitations) (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel is the second of three examining knowledge politics around climate and environmental politics. It specifically interrogates how climate futures are constructed and what limitations evolve from discourses about these futures.

Legal training for research and training on Palestine with the European Legal Support Centre

• Amira Abdelhamid (University of Sussex)
• Anna Ost (ELSC senior legal officer)

Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre This roundtable is sponsored by The University of Brighton's Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics.

Maritime Issues in Foreign Policy (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre Five papers on maritime issues in foreign policy.

New Visions of Justice (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre New Visions of Justice

Place, performance and power in international political economy (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel How is international political economy performed in different places? This panel brings together a new agenda around performance in political economy with the wide range of literatures on place in international relations and IPE. The everyday international has created a wealth of insights into the mundane and quotidian acts that constitute international relations. Yet invocations and enactment of the international continue to surprise in their appearance and consequence. In the summer of 2025, George Cross flags sprouted overnight from lampposts like C20th talismans warding off a small boat invasion. The same year saw water protestors fighting global capital not as workers, but dressed as shitty emoticons and with panty liners stuck to their faces. Seaside towns have found themselves battered by the changing international relations. House prices in coastal areas shot up as Airbnb and staycations dove international investor interest leaving the homes of their parents beyond the reach of many locals. Low wage and precarious work that characterised old coastal industries, like fishing and marine sectors, are replaced by new low wage (call centres) and precarious (hospitality) sectors that carry the same status. Yet at the same time coastal places offer different opportunities for agency in international relations. Citizen scientists gather microbial data on water quality to hold utility companies to account, families renew expressions of kinship in a splash and a dip, volunteers crew lifeboats to search for and rescue migrants on boats. People change when they visit the seaside, taking on different identities and attitudes to each other and themselves, as they stretch out near naked on a beach towel. Promenades, sea defences and maritime and military architecture structure the way people behave by the sea: they even dress differently at these interstitial locations that once so clearly defined nation’s border. Brighton is a well connected seaside town that lends itself to a discussion of the practice of international relations in an internationalised political economy. The panel brings together authors of a new Performance and Political Economy Framework with experts on microbial health, local infrastructure, seaside identities and the ways that value is performed differently by different intellectual places. Together the panel examines different ways of exploring the ways that the material, cultural, scientific and social dynamics of place feed into our understanding of international political economy.

Policing realities, abolitionist horizons (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel ‘the idea is simple / & permanently freakish: / to live outside of servitude’ (Sean Bonney, Letters Against the Firmament, p. 56) This panel will address the realities of policing and how we study/resist them from abolitionist perspectives. We understand policing as a broad critical category encompassing the myriad forms of (often normalised) violence that maintain hierarchical social orders, from the operations of state police and border regimes to disciplinary social services and informal ‘social policing’ within communities and families. We include papers that reflect on epistemological is-sues such as the role of lived experience and struggle in revealing policing’s oppressive realities, and of pro-policing ideologies in obscuring and legitimising them. At the same time, we are interested in how policing constructs realities, e.g. through the production of social categories and identities, expanding architectures of control, or violently enforcing the commodity form. We want to think about what difference the ‘permanently freakish’ idea and practice of abolition makes to how we see these realities and how we intervene in them, envisioning and contributing to their possible overcoming.

Public discourse, public opinion and national security (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre Recent British national security policy documents recognise an important role for the public. Both the Strategic Defence Review and the National Security Strategy argue that building resilience at home, and ensuring the public are engaged and supportive of UK approaches to producing security, are crucial. As Sir Keir Starmer’s introduction to the National Security Strategy stresses, ‘nations are strongest when they are bound together by a shared purpose’, demanding ‘nothing less than national unity’ in response to the challenges ahead (HM Government, 2025: 6). To achieve the UK’s national security goals, it is recognised that this requires a ‘whole-of-society’ approach (HM Government, 2025:12). As the foreword to the Strategic Defence Review states, ‘everyone has a role to play and a national conversation on how we do it is required’ (Ministry of Defence, 2025: 9). Yet, what an inclusive, thoughtful and realistic national conversation on the UK’s defence and national security might look like is not clear. Bringing together cross-disciplinary expertise and research, this roundtable will discuss the relationship between the public and policymaking on topics of national security, asking: How do diverse UK publics understand and experience ‘security’? How do these understandings and experiences translate into policy preferences for producing national security for the UK? What is the basis upon which different policy approaches are preferred and prioritised? To what extent is there consensus or dissensus on national security policy among key stakeholders (i.e., the public, policymakers, the third sector)?

Re-evaluating the underpinnings of liberal internationalism: International law, international norms, and international order (British International Studies Association) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre N/A

Rethinking Mass Atrocity Prevention and Response (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel Protection norms, the Responsibility to Protect, and intervention

Special Issue on The multiplex age: pluralism and connectivity beyond multipolarity (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel The concept of “multiplexity” has recently garnered attention as a lens onto complex and cross-cutting, if not necessarily competing, international orders and globalisms. Against traditional models of unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity, multiplexity alerts us to the plurality of actors and forces in the contemporary world—including international and regional institutions, corporations and banks, social movements and activists, criminal gangs and terrorist networks. The proliferating empirical descriptions of multiplexity demand a systematic examination of its analytic possibilities and limitations. By critically assessing the ontological, epistemological, and analytical potential of multiplexity, this panel assembles papers for a Special Issue that will serve as a key reference point for students of planetary politics, international relations, and global development as these fields have unfolded over the last decade. By shifting the terms of discourse away from Eurocentric—and great power-centric—models of multipolarity, as well as Western-centric notions of “liberal international order,” the conceptual tool of multiplexity can help us to anchor an otherwise decentered conversation between experts with diverse regional and thematic expertise towards relational learning across perspectives. Contributors to the SI contend that a plurality of actors across diverse states and societies, influence international affairs today. Economic interdependence is denser than it has ever been, entailing proliferating forms of trade and finance, infrastructures, and supply chains. More people than ever before are crossing national boundaries, and digital technologies have enabled the formation of transnational networks hitherto unthinkable. New actors, especially in the global South, are asserting their agency in shaping international affairs, addressing global challenges posed by such processes as climate change, human trafficking, and pandemics. These realities compel analysts to confront dominant Eurocentric narratives of world order, while avoiding the temptation to replace these with, say, Sino-centric, Indo-centric or Afro-centric perspectives.

The Future of International Military Missions and Peacekeeping in a Post-Unipolar World (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel The era of unipolarity, dominated by U.S. hegemony since the end of the Cold War, has given way to a multipolar international order characterized by the resurgence of powers like China, Russia, and regional actors such as India and Turkey. This panel examines the implications for international military missions and peacekeeping operations, which have traditionally relied on collective security frameworks like the United Nations and NATO. As great power competition intensifies, the consensus-driven model of peacekeeping faces unprecedented challenges, including veto paralysis in the UN Security Council, the proliferation of hybrid threats, and the erosion of norms against territorial aggression, as evidenced by conflicts in Ukraine and the South China Sea. Key discussions will explore how multipolarity reshapes mission mandates: from traditional blue-helmet deployments to more robust, coalition-based interventions addressing non-state actors, cyber warfare, and climate-induced instability. Panelists will debate the role of emerging alliances, such as the Quad or AUKUS, in supplementing or supplanting UN efforts, while scrutinizing the risks of mission fragmentation and selective enforcement. Ethical dilemmas, including the protection of civilians amid proxy wars and the integration of private military contractors, will also be addressed.

The IPE of Digital (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Pier, Brighton Centre IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

The Politics of Ecocide after the Rome Statute (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre In September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa formally introduced an amendment criminalising ecocide to the International Criminal Court. The submission marks a new high point for state interest in ecocide as an international crime; one which, over the last few years, has gained prominence in contexts as diverse as the Association of Small Island States, the Ukraine war, EU criminal law, and the Council of Europe. This range of interests raises almost as many questions, not least how negotiations will impact on the proposed definition, and the relationship of ecocide to questions of sustainability and climate change. In addition to being, potentially, the first new crime added to the Rome Statute since the founding of the ICC, the criminalisation process is also notable for its bottom-up character in which states and social movements are seeking to criminalise ecocide in advance of a consensus on its meaning and purpose. This panel draws together scholars with an interest in ecocide from both international relations and international law to reflect on these developments, examine the consequences of diverse pathways to criminalisation, and to situate the criminalisation process within global hierarchies, fragmentation, and cross-cutting relations of legal authority.

Why Politics and International Relations scholars need to talk about AI Pedagogy (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel Artificial intelligence (AI) and Politics and International Relations (IR) pedagogy are deeply intertwined, yet this symbiotic relationship is often missed. AI is a site of political contestation and epistemic disruption but although research on AI governance already examines AI as a political system of power, these insights rarely reach classrooms or shape how we teach about technology . At the same time, IR offers a rich conceptual toolkit for interrogating AI’s societal impacts, from legitimacy and authority to justice and pluralism. AI pedagogy benefits enormously from IR’s critical traditions, while IR education must now grapple with the algorithmic systems reshaping how knowledge is produced, validated, contested, and distributed. This roundtable explores how these two domains can – and must – inform one another. Participants will explore how IR concepts, including sovereignty, legitimacy, epistemic authority, and global justice, can illuminate the political dimensions of AI in education and society. We will examine how AI challenges traditional knowledge systems, how algorithmic governance reshapes accountability, and how IR’s critical traditions can equip students to interrogate these shifts. Importantly, the roundtable will ask how IR’s commitment to diverse epistemologies and postcolonial theory can counter the epistemic dominance of Western-developed AI systems.

Alternative Worldmaking and Methodologies in International Relations (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre Alternative Worldmaking and Methodologies in International Relations

Competing Narratives, Competing Selves (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre The role of narratives in foreign policy has never been clearer, nor has the role of narrative in constructing specific versions of the state Self. Narratives constrain and permit action and can shape not only state behavior but also state performance. For this reason, there is a growing interest in how states narrate themselves within the international system, and how those Self narratives change and evolve as a result of conflict, crisis, or political contestation. Nonetheless, within this literature there is a preoccupation with achieving for the state what would be impossible even for the individual: a clear autobiographical narrative. Indeed, even when state autobiographical narratives are said to be flexible, they are often treated as fixed. What is missing in conversations about state narratives is an effort to open up the “black box” of discursive material to understand how and when specific narrative strands pull states in one direction or another. In other words, if we accept that narratives are pluralistic and changeable, what happens when specific narratives become fixed, rigid, or overly powerful? In this selection of papers, scholars engage not with over-arching narratives of state selves, but rather individual strands. Our authors engage in how notions of trauma or victory can create rigid lines of narration, foreclosing “rational” pathways and provoking violence. They equally engage with the narrative entrepreneurs who seek to elevate specific identity narratives at the expense of others. Finally, they seek to pull apart the narrative monolith, to understand how narratives interact, co-constitute, and rhyme with one another, even in different political contexts and across time.

Competition & Cooperation – Examining Russia’s interactions with other major powers (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre This is a panel on Competition & Cooperation – Examining Russia’s interactions with other major powers

Developments and Insights on UK Foreign Policy (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre Five papers featuring important developments and insights on UK foreign policy.

Disorder and Domination: Rethinking Security, Imperialism, and Global Order (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre Disorder and Domination: Rethinking Security, Imperialism and Global Order

Europe and Geopolitics (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

Exploring the relationship between imperialism, coloniality and environmental degradation II (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel recognises that many researchers are working at the intersection of environment and colonial / post colonial / decolonial research, especially during a time when the realities of this intersection between colonialism, empire, and the environment have never been more clear. This moment makes evident the interconnections between militarism and settler colonialism and genocide and ecocide, and therefore the need to situate our knowledge and approaches within anticolonial, indigenous and translocal perspectives. These papers recognise the importance of scholarship that addresses these issues, and address how imperialism / colonialism / extraction / capitalism are in relationship with environmental degradation. This is both on a material level, where the functions of occupation and extraction lead to environmental destruction, and on a more discursive level, where hierarchies of life are used to justify and naturalise ongoing violence against certain people and places.

Feminist Practices of Resistance (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre Feminist Practices of Resistance

Feminist Solidarity amidst Planetary Threats: Between Foreclosures and Possibilism (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre What are feminist solutions to crises of planetary proportions? How can we envision a good life amidst genocide, ecocide, and fears of rising fascism? How do we stand united against heteronormative dogmas? How do we build feminist alliances and move from theory to concrete political action of re-organizing our societies and ecologies in the interest of mutually assured survival? This roundtable will gather four feminist scholars at different career stages working on feminist solidarity from the perspectives of political economy, labour, queer theory, and social movement studies. Drawing on theoretical and empirical research, roundtable participants will discuss feminist solidarity mediated by reflexive feminist praxis, coalition-building, efforts of countering political (self)-betrayals, and re-thinking feminist political projects amidst shared planetary threats.

IPE/GPE and method (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre IPE/GPE occupies contested disciplinary territory positioned between two other fields: International Relations and Economics while simultaneously founded in the UK on the notion of eclectic method and an intellectual open range. In practice this has meant IPE/GPE ignoring the frontiers of innovative methodologies, remaining firmly wedded to theoretical rigour over exploratory openness and instead all too often devolving into a ‘soft' economic discourse analysis as method. However, in recent years, several methodological developments have emerged in cognate fields reflecting advances in analytical approach, data availability, computational techniques, and an increasing recognition of the power of meaningful interdisciplinary approaches. These methodological developments elsewhere reflect the interdisciplinary nature of research and the increasing complexity of international and global political and economic systems. This roundtable asks how we might engage with these developments so that IPE/GPE has the potential to further innovate not just these methods but to advance the very study of the global political economy in novel directions.

Ideas That Move the Field: Stefan Elbe, Global Health Security, and New Horizons of IR Scholarship on Global Health Politics (Centre for Global Health Policy, University of Sussex & Global Health Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre This roundtable brings together scholars working at the intersection of global health and International Relations to celebrate the intellectual contributions of Stefan Elbe to this field. Stefan’s work has been foundational in establishing global health—and particularly global health security—as a central concern in IR. Over the past two decades, his work has illuminated how health issues have become deeply entangled with security politics, scientific and technological developments, and global governance. Moreover, Stefan’s scholarship has continuously propelled the field forward by creatively bringing together diverse theoretical traditions, such as pharmaceuticalisation, information theory, postcolonial studies, infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies, to shed light on the evolving nexus of health and security. Through this intellectual range, Stefan has opened new conceptual pathways and vocabularies for understanding the political life of biological threats, medical countermeasures, and the infrastructures that sustain global health security practices. The roundtable convenes scholars whose research has been influenced by Stefan’s work to reflect on his intellectual contributions, the new thinking it has generated, and the directions in which it continues to push the study of global health politics. It considers how Stefan’s intellectual curiosity exemplifies the kind of open, interdisciplinary, and forward-looking scholarship needed for the next 50 years of the discipline.

Leaders and leadership in world politics (British International Studies Association) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre n/a

Making Sense of Misconduct: Gender, Soldiering, and the Law (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre Scholarship on troop misconduct typically focuses on the gendered dynamics at play in the violent act or events themselves. Instead, this panel considers institutional or state sense-making practices in the aftermath of troop misconduct. Bringing together an interdisciplinary panel of speakers, these papers shed light on how legal or disciplinary processes assume, (re)produce, and naturalise gendered logics in their approaches to troop transgression. By tracing the response to misconduct (broadly conceived) rather than the contours of the act itself, we will expand understandings of how ideas of gender, militarism, and violence are intertwined. We will explore how institutional practices of criminalisation and punishment in military contexts are both deeply individualistic and also reinforce patriarchal societal order. From the front line to the courtroom, peacekeeping missions to domestic spaces, we will discuss how gendered logics shape how the individuals implicated within the processes– including, but not limited to, the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders – are distorted by technical, disembodied calculations of criminality, mitigation, and sanction.

New and emerging security and defence technologies: governance, politics, implications (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre This panel discusses how technological innovation is reshaping contemporary security practices, institutions, and logics. Focusing on drones, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, the contributions explore how emerging technologies are reconfiguring the conduct and understanding of security across military, policing, and border domains. Particular attention is given to the growing entanglements between state and private actors in the development and deployment of security technologies, as well as to the diffusion of military technologies into civilian and law enforcement contexts. By engaging critically with cases ranging from autonomous sea power to AI-enabled border surveillance, the panel interrogates the strategic, ethical, and political implications of automation, datafication, and privatisation in the security field.

New thinking, new directions from building educational communities in Politics and International Relations (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1b, Brighton Centre As higher education faces multiple intersecting global challenges, collective thinking, reflection and action is essential for opening new directions not only for the discipline of Politics and International Relations but for the academy as whole (Stein 2024). Education communities offer a power space for this work, honouring, exploring and fostering pluriversality within and between our institutions. Such communities help to further pedagogical practices, research, and policy, while simultaneously building networks of solidarity. In this roundtable we bring together educators and pedagogical scholars who have built and sustain educational communities across the academy, from departmental, institutional, national and international levels, to learn how educational communities enable new ways of thinking and doing in political education. We will hear from board members of international networks for global education; founders of the ASPIRE network for teaching-track colleagues in Politics and International Relations as well as directors of institution-based pedagogical research centres. From the importance of informal spaces for connection, to collective power for policy change, the roundtable will both reflect on how education communities have, do and could further create new ways of thinking and new directions for teaching and learning in Politics and International Relations.

Peace and Conflict Studies in the Polycrisis (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre Recent debates have highlighted how climate change, the global expansion of war, authoritarian backsliding and the rise of mass unrest are constituting interlocking and mutually reinforcing crises. As an interdisciplinary field of studies, Peace and Conflict Studies should be well placed to provide analysis of and help design responses to this polycrisis. Yet, for the past two decades, PCS has been caught up an empiricist detour from what the critical project of the local turn was meant to be. Much of the current scholarship in the field is thus not sufficiently engaging with large-scale interlocking crises. This panel elaborates different perspectives on the polycrisis, and provides new, radical, as well as historically tested thinking to tackle these contemporary challenges.

Prize giving ceremony Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre Come and find out who has been awarded BISA2026 prizes for Distinguished Contribution, best book prize, first book prize, best thesis, best dissertation, best teaching and learning prizes, EDI prize and Working Group of the year

Processes of Peacemaking (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre Understanding longer-term projects of peacemaking

Sovereignty, Status and Technology (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre This panel collects papers on the common theme of sovereignty and technology in a range of cases. The papers all speak well to each other.

The Cause of War (War Studies Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel This panel explores the many forces that lead societies into war, from philosophical ideas about conflict to the political processes and symbols that escalate tensions. The papers consider how causes of war are understood, interpreted, and acted upon, and how these understandings shape both decision-making and diplomacy. Together they offer a wide view of the pressures that drive states and communities toward violence.

The Contested Politics of ‘The Human’ in Conflict and Security Studies (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel Technological development is blurring the boundaries, relations and character of human subjectivity more than ever before. Furthermore, as artificial intelligence, drones, cyber warfare and digitalisation increasingly inform the conduct of warfare, the commissioning of and resistance to violence has become an increasingly technocratic process. More broadly, the very character of conflict and (in)security is morphing and becoming an everyday concern for vast sectors of the population who are marginalised by the same processes of capitalist development that are driving technological innovation. Rather than engaging in a technocratic study of these norms, as disciplinary IR has tended to, this panel scrutinises technological development, its political consequences, and its impact on (post)human subjectivity from a range of innovative critical IR theoretical perspectives. Drawing on approaches including queer, decolonial, Indigenous and new materialist thought, this panel situates contemporary (in)securities within the historical context of colonialism, changing human-land relationships, and non-anthropocentric conceptualisations of identity, relationality and subjectivity. Reflecting the changing character and consequences of conflict, panellists discuss diverse topics including technologies of conflict, the War on Gaza, irregularised migration, the global economy and climate change. Cumulatively, the panel proposes an expanded conception of conflict and its impacts than that currently proposed by the discipline of international relations.

The Role of Sex and Gender in Security: Borders, Threats and Protection (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel The Role of Sex and Gender in Security: Borders, Threats and Protection

The World Politics of Protecting Nature (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre While the environment and climate change have become central concerns of international politics, the protection of nature – biodiversity, habitats, and ecosystems – remains comparatively underexplored within the study of world politics. This panel seeks to foreground nature protection as a critical and urgent domain of political contestation. Recent developments such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the growing prominence of biodiversity COPs, and the inclusion of nature-based solutions in climate finance and loss and damage debates signal a shifting landscape. These changes invite renewed attention to how nature is conceptualised, valued, and contested across borders and disciplines.

The coloniality of Far-right and Fascist Fantasies and Discourses (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel The coloniality of Far-right and Fascist Fantasies and Discourses

The elite politics of deterrence: elite practices and the making of deterrence strategy and policy (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel Deterrence is not a mass sport. It usually involves military and political elites communicating among each other’s, beyond and within national boundaries. This panel scrutinizes the social practices of those elites to understand how they shape the politics of deterrence. How do elites ritualize certain practices so as to communicate particular meanings through routine activities? How does their definition of self affect deterrence practices or adversary perceptions? How do practices of deterrence serve in promoting certain security professionals as state elites? How does the elitist nature of deterrence practice affect the possibility for communication with culturally estranged adversaries? Adopting a broad view, by looking both at contemporary and historical cases, and at Western and non-Western cases, this panel aims to contribute not to deterrence theory, but to the study of deterrence as a social practice. In doing so, it highlights the performative, symbolic, and identity-based dimensions of deterrence interactions, revealing how meaning-making, professional hierarchies, and cultural context shape strategic communication and the reproduction of security orders across time and space.

Through the Plate Glass: 65 Years of International Theorising at Sussex and 15 Years of the Centre for Advanced International Theory (Centre for Advanced International Theory, University of Sussex) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel It has been 65 years since the University of Sussex was established as the first of the post-Second World War plate glass universities and Martin Wright became its founding Dean of European Studies. 50 years later, the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) was established in 2011 with the aim to reconsider and promote theorizing in International Relations without being directly policy relevant. Until then, the discipline was driven by the desire to influence policy-making but that stood in the way of systematic theoretical analysis. In this roundtable, we invite past recipients of the Sussex International Theory Prize to reflect on the role that the University of Sussex had for International Relations Theories in the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond and what role it still can play. What impact had Sussex play on International Relations Theories? Did CAIT achieve its ambitions from 15 years ago? Are International Relations Theories still important in an anti-intellectual world that and what role can and should Sussex play?

Vulnerability, Care, and Control in counterterrorism (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This panel explores narratives of risk and vulnerability in contemporary counterterrorism

Worlds in Motion: On Turning Points, Continuity and Development in International Society (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel In a moment of profound global instability – marked by geopolitical upheaval, ecological crisis, and shifting moral and institutional orders – the question of how international society changes over time has renewed urgency. This panel explores moments when norms, practices, institutions, and balances of power shift, and equally how turning points interact with longer processes of continuity and transformation in international society. Each paper engages with a key theme in International Relations that gains renewed significance when considered through the panel’s focus on how temporal dynamics shape order, legitimacy, and change. Contributors consider whether today’s turbulence represents – or may come to represent – a decisive turning point in the evolution of international society, examining how revolutionary movements, the war in Ukraine, the resurgence of great power politics, and China’s “Community with a Shared Future for Mankind” civilisational vision are shaping the current historical predicament and its implications for the future of world order. Extending debates on temporality within the international society tradition, the panel advances relational and processual approaches that link historical conjunctures to longer trajectories of integration, disintegration, and legitimacy. Bringing together a diverse group of scholars of various backgrounds, genders, and career stages, it aims to foster an inclusive dialogue on how the meanings of global order emerge and evolve through time.

Sponsored by Sussex International Relations Department, Pluto Press, and Lark and Bloom Library - Power and politics in the war machine: global social forces, local resistance. Separate registration required. Click for more details. Room: One Church Gloucester Place, BN1 4AA This roundtable is organised in partnership with the Sussex International Relations Department, Pluto Press, and Lark and Bloom Library. [Click to register and find out more.][1] [1]: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/onechurchbrighton/2031246

University of St Andrews Reception - Separate registration required. Click for more details. Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre The University of St Andrews School of International Relations will be hosting a reception in the beautiful Skyline Bar. Friends and guests of the School will be invited to join representatives from the School for drinks and snacks while enjoying beautiful sea views over Brighton Beach. [Click to register and find out more.][1] [1]: https://indico.bisa.ac.uk/event/661/

Alignment and Hedging Strategies (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre Five papers on alignment and hedging strategies.

Alterity and Humanity (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre Alterity and Humanity

Bridging academia and policy in a changing world (British International Studies Association) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre There is a little doubt that the global order, as we know it, is changed rapidly and profoundly. Many long-standing pillars of international politics such as international law, multilateral organizations and peace-making, are being questioned and redefined. How can we sense of this changing world together? This roundtable brings together editors, scholars, policymakers and communications professionals to discuss how links between academic research and policy-making can be fostered in a sustainable way. What does it mean to write and publish effectively for policy audiences? How can academics promote their research to diverse audiences beyond academia? What spaces and opportunities exist for community-building and knowledge exchange between academia and policy-makers? These are some of the many topics we will discuss.

Critical Studies on 'Terrorism' beyond western contexts (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre This panel explores Critical Studies on 'Terrorism' beyond western contexts.

Doing migration research: reflections from the field (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre Doing migration research: reflections from the field

Futures of IR pedagogy (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Meeting Room 16, Brighton Centre Futures of IR pedagogy

Governing Affective Bonds and Boundaries: Emotional Communities and the Politics of (Un)Belonging in IR (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre N/A

Governing the Globe: International Organizations and World Order (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre Governing the Globe: International Organizations and World Order

Innovative Feminist Methods and New Approaches to Data (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre Innovative Feminist Methods and New Approaches to Data

Knowledge Politics III (Science, Faith and Myth) (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel is the third of three examining knowledge politics around climate and environmental politics, specifically interrogating the relationship between science, faith and myth. How do we evidence what? What actors are engaged in the knowledge construction process and what hierarchies follow? The papers on this panel work across these questions to understand how scientific authority is constructed, mobilised, and contested across domains of climate policy, environmental governance, and global cooperation.

Making Gender Visible in Militarization and Violence (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre Making Gender Visible in Militarization and Violence

Media, Technology, and Visual Politics (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre Media, Technology, and Visual Politics

Memory, Migration, and Affective Histories in Motion (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre N/A

Oaths and Confessions: (re)visioning the politics of military/ised violence and voice (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre A panel created by the CMS Working Group Convenors of existing paper abstracts.

Planetary Politics I: More-than-human and multispecies interventions in IR (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel The unfolding planetary crisis is placing mainstream International Relations (IR) understandings of what it means to be ‘human’ under increasing scrutiny. As IR scholars attempt to understand, articulate and critique the anthropocentric ways of thinking and living that dominate the Western-European worldview and have led to ecological breakdown, greater analytical attention is being turned towards the role of the nonhuman, more-than-human and inhuman in global politics. This panel, linked to another proposed roundtable 'Planetary Politics II: Conversation on Planetary Politics', considers the future of IR from a more-than-human and multispecies perspective. It asks, among other questions: In what ways can study of the nonhuman, more-than-human and inhuman ensure that IR is equipped to address intensifying ecological challenges? And how can or should key concepts in IR like the state, territory, power, agency and violence be rethought in less anthropocentric ways?

Power and Legitimacy in Trade-Environmental Governance: The Contestation of CBAM and EUDR Within and Beyond Europe (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products (EUDR) are among the most contested policies to emerge from the European Green Deal (2020). While both seek to extend the EU’s climate and environmental objectives beyond its borders – one by introducing due diligence obligations on importers, and the other by imposing a carbon price on imports – they have triggered intense political, legal, and normative contestation both within the EU and globally. Theoretically, the panel advances new ways of understanding unilateralism as a dynamic and relational mode of governance, centred on expectations, discourse, and dissensus. By tracing how contestation unfolds both *within* and *beyond* Europe, i.e., across EU institutions, member states, industries, and trade partners, the papers seek to reconceptualise the EU’s recent environmental-trade policies not as those of a singular “norm exporter,” but as embedded in a dynamic web of interdependencies and resistance. Methodologically, the panel demonstrates the promise of Q-methodology and large language models (LLMs) for studying complex, multi-scalar governance processes and discursive dynamics. Normatively, the contributions highlight enduring challenges of fairness, inclusivity, and justice that define contemporary global politics. In short, the panel asks whether International Studies is ready for a world in which global norms emerge not through multilateral consensus, but through polycentric and deeply contested governance. By treating the EU’s trade–environmental policies as a laboratory of this transformation, the panel speaks directly to BISA 2025’s call for new thinking, new directions.

Product demonstration - Implementing AI-Assisted Text Analysis in WordStat and QDA Miner

• Normand Peladeau (Provalis)

Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre This workshop will provide an overview of recent generative AI and large language model technologies, with a focus on their possibilities, limitations, and implications for text analysis. [Click to find out more.][1] [1]: https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/featured-events

Rethinking peacebuilding: Beyond the crisis of the liberal peace (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre The field of peacebuilding stands at a conceptual and political crossroads. The liberal peace framework, long the dominant model guiding international intervention and post-conflict reconstruction, has come under sustained critique for its normative assumptions, limited inclusivity, and uneven outcomes. Yet, while the crisis of liberal peacebuilding is widely recognized, what comes next remains underexplored. This panel brings together contributions that examine how peace can be reimagined in light of shifting global, regional, and local realities. It considers how emerging security concerns, questions of justice and reconciliation, youth and civic engagement, and alternative political orders reshape both the imaginaries and practices of peace. Encouraging innovative, critical, and regional non-western perspectives, the panel seeks to open new pathways for thinking about peace beyond the liberal paradigm, toward more plural, performative, and adaptive understandings of peace in contemporary global politics.

Russia’s Offensive War Against Ukraine (War Studies Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre This panel explores Russia’s offensive war against Ukraine through the lenses of civil resistance, elite discourse, identity politics, and hybrid warfare. The papers trace how Ukrainian society mobilizes resources, how Russian leaders frame aggression, and how conflict narratives shape diplomatic efforts and military strategy. Together they offer a clear view of the political, social, and strategic dynamics driving the war and its broader implications.

Scholar Activism, Abolitionist Pedagogies, and Institutional Complicity: Developing Creative Tools to Confront Genocide from Inside Academia (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre This roundtable invites critical researchers and scholar-activists to collectively confront the entanglements of ongoing colonial relations with the severe challenges posed by the current political moment. A moment which is characterised by an intensification of the racial capitalist regime and its acceleration of capital accumulation, dispossession, mass colonisation, violence, and exploitation. Racial capitalism, first and foremost, is a process that makes different grievances and devastating realities of communities seem disconnected from each other. We acknowledge that for many academics in European institutions, recent events – especially concerning Palestine – have strained our ability to act as critical voices for global decolonial justice, particularly in light of blatant institutional complicity with ongoing colonial violence and genocide. Grounding our discussion in abolitionist pedagogies and creative methodologies, we will explore the intertwining themes of racial capitalism, settler-colonialism, the arms trade, and the rise of the far right through the lens of colonial violence – military, epistemic, and structural – as manifested in Palestine, SWANA, DRC Congo, at European borders, and within our own cities. The roundtable moves beyond critique towards practical engagement to counter the coordinated attack on internationalist solidarity. Through collective reflection and creative dialogue, we will examine our positions as educators, researchers, and activists, and explore the complementarity, contradiction, and complicity inherent in our work within and beyond the academy. Our goal is to develop emancipatory perspectives and tangible teaching tools rooted in a commitment to liberation and social justice. The hope is to take these themes forward to support our students and communities.

Shaping the international through a lens of accountability to children and young people (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel How would centring accountability to children and youth shift our understandings of this current moment of global crisis and what comes next? Can seeing young people as ‘who counts’ offer new pathways for International Studies to meet emerging challenges? This panel explores what an accountability to children and young people lens adds to approaches to addressing global challenges. Accountability is often equated with punitive and/or technical administrative matters rather than questions of peace and justice. By centring children and young people as the ‘who counts’ in accountability in theory and practice, this panel explores the contested place and status of children and young people in the international. Amidst rapidly declining investments in peace and development and vast increases in investments in war and conflict, young people’s rights are sidelined. Threats to promotion and protection of children’s rights and agency exacerbate how we can imagine the scale and impact of global insecurities. This panel reflects on normative, theoretical and empirical conceptualisations of accountability to children and young people, and draws on how particular formations and applications of youth accountability shape possibilities in countering adultist lenses and opening space for counter-narratives of, for and by young people.

States of Transition (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre What is the role of the state in supporting transitions and deeper transformations towards a more sustainable world? This panel brings together leading scholars from across the discipline to reflect on this question. Prompted in part by engagement with Peter Newell's new book 'States of Transition: From Governing the Environment to Social Transformation', it will explore the tensions and contradictions between multiple state roles from the military, democratic and welfare state to the industrial and global state and what this means for the prospects of creating a more sustainable world.

Studying Peacekeeping: Unpacking the Methodological Divide (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel This roundtable launches a newly published forum in International Peacekeeping that revisits the enduring methodological divide in peacekeeping research. While large-N statistical studies and in-depth qualitative analyses often appear to generate contrasting findings, contributors argue that these approaches reflect different research questions and assumptions rather than irreconcilable differences. The forum highlights opportunities for dialogue, collaboration, and methodological pluralism, ranging from joint research agendas to relational approaches that foreground dynamic interactions in peacekeeping practice. In doing so, it asks how peacekeeping research can move beyond a “dialogue of the deaf” to produce cumulative, policy-relevant knowledge. Bringing together contributors of this forum, this roundtable provides a space for reflection on how we study peacekeeping and how peacekeeping scholarship can continue to inform international efforts to manage conflict in an era of shifting global order.

Technological competition, cooperation, and control in an uncertain global order: Emerging strategic and governance challenges beyond the US-China hyperbole (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel Rising global competition over strategically important technologies has raised complex questions about the future of intelligence collection, technology governance, and cooperation in an increasingly privatized, interdependent world. This panel explores the primary tensions, opportunities, and challenges which characterize global actors’ efforts to manage and respond to key technologies, and it considers their consequences for the future of international relations. Using diverse theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches, the four papers in this panel examine these dynamics in several important areas: artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and the technologies supporting military intelligence collection. Foremost, in their contribution, Siegel, Nandkumar, and Blomquist examine Silicon Valley’s leading role in procuring AI systems for critical American security services and its consequences for wider dynamics of AI arms racing between Beijing and Washington. Their paper highlights the rising significance of private actors in public-private AI systems procurement and in the securitization of AI systems, exploring whether this emerging "military-tech-industrial complex" adds a fundamentally new dimension to US-China technology competition. From a different angle, Harack’s paper introduces a novel conceptual approach to the issue of AI verification and arms control, fleshing out the technical elements of verification, their political trade-offs, and the rationale for why AI verification processes are crucial for the future of AI arms control–in an increasingly fractious period of geostrategic competition. Next, Carver’s paper explores how European countries–often framed as ‘falling behind’ in the US-China tech race–have managed concrete trade-offs between control and innovation in their strategic approaches to cloud computing technologies. The paper theorizes an AI-cloud sovereignty trade-off and explores how, if at all, policymakers have managed this tradeoff through different cloud procurement strategies. Finally, Kearney’s contribution inverts the question by considering how technological changes in areas such as space surveillance and signals intelligence affect state incentives around intelligence disclosures. Employing a formal model to systematically evaluate how the emergence of novel technologies shift states’ shadow of the future, the paper reveals not just the areas of technology in which we might expect future competition but also how this competition might alter states’ ability to signal resolve and employ coercive intelligence disclosures as a tool of crisis bargaining.

The IPE of Trade (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

The Path Not Taken: Decolonial Perspectives from India and the Future of IR (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel The panel seeks to engage with the politics of decolonizing the discipline of International Relations (IR) building upon perspectives from India. Scholars within India, outside, and across the ideological spectrum have shown renewed engagement with the broader project of decolonising political thought, theory, and IR. The so-called relational turn is a testimony to this. The contributions engage with ancient Indian texts and seek to provide interpretations that engages with ontological and epistemological problems in the discipline of IR. The panel includes interpretation of texts such as Arthashashtra, Mahabharata and philosophies such as Samkhya, Yoga. By doing so, it seeks to place Indian philosophy and philosophers in the domain of IR. Existing scholarship have used key concepts of Indian Knowledge System to reconfigure the discipline. Such scholarship ranges from finding similarities between extant concepts and traditional Indian practices to positing the superior distinctiveness of Indian ideas. For the purpose of simplification, these works can broadly be categorized/labelled as Non-Western, Post-Western, Global, Nativistic, etc. The panel interrogates and problematizes these existing exercises that begin by either critiquing Eurocentrism and romanticizing Indian contributions, or presenting the Indian ideas as precursors of Western concepts. While attempting to uncover the perils of such attempts of decolonizing IR, the contributions in this panel align with the idea that Indian tradition(s) evolved while traversing through critical historical conjunctures and learning from internal contradictions. It is the direction that was not chosen, and possibly the future of IR as discipline – and practice – lies there.

US power in Asia (US Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel N/A

World politics in MENA region and Kurdistan (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel The panel explores different aspects of the politics in the MENA region and Kurdistan

Refreshment break Room: Foyer, Brighton Centre

Affective Nationalisms: Emotion, Power and Everyday Governance (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Syndicate 1, Brighton Centre N/A

Alliances and Diplomacy (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre Five papers on alliances and diplomacy.

Author Meets Critics: Elif Kalaycioglu's "Politics of World Heritage" (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre In Politics of World Heritage, Elif Kalaycioglu analyzes UNESCO’s flagship regime, which seeks to curate a cultural-history of humanity, attached to a rarified “universal value” and tethered to goals of peace and solidarity. Kalaycioglu shows that the regime generates and structures desirous pursuits of subjectivity, such as civilizational grandeur, technological acumen, world-historical agency. This raises the question of whether these subjectivities, valorized by the regime’s configuration and coveted by states, are conducive to peace and solidarity. Following that question, Kalaycioglu shows that participants link diverse visions of peace and solidarity to humanity, from nuclear disarmament to cooperation under multipolarity modeled after a stylized Silk Roads history. Three key lessons follow. First, humanity is not a self-evidently normative subject. How humanity is represented matters for resulting social orders and political visions. Second, while cultural and historical resources facilitate political visions, such facilitation can be multiply forged. Finally, a synecdoche for the liberal international, world heritage asks us to contend with difficult questions of the universal and the particular, and the enduring and emergent hierarchies of global politics. To address these claims, the roundtable brings Kalaycioglu into conversation with scholars whose work engage with themes of subjectivity, heritage, and humanity, among others.

Author Meets Critics: Reflections on 'The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge' by Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre 'The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge' (University of California Press, 2026) offers a radical rethinking of the fundamentals of refuge, protection, and justice through the lens of queer and trans displacement. Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz interrogate the moral and political foundations of international asylum systems, exposing how existing institutions fail to recognize the lived realities and relational harms experienced by LGBTQ+ individuals in situations of displacement. Against a backdrop of global institutional failure and rising illiberalism, the book challenges us to revisit core assumptions about the “international” and its obligations. This roundtable brings together scholars to reflect on how 'The Way Out' revisits the foundational ideas of international protection: to secure dignity, safety, and justice for the most marginalized. It asks how systems of refuge might be reimagined in light of the structural exclusions they produce, and how queer approaches can recenter global ethics on the needs of those at the edges of visibility and belonging. The authors will respond to the commentaries, opening a conversation about the place of justice for the queer and trans displaced in a world in crisis.

Book Roundtable on Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order? Sasikumar Sundaram provides a bold new theory of rhetoric as power politics, demonstrating how non-Western states challenge their silencing within the Western-led international order. He argues that, in the deeply hierarchical international system, states in the lower rungs resort to rhetorical performances in order to be heard. Through anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetorical statecraft, states such as India, Brazil, and China seek to expose and exploit the contradictions in the legitimating principles, norms, and rules of the international system—and, in so doing, pursue and exercise power. Today, as Russia, Europe, and even the United States engage in anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric, Sundaram shows why lessons from the non-Western world are crucial to recognizing the dynamics of power politics and global disorder.

Colonial Postcolonial Decolonial Working Group output workshop Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre

Contemporary Challenges in Peacebuilding (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre Trust, moral agency, legal empowerment, food security and digital battlefields

Dimensions of Sino-Centric Multilateralism in the Global South. A Book-based Roundtable (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre China’s rise as a global power has often been assumed to unfold within the international order created and maintained by the West. As a result, much attention has been focused on its challenge to and perceptions of the liberal institutional order established after the Second World War. However, far less attention has been paid to Sino-centric multilateralism — the emergence of multilateral formats initiated by China and operating largely outside the reach of the liberal order. The Dragon’s Emerging Order (2026) is the first volume to offer a comprehensive, global stocktake of China’s efforts to enhance its centrality in international relations. It provides insights into the struggle for global influence, highlighting the interplay of hard and soft power. The chapters offer balanced and critical views of China’s attempts to establish its own multilateralist presence. There are theoretical and empirical chapters, but all combine theory and empirics. A few of the topics are the Belt and Road Initiative, China-CELAC Forum, FOCAC, China and the BRICS, China and ASEAN, China and the G20, and the agency of regional states.

Directions for UK National Security: navigating alliances with the US, Europe, NATO and beyond (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre In 2025 the UK National Security Strategy recommitted the UK to ‘collective security, led by NATO’ as the ‘cornerstone of our strategy’. It thus recommitted the UK to deepening its partnerships with both the US and Europe, and made a significant defence investment to this end. At the same time, it signalled an intent to ‘Sharpen our diplomatic focus on countries that… share a similar interest in shaping international norms to mitigate and manage the effects of great power competition’. In this session we explore the UK’s options for shaping its future relationships towards other powers, and the arguments supporting them.

Earthpolitik vs Realpolitik: Complements or Contradictions? (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre We are living in times of existential threat. The worst scenarios for anthropomorphic climate change see humanity experiencing catastrophic casualties – and possibly extinction – as a consequence of its own emissions. It may be that Earth hits an environmental tipping point, beyond which its further deterioration as a life-support system is unavoidable. At the same time, the resurgent spectre of great-power war risks compressing the pace of climate change from decades to mere seconds: if states’ nuclear arsenals are employed in anger for the first time since 1945, especially if such a conflagration escalated to an all-out retaliatory exchange, other concerns about environmental degradation would be rendered moot. This roundtable will therefore consider whether ‘Earthpolitik’ or ‘Realpolitik’ is a more useful lens through which to view contemporary international politics, with a particular – but not exclusive – focus on calls to ‘green the military’. The implications of such a call are radical: that even the state’s shield against the potential predations of an anarchic system should itself be reformed – and potentially weakened – in hope of lessening future planetary danger, thus representing the subordination of realpolitik to a more expansive Earthpolitik.

Gendered Peace, Organizing and Solidarity Networks (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre Gendered Peace, Organizing and Solidarity Networks

Global China: A Critique of Chinese and Western Narratives (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre This panel focuses on Tim Summers' newly published Global China: A Critique of Chinese and Western Narratives (British University Press 2025). This insightful book explores evolving perceptions of China, contrasting dominant Western narratives with Chinese perspectives. The book critiques three prevailing views of China’s rise: the return of geopolitics, challenges to liberal order and prospects for collaborative governance.

Historical IPE (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

Hydrosphere and Cryosphere Governance (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel examines how authority over cryosphere and hydropshere environments is being renegotiated as climate change unsettles established arrangements. Across polar and oceanic spaces, the papers track shifting claims to expertise and disputes over who should guide environmental decisions. Rather than supposedly stable governance systems, this panel interrogates the nature of and the claims to governance.

Identity, norms, security and status: Eurasian and Asia-Pacific dimensions of regional and international order: (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre This panel examines a range of contemporary issues relating to regional and international order in Eurasia and Asia-Pacific. The five papers analyse and interrogate issues such as hybrid Sino-Turkic identities in Central Asia and their relevance to contemporary conceptualisations of China & Central Asia; the evolving organisational identity of the SCO, from regional to global; the role of memory anxieties in the context of Sino-Russian relations and its effect on status perceptions; diverging Sino-Russian narratives of global order, and finally a paper that sheds light on New Zealand's views of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the Indo-Pacific security context.

Ideological Competition and International Disorder (European Security Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre The 21st Century world is witnessing escalating international competition and threats to 'liberal international order', as the major powers involved have affirmed. Russia warns of an “intensification of global competition,” the European Union expresses concerns about a “competition of governance systems accompanied by a real battle of narratives,” while NATO asserts that “rising strategic competition and advancing authoritarianism challenge the Alliance’s interests and values.” Such statements allude to the possibility that heightened *ideological competition* is an important dimension of increasing disorder, yet ideology's precise role and significance is uncertain and contentious. This roundtable will consider this ideological dimension of growing challenges to international order, and how a recent growth of interest in ideology within International Relations scholarship can help theorise it. Contributors to the panel will consider how ideology and international (dis)order should be understood, how ideology relates to bloc politics, and the ideological challenge posed by Xi Jinping's China, Vladimir Putin's Russia, and 'sovereigntist' movements within established liberal democracies. All members of this roundtable are participants in the 'Contemporary and Historical Ideological Competition in World Politics' research network, created with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Institutions and Technology Regulation (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre A panel on institutions and regulation of technologies

Migration Deterrence policies and practices (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: The Marina, Brighton Centre Migration Deterrence policies and practices

Militarism (dis)embodied: care, injury, neglect (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre In these papers' explorations of the politics of military and veteran care, injury and neglect by the state which sends them to war, this panel unsettles militarism in these spaces and practices to reveal it as (dis)embodied.

Money, debt and discourse (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel IPEG constructed panel from individual paper submissions

Norms, Contestation, and the Reshaping of the Global Nuclear Order (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel This panel examines how states often positioned at the margins of global nuclear governance, whether small states, regional actors, or norm challengers, engage with, resist, and reshape the global nuclear order. Collectively, the contributions interrogate how identity, status, and structural inequalities influence compliance, resistance, and the creation and evolution of norms in nuclear politics. The panel invites discussion on the implications of these dynamics for global governance, regional security, and the future of nuclear norms, as well as on the actors who are shaping the nuclear security landscape.

Palestine, Protest, and Pretext (Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre This panel examines counterterrorism frameworks in the context of Palestine, genocide and Palestinian solidarity.

Planetary Politics II: Conversation on Planetary Politics (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre Planetary politics or planet politics is a significant emerging agenda today, not just in International Relations theory and academia more widely but also in concrete activism for new ways of doing politics on a troubled planet. But what is meant by planet/ary politics and what are its implications for redirecting politics and international relations as we know them? What kinds of constellations of actors, agencies and politics arise around planet/ary politics? What are the implications for who speaks, how we relate to others, where we do politics and how? And what kinds of contestations and debates structure the theory and practice of planetary politics? This roundtable, linked to another proposed panel 'Planetary Politics I More-than-human and multispecies interventions in IR' brings together a range of scholars who have been shaping the agenda of planetary politics, planetary thinking and planetarity in different ways to answer such questions and to unpack the implications for the study of International Relations.

Security and Signalling in Outer Space (Astropolitics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre N/A

Strategic challenges in Peacekeeping practice (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel Legitimation practices, peacekeeping expulsion, and motivation of interveners

The World at War: Analysing Contemporary Conflict (War Studies Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 1, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This panel surveys a world shaped by ongoing conflict, from great-power competition in West Africa to evolving air combat systems and multi-domain deterrence. The papers explore how states project influence, construct narratives, imagine future wars, and grapple with the limits of intelligence and coordination. Together they offer a wide lens on how contemporary conflicts are unfolding and how competing actors adapt to an increasingly complex security landscape.

Violence, Exclusion, Dispossession (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 2, Hilton Doubletree Hotel Violence, Exclusion, Dispossession

Worldmaking, Memory, and Resistance in South East Europe (South East Europe Working Group) Room: Renaissance Suite 3, Hilton Doubletree Hotel This panel examines how histories, memories, and practices of resistance shape political imaginaries and worldmaking in South East Europe. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from political theory, history, and critical sociology, the papers interrogate how states, movements, and communities in the region construct meaning and legitimacy in the face of domination, marginality, and transformation. From the ideological self-narration of past regimes to contemporary struggles over identity, archives, and democracy, the panel traces how alternative visions of the political emerge from sites often considered peripheral. Collectively, the contributions highlight South East Europe as a space where competing projects of power and resistance continually remake both regional and global orders.

Ethics and World Politics Working Group annual general meeting Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre

International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group - childhood, youth and IR meeting Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre

Alternative Politics of Social Media and Popular Culture (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel Alternative Politics of Social Media and Popular Culture

Coloniality and Imperialism in cultural materialities (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre Coloniality and Imperialism in cultural materialities

Critical perspectives in development (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre This panel brings together critical examinations of how bodies, knowledge, data, and governance shape development.

Dilemmas and lost spaces in ontological security seeking (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre Over the last two decades ontological security studies has burgeoned into a broad and vibrant subfield in International Relations. Central to scholarship in OSS are ontological security seeking practices – the routines, narratives, and relationships we form in order to provide a secure sense of self in order to “go on” and bracket the ever-present potential for chaos that underpins daily life. Due to its foundational nature, the act of ontological security seeking is considered, if not necessarily as an untrammelled good, then as something we engage in naturally and constantly and simply cannot turn off. Recent literature on the ethics of ontological security has sought to problematise ontological security seeking behaviours and, in this panel, we develop this line of enquiry, asking; what happens when our security seeking practices actually fundamentally undermine our ontological security? What is the role of truth in self-narratives? How can ontological security seeking help us understand techno-fascism’s preoccupation with immortality? What role does rest and sleep have in the emergence of the self? And how can psychic processes of sublimation encourage transformation of the self without risking salient relationships descending into friend-enemy distinctions? Ultimately, this panel seeks to generate critical insights into ontological security seeking behaviour that encourages transformation and change.

Health Diplomacy and Governance in Times of Crisis and Insecurity (Global Health Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre Health Diplomacy and Governance in Times of Crisis and Insecurity

Integrating a youth lens across International Studies (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre Always present, often overlooked, youth are not just ‘future promise’ but fundamental to the contemporary contours of IR as we face uncertain futures. This roundtable brings together scholars working across multiple sub-disciplines of international studies to reflect on how global challenges might be differently understood and addressed through integrating a youth lens. While much progress has been made in integrating critical intersectional and feminist approaches to international studies, including by drawing more attention to the role of race, class, gender and sexuality in shaping the international, less cross-cutting attention has been granted to age, especially children and young people. This roundtable invites a discussion from scholars across different sub-fields to both explore how youth perspectives shape the landscape of what is known, what a youth lens offers to interrogating and deconstructing knowledge in their field, and how youth-attentive scholarship offers new directions for the discipline in this moment of multiple crises and uncertainty.

Learning and Teaching/Early-Career Small Research Grant café (British International Studies Association) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre Learning and Teaching/Early-Career Small Research Grant café

Local Conflict Dynamics and Peacebuilding (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre understanding the local dynamics of peacebuilding projects

National Security under Labour: Strategy in an era of radical uncertainty (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre For decades, scholars of British politics have argued that national security rarely features as a salient topic in electoral politics or public debate, owing to a durable strategic consensus and an assumed public focus on domestic matters. However, the past five years have shattered this assumption. From Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and escalating tensions with China, to the reverberations of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, national security has become a visible and contested arena in the UK political sphere, demanding public scrutiny and intellectual renewal. This roundtable gathers contributors to the forthcoming edited volume National Security Under Starmer (Palgrave Pivot) to consider what this shift means for International Studies. Centred on the UK Labour government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review and National Security Strategy, each expert examines a key dimension of Britain’s security orientation: the evolving state identity and public legitimacy of security policy (Martin), the elevation of cyber and digital sovereignty (Devanny), the strategic integration of the space domain (Balm), the long-term evolution of the Strategic Defence Review process (Reynolds), and the embedded role of gender in security statecraft (Kirby). Together, we offer the first academic forum to examine the Starmer government’s national security policymaking across interconnected domains – from space and cyber to gender and public opinion. By unpacking different forms of evidence (from defence reviews to citizen sentiment) and contrasting state-centric and society-centric perspectives, we explore how to study national security as a whole-of-system enterprise rather than a series of siloed issues. In doing so, we open a conversation about how to renew security studies for the next 50 years: methodologically (through multi-domain, mixed-method approaches), pedagogically (through teaching security as a public, not just governmental, concern), and conceptually (by breaking down the walls between strategic analysis and democratic accountability). This roundtable reflects BISA’s commitment to critical debate and disciplinary innovation – asking whether Starmer’s government, and those of us studying it, are truly ready for what comes next, and what needs to change if not.

Norms in Global Politics: Erosion, Decay and Contestation (International Law and Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre Norms in Global Politics: Erosion, Decay and Contestation

Operational Challenges in Peacekeeping Practice (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre Local reception. civilian protection, relational peacekeeping and the Use of Force

Pandemic Politics in Central Asia. Authoritarian Contagion (East Europe and Eurasian Security Working Group) Room: Mass Media, Brighton Centre Book presentation roundtable: Anceschi, Luca. (2026). Pandemic Politics in Central Asia. Authoritarian Contagion. London: Routledge. Central Asia experienced a pandemic power grab in 2020-2022: the authoritarian leaderships of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan managed the politics of Covid-19 to ultimately strengthen their control over the region’s politics and societies. This book looks at three policy areas wherein this power grab surfaced more noticeably: • Mobility Control, whereby the regimes, through restrictive legislation enacted in thoroughly repressive fashion, limited the population’s freedom of movement and, indirectly, their capacity to protest; • Authoritarian Information Flows, whereby Covid-related measures ostensibly meant to align broadcast, print, and digital information flows to the governments’ pandemic message curtailed even further the freedom of expression of everyday citizens across Central Asia; • The International Politics of the Pandemic, whereby the three regimes studied here capitalised on a rapidly mutating international environment to strengthen their kleptocratic hold over Central Asia’s politics and society, and benefited from the crumbling international order to purse large-scale deception of their Covid response capacity. This roundtable advances the conference’s call for ‘new thinking, new directions’ by interrogating how the Covid-19 era empowered authoritarian governance in Central Asia and thus challenges prevailing frameworks in International Studies.

Representations of War (War Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre This panel examines how war is represented, justified, and understood across different societies and disciplines. The papers explore how cultural heritage, public attitudes, writing practices, and local experiences shape the stories we tell about conflict. Together they show how representations of war influence both policy and perception, often determining how violence is interpreted, supported, or resisted.

Shaping Security: Public Opinion, Media Narratives, and Security Policy (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre This panel investigates how public opinion, media narratives, and everyday understandings of (in)security interact to shape the formulation, legitimation, and contestation of security policy. The papers discuss how security is communicated, interpreted, and experienced through vernacular and everyday articulations of security and how the circulation of disinformation and media narratives influence public perceptions of security. The panel examines the co-constitution of security and communication, highlighting how media and public discourse operate as key sites where meanings of security are produced, normalised, and contested.

Teaching amidst the ruins: IR pedagogy, oppression, and the neoliberal university (Learning and Teaching Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre Teaching amidst the ruins: IR pedagogy, oppression, and the neoliberal university

The British state as a source of global insecurities: critical scholarship and political accountability in a time of crisis” (Centre for Global Insecurities Research, University of Sussex and the Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1b, Brighton Centre Britain’s complicity in the Gaza genocide is a stark reminder of the enduring significance of the British state as a global actor. Not least since it follows the 2015-22 Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, another case of extensive war crimes and a consequent humanitarian catastrophe in which Britain’s complicity was even deeper than in the case of Gaza. For scholars of international relations working in the British context, Britain’s involvement in this extraordinary violence over the past decade presents an urgent challenge: how to contribute to critical knowledge production around the crimes of the British state, and how to place that knowledge at the disposal of wider civil society efforts to ensure accountability for these crimes? Also, if Britain’s role as an accomplice to US imperialism in these and other cases can only be fully understood in the context of Britain’s own colonial history, how might the recent decolonial turn in IR be brought to bear as a theoretical frame to illuminate empirical analysis of British foreign relations? This roundtable brings together scholars working on British militarism, arms exports and imperialism more broadly, and on the ways in which colonial legacies continue to shape British foreign relations. They will discuss what a new critical research agenda on British foreign relations might look like, in terms of potential topics for research and the theoretical and evidential resources that are available to those interested in pursuing this work.

The Global Politics of Solar Geoengineering (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre Global climate change effects are already with us and certain to worsen, pointing to the failure of mitigation strategies to date. In this context researchers, policy-makers and entrepreneurs have begun to discuss the possibility of, even advocate for, technological interventions to moderate the effects of climate change, including geoengineering, While one form of geoengineering- carbon dioxide removal (CDR)- has become relatively accepted and integrated within states’ net zero emissions plans, the other- solar geoengineering/ solar radiation modification (SRM)- remains acutely controversial. Large scale technological interventions to reflect sunlight back into space certainly have the theoretical potential to mask (at least some) climate effects, in the process potentially reducing some harms to humans, plants, animals and ecosystems. Yet they also raise concerns about unanticipated ecological effects, the danger of disincentivising mitigation action and the possibility of causing sudden and significant harms if suddenly curtailed. There are also acute concerns about their governance, with no current global agreement in place to regulate their use and emerging steps towards commercialisation and security sector involvement. This roundtable gathers together leading researchers working on the international politics of solar geoengineering to explore these debates and reflect on the future of solar geoengineering in response to the climate crisis. Participants will be invited to consider a range of questions in this space, including whether (large-scale) solar geoengineering interventions are likely; whether they should be and if so under what circumstances; what the key concerns are about research and their deployment; whether meaningful global regulation is possible; and/or whether the potential implications of their use are adequately considered by key institutions of global politics.

The IPE of Economic Nationalism (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: 2 bar, Brighton Centre IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

The IPE of the Second Cold War (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

The Politics of Global Just Transitions (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1d, Brighton Centre A decade after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, scholarly and policy discourses are shifting toward the opportunities and challenges posed by its implementation. However, a growing gap between climate action and global goals is becoming increasingly apparent, especially given broader challenges to multilateralism and the ongoing global power shift that is complicating climate politics and governance. Geopolitics is reshaping global governance as multilateralism faces decline. Moreover, the intensifying competition for critical minerals among major powers risks exacerbating the extractivist models that have long impoverished resource-rich but less powerful countries, while some major emitters are simultaneously backsliding on their climate commitments. Against this backdrop, "just transition" has emerged as a powerful metaphor capturing both the normative and strategic dimensions of meeting global climate goals. Yet its connection to ongoing global power shifts remains largely unexplored. This panel examines the prospects of just transition as a framework for understanding the emerging politics of implementing climate commitments. By connecting the concepts of just transition and global order, we illuminate the evolving global politics of just transitions—including both their promise and their contestations. Speakers will draw on their pioneering scholarship on just transitions to reflect on the longer-term challenge of meeting climate goals in a fair and just manner in the coming decades.

The Politics of the Migration state (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel The Politics of the Migration state

The Slavery-War Nexus: New Understandings of the History and Future of Slavery and War (European Journal of International Security) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel As many as 90% of contemporary conflicts have featured modern slavery practices, yet the profound links between slavery and war remain critically underexplored within International Studies. As BISA looks ahead to the next fifty years, this roundtable addresses a crucial gap in war studies scholarship and practice: understanding slavery not as peripheral to conflict, but as central to its dynamics and impacts. With more active conflicts globally than at any time since the Second World War, the prevalence of slavery is increasing as well. From forced labour and child soldiers to sexual exploitation and trafficking, slavery is weaponised in war, shaping societies, economies, and legal frameworks across historical and contemporary contexts. Yet governments, international institutions, and humanitarian actors remain ill-prepared to respond effectively. This panel brings together scholars from the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War – the world's first major initiative dedicated to the slavery-war nexus – to discuss how integrating slavery into war studies not only creates a new sub-discipline, but transforms our analytical frameworks. Panellists will present the innovative interdisciplinary methodologies being developed (spanning historical analysis, survivor narratives, satellite imagery, AI-powered forecasting and peacegaming) that will reveal patterns previously obscured by disciplinary silos and facilitate new strategies for eliminating conflict-related slavery worldwide. By bridging war studies, slavery studies, law, political theory, and data science, this panel exemplifies the disciplinary evolution necessary for International Studies to meet future global challenges – advancing both theoretical innovation and real-world impact.

What's "Left of Queer" in IR? (Re)claiming the radical potential of queer feminist critique (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel In the 2020 Social Text special issue introduction “Left of queer”, Jasbir Puar and David Eng remind us that “the radical potential of queer critique has often turned on its analyses of gender and sex as ‘racial arrangements’” (2). In agreement, this roundtable calls for a (re)centring of questions of empire, race and (settler)coloniality in our study of gender and sexuality, to appraise how they act as sites where violent racial formations are created, maintained, but also contested. This roundtable asks, how can “what’s left of queer” in IR fundamentally challenge the ongoing violent (racial, colonial) projects of transnational security regimes, nation-state(s), empire, racial capitalism? How can it address the ongoing coloniality of our present, and help us push back against both global fascisms and the murderous inclusions pedalled under “liberal democracy”? How can it ground us in material, lived realities, and defy abstraction and “mystification” (Stoffel & Birkvad 2023)? What new/old/unconsidered objects, subjects and sites of study should our queer feminist critique attend to? These questions will be accompanied by reflections on the production of “queer knowledge” in the academy: What are its material conditions? Who is it for? And how do our different positionalities and personal investments drive our employment of “queer” as an analytic? Attending to these questions, this roundtable seeks to carve out a space for us to take stock of our queer feminist critique and figure out its place and potential in the joint struggle against fascism, genocide, empire, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.

Refreshment break Room: Foyer, Brighton

Care, Resilience and Social Reproduction (Gendering International Relations Working Group) Room: Syndicate 1, Brighton Centre Care, Resilience and Social Reproduction

Central Banking and Monetary Power (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

Climate Policy, National Implementation and International Institutions (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel examines how climate, energy, and environmental governance unfolds domestically, how international institutions contend with and engage with these domestic realities and what gaps between policy and practice emerge. Beyond polycentric climate governance, the case studies in this panel interrogate in detail implementation realities and what they tell us about the state of climate governance today.

Colonialism, Diaspora and Migration Policies (International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre Colonialism, Diaspora and Migration Policies

Contemporary Challenges and Approaches to Peacebuilding (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre This roundtable brings together scholars and practitioners to critically examine the evolving landscape of peacebuilding in the face of complex global challenges. From recurrent conflicts and authoritarian resurgence to climate-induced displacement and violations of international humanitarian law, contemporary peacebuilding efforts must navigate increasingly multifaceted environments. Participants will explore how liberal peacebuilding is being re-evaluated and re-interpreted, and discuss emerging approaches that accommodate local agency, adaptive approaches, illiberal practices, and the evolving role of multilateral actors. By fostering dialogue across regions, this session aims to identify the theories and strategies to respond to current realities and advance sustainable peace.

Contemporary US Politics (US Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre N/A

Contemporary debates in UK Foreign Policy (British International Studies Association) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre N/A

Critically examining legalised pathways to international migration (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre This roundtable brings together scholars working on historical and contemporary border security, migration governance, and visa regimes to critically unpack legalised pathways to human international movement. Through various critical approaches, participants question the ontological assumptions of legalisation of certain pathways to international movement, inviting the audience to reevaluate who gets to cross international borders with safety and dignity. While policy narratives in the Global North and beyond often frame legal migration as accessible and orderly, research and lived experience reveal a deeply stratified system in which legality of who gets to cross international borders safely is constructed by power, leading to uneven access for different groups of people to international spaces. Our panellists unpack the genealogy of legalisation of certain pathways to migration over time and space. The roundtable aims to open a space for dialogue on the epistemic and legal mechanisms through which states and security actors define what counts as legal movement, the role of security infrastructure in legalisation of certain pathways of international movement, the role of visa regimes and bordering practices in relation to international hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and case study and comparative insights across geographies. The roundtable takes a critical approach to the question of legalised migration and provides a platform to reflect on methodological challenges in conducting this research.

Foreign Policy (Analysis) in a World of Personalist Rule (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre This roundtable explores explore the implications of the rise of personalism for Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). The angles from which this question will be approached include: the relationship between personalist rule and the growing politicization of foreign policy, with the suggestion being that latter is both an instrument and a response to personalist rule; the challenges and opportunities the rise of AI present for foreign policy-leaders in a world of personalist rule; how personalistic rule exemplifies the strong connection between how foreign policy is made and substantive foreign policy outcomes, specifically in the sense that leader personality, and dynamic aspects of personality change in particular, underpin both changes in process and changes in outcomes; the role of personalist leaders in eroding foreign policy bureaucracies; and the role that emotions and gendered approaches to leadership play in foreign policy-making. In so doing, the roundtable seeks to develop and critically assess possible new directions in FPA theorising. Key words: Foreign policy Leaders Populism Decision-making

Histories of sovereignty, solidarity and pan-regionalism in the making of IR (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre Histories of sovereignty, solidarity and pan-regionalism in the making of IR

Imaginaries and Stories of Peace (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre Imaginaries and Stories of Peace

Imaginaries of World Politics (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre Imaginaries of World Politics

Institutional Challenges and Contemporary Security (War Studies Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre This panel explores the institutional challenges that shape contemporary security and the contemporary security challenges that shape institutions. From gender equality and violence to how militaries reason and learn from past operations. The papers consider how organisational identities are formed, defended, and transformed, and how these internal dynamics influence wider security practices.

Invisibility, Illiberalism, and Resistance (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre A panel of critical scholarship and in depth cases.

Narratives of Greatness in International Politics (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre This panel brings together papers that, in different ways, deal with the question of "greatness" in international politics. Some former great powers cling to the narratives of their past glory, some resent their loss of status, and some project their internalize greatness into the future, angling to be "custodians of humanity." Papers on this panel rely on diverse empirical material - cultural heritage debates, domestic political attitudes, controversies over colonial-looted art, and public opinion surveys - to make claims about how narratives of past greatness influence contemporary world politics.

New Directions in Global Ethics Research (Ethics and World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre None

Nuclear Imaginaries in the Third Nuclear Age (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: 2 Bar, Brighton Centre How are ideas about nuclear weapons, their possessors, and possibilities for the future constructed, sustained, and policed in the context of the Third Nuclear Age? This roundtable brings together scholars working on critical nuclear weapons scholarship to interrogate the contemporary dynamics that speak to the legitimacy of nuclear weapons, influence policy choices, and shape nuclear cultures. As the global nuclear landscape becomes increasingly complex via modernisation efforts, technological advancements, and the erosion of arms control agreements, the panel seeks to examine this context through the lens of representation and imagined futures. We aim to explore what particular imaginaries do politically, and how understanding these regimes of thought might open up new avenues for advancing disarmament.

Pacifism and Militarism: A conversation at the intersection of critical sub-disciplines (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1b, Brighton Centre Research on militarism has been thriving over the past two decades, especially with the establishment of critical military studies as a vibrant sub-discipline in IR. Pacifism has been increasingly studied in recent years and is beginning to establish itself as a critical lens for better understanding IR. Both fields intersect with other disciplines, including gender studies, peace studies and political theory. But they have rarely been brought into direct conversation. This roundtable will discuss the main avenues where this dialogue is most likely to be fruitful. Potential topics for discussion might include: framings of peace and security in an increasingly militaristic geopolitics; myths and assumptions about the effectiveness of organised violence; the intersections of popular culture with military institutions and practices; the political economy of war and the arms trade; feminist perspectives on war, militarism and peace; sites of resistance and nonviolent alternatives to militarism; epistemological and ontological challenges and opportunities for critical research agendas; the potential interconnectedness of militarism and pacifism.

Peacebuilding in International Security (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre Strategic challenges of peacebuilding practice

Repoliticising Peace and Peacebuilding (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: The Pavilion, Maldron Hotel Repoliticising Peace and Peacebuilding

The Transatlantic Relationship and NATO: From Foundation to Trump (European Security Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel Papers in this panel explore a variety of aspects of Transatlantic security. From historical perspectives to contemporary examinations of the NATO alliance during Trump's second mandate, the authors in this panel will debate the past, present and future of the Transatlantic relationship for European security.

Variegated dynamics of commodification, oppression and contestation (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: The Exchange, Maldron Hotel IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

Why people join: interrogating public participation in protest and combat (British International Studies Association) Room: The Pier, Maldron Hotel N/A

AI Ethics and the Military (International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1c, Brighton Centre A panel of papers on military uses of AI, Autonomous Weapons, and AI Ethics

Actors, Transitions, Global Climate Governance (Environment and Climate Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 1a, Brighton Centre This panel asks where we stand in contemporary climate governance, which actors are in motion, and how we might understand and respond to this transitional moment.

Africa and the World (Africa and International Studies Working Group) Room: Syndicate 1, Brighton Centre The panel discussion includes consideration of migration control, the role of ECOWAS, 'Nehandaism' at the intersection of gender politics and religious beliefs in Zimbabwe, and the positio of Chinese translaters in Angola.

Conceptual History, Culture and World Order (Contemporary Research on International Political Theory Working Group) Room: Syndicate 2, Brighton Centre Conceptual History, Culture and World Order

Critical Dialogues on Militarism and Militarization: Non-hegemonic inquiries from the Margins (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Syndicate 3, Brighton Centre This panel articulates debates on militarism and militarization as (re)imagined through non-hegemonic theoretical perspectives and experiences. In recent decades, Critical Military Studies (CMS) has provided thoughtful alternative insights into these phenomena. However, much of this scholarship remains anchored in experiences and epistemologies situated in the Global North. Furthermore, by adopting a critical stance on the civilian-military divide, dominant CMS approaches often downplay the power exercised by military institutions diminishing the agency of military figures. The papers in this panel adopt perspectives “from the margins” to establish a critical dialogue with hegemonic CMS approaches. As a starting initiative, it gathers mainly Brazilian perspectives that situate the centrality of militarism and militarization in the constitution of social and political life, and therefore highlight recent phenomena such as far-right politics not as exceptional but deeply embedded in historical development. Specifically, they examine diverse sites of militarism (re)production, repositioning both the role of military institutions and the mechanisms through which military authority is constituted and (re)produced as central to critique. Drawing on a range of thematic, epistemic, and methodological frameworks, these contributions collectively ask how non-hegemonic perspectives can reconstruct and critically contest dominant understandings of militarism and militarization, re-centering the military as agents and ultimate perpetrators in these processes. The panel also aims to advance reflections on resistance and foster critical engagements that move beyond Northern-centered political imaginaries and the immanent martial logics that sustain them.

Cultural infrastructures of security (Security Policy and Practice Working Group) Room: Syndicate 4, Brighton Centre This panel examines how security is lived, performed, and reproduced in everyday life, and how these practices shape collective identities, boundaries of belonging, and notions of normality under conditions of uncertainty. Moving beyond institutional analyses of security, the papers investigate how cultural, discursive, and material practices, such as food culture or education, contribute to the social construction of security and insecurity. Drawing on cases, such as the construction of secrecy or societal resilience, the panel explores how security operates through cultural, material and other informal infrastructures. In doing so, the panel advances debates in security studies that foreground the cultural and epistemic dimensions of security, and analyses how ordinary practices sustain, challenge, or reconfigure security cultures in contemporary societies.

Decentring Western Paradigms and anticolonial contestations (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: The Marina, Maldron Hotel Decentering Western Paradigms and anticolonial contestations

Everyday Affects in Diplomacy and Global Politics (Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group) Room: Meeting room 14, Brighton Centre N/A

Everyday and Ontological (In)Security/ies (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Meeting room 3, Brighton Centre Everyday and Ontological (In)Security/ies

Financialisation of development cooperation (Global Politics and Development Working Group) Room: Meeting room 5, Brighton Centre This panel examines the ongoing trends of financialisation of development cooperation - ranging from UK, Canadian, and EU aid through Brazil's proposed Tropical Forest Forever Facility to philanthrocapitalism.

Foreign Interference and European Security (European Security Working Group) Room: Meeting room 6, Brighton Centre The problem of foreign interference is of the most discussed issues in European security, together with often interchangeable concepts like foreign influence, misinformation, or hybrid warfare. It has found its firm place in security strategies documents of EU, NATO, and their individual member states, and has been discussed – often critically – in academic literatures. This panel will address the problem of foreign interference in European security by outlining theoretically-grounded research into a range of different empirical contexts. The unifying theme of the papers is the conceptual elasticity of the notion of foreign interference: what is seen as falling under its definition and, therefore, requiring a security response, is typically a result of social and political processes. Therefore, this panel will ask how foreign interference is constructed (or not constructed) as a problem in EU official documents, in parliamentary debates of selected member states, or by Russian-speaking publics in the Baltic States. It will interrogate how administration changes influence the shifts in understanding foreign interference, e.g. in relation to EU’s understanding of US role under Donald Trump, or concerning the recent change of government in Czechia. Thereby, the problem will be evaluated through the lens of multiple theories, including small states in world politics, vernacular security, and leadership studies.

Gendering and everyday militarism (Critical Military Studies Working Group) Room: Meeting room 8, Brighton Centre A panel created by the CMS Working Group Convenors of existing paper abstracts.

Global Governance, Democracy and Legitimation Strategies (International Political Economy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 9, Brighton Centre IPEG Convened panel from individual paper submissions

Narratives, Metaphors, and Practices in the Nuclear Age: Rethinking Sovereignty, Security, and Culture (Global Nuclear Order Working Group) Room: Meeting room 10, Brighton Centre This panel examines how narratives, metaphors, and practices shape nuclear politics across historical and contemporary contexts. The papers explore early post-Hiroshima visions of world government, the contradictions of sovereignty, and Herman Kahn’s strategic metaphors for managing escalation. In addition, contributions analyse cultural representations of nuclear expertise in film, NATO’s narrative strategies for ontological security, and the historical emergence of nuclear secrecy. Together, these contributions illuminate the interplay between ideas, identity, and materiality in sustaining the global nuclear order, offering critical insights into the symbolic and discursive foundations of nuclear politics.

Peace and Peacebuilding Theory (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: Office 11, Brighton Centre Global governance, violence and peace

Political Ideologies After Unipolarity: Navigating Power and Ideas in a Multipolar World (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: Skyline, Brighton Centre The erosion of U.S.-led unipolarity has catalyzed a multipolar world, reshaping political ideologies and their geopolitical consequences. This panel examines how liberalism, populism, neo-socialism, and techno-nationalism evolve amid global challenges—climate change, tech rivalries, and economic fragmentation—challenging IR theories (realism, constructivism, critical geopolitics). Papers explore how Trump’s 2025 “America First” policies, China’s state capitalism, Europe’s green liberalism, and Global South neo-socialism redefine sovereignty, national interest, and global governance. Do these ideologies entrench zero-sum rivalries or foster cooperative frameworks? How do rising powers and non-state actors shape ideological landscapes? Discussing conflicts such as the U.S. CHIPS Act, China’s Standards 2035, and EU climate policies, the panel interrogates whether ideological pluralism can address existential risks or exacerbate global tensions. By bridging theory and practice, presenters offer critical insights into how ideologies influence state strategies, global value chains, and crisis responses, illuminating the future of international order in a post-unipolar era.

Politics and Parties in Foreign Policy (Foreign Policy Working Group) Room: Meeting room 15, Brighton Centre Five papers on politics and parties and their roles in foreign policy.

The Future of International Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding in an era of global geopolitical tensions: addressing challenges for Peace Studies and for multilateral peacebuilding approaches (Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group) Room: 2 bar, Brighton Centre Multilateral peacekeeping and peacebuilding is widely seen to be in crisis, in some sense. The increasing global geo-political tensions over the last 15 years have reduced the space for achieving sufficient agreement at the UN Security Council for effective UN peace mission mandates, or even amongst reasonably broad-based ‘coalitions of the willing’. For many critics of UN or other multilateral peacebuilding strategies and missions since the late 1990s, this is not particularly worrying. In practice such peace missions have had many limitations and faults - maybe it would be better to allow local stakeholders within conflict affected countries to take the lead on peacebuilding efforts without potentially clumsy or misconceived international efforts to provide support? This panel takes a different view: that the crisis in multilateral peacekeeping and peacebuilding doctrines and missions is of serious and urgent concern, raising questions of how to respond so that at least key elements can be salvaged and developed even in the context of substantial geo-political tensions. Although experience demonstrates that many of the determinants for successful peacebuilding are local; sustained and well-informed international support is normally a critical factor in enabling a sufficiently secure environment or adequate political space for local peacebuilders to mobilise and form the necessary coalitions for sustainable and effective peacebuilding. Peace Studies researchers have long emphasised the importance of multilevel peacebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, combining community, mid-level and national peacebuilding with transnational and international support. The papers in this panel explore the extent to which Peace Studies’ concepts and approaches to peacebuilding, as well as those of international peacebuilding practitioners, need to be revised or transformed in order to respond to the present crises in international peacebuilding policy and practice.

The Indo-Pacific in world politics (International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East & Asia Working Group) Room: Auditorium 2, Brighton Centre This panel explores several dimensions of Indo-Pacific politics, including China’s low-profile engagement in Myanmar, India’s maritime strategy, the political dynamics of small states such as the Maldives, and the securitisation of democracy in Singapore.

The bodies and scripts of empire: imperial orders and colonial administration (Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group) Room: Meeting room 16, Brighton Centre The bodies and scripts of empire: imperial orders and colonial administration

Transnational Harms and Lateral Universal Justice (Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group) Room: The Dome, Maldron Hotel Impunity is rapidly becoming a (dis)ordering principle of global politics, with accountability mechanisms around problems from arms exports, climate justice, and nuclear rearmament to transnational data sharing becoming increasingly ineffective. How can we think about notions of ‘justice’ and ‘accountability’ for transnational harms? Drawing on the work of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the panel aims to move beyond the universal/particular dichotomy by building on the idea of a ‘lateral universal’ justice. In various situated sites, it will conceive of ‘universalising’ as a dynamic spatio-temporal practice which remains continually open to the future.