International Studies and Emerging Technologies symposium: emerging technologies and global dis/re/order

Friday 23 Jan 2026, 09:00 → 13:30 Europe/London

Zoom

The International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group are hosting an online Symposium on "Emerging technologies and global dis/re/order", taking place on Friday 23 January 2026, from 9 am to 3 pm GMT.

This one-day event brings together emerging and leading scholars to explore how emerging technologies are reshaping international relations, presenting new security challenges, and requiring us to rethink global ‘order'. 

Programme

9.30 – 9.45 am: Benjamin Farrand (Newcastle University) Introduction to ISET Global Disorders

 

9.45 – 11.15 am: Digital disruption, risk, and security

1. Xinchuchu Gao (University of Lincoln) From Order to Disorder: China’s Role in Rewriting the Global Digital Landscape

2. Mel Meadowcroft (London School of Economics) Emerging technologies, emerging conflicts: Assessing the Use of Technologies to Support Early Warning in the European Union

3. Konstantinos Manakos (Northumbria University) Promising Security, Delivering Dependency: The Material Constraints of EU Semiconductor Collective Securitisation

4. Samah Rafiq (King’s College London) Digitising Risk: Expertise, Pre-emption, and the Technological Reordering of Security

 

11.25 – 11.50 am: Break

 

11.50 am – 1.20 pm: Theorising world (dis)order and emerging technologies

1. Mike Bourne (Queen’s University Belfast) Technicity and Metastability in International Relations: Modes of stability and disruption

2. Elisabeth Schweiger (University of Stirling) The Pinnacle of Modernity: New weapon technologies and colonial imaginaries

3. Jing Su (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) & Caice Jin (University of Exeter) Cyberspace and the Transformation of International Order: Four Scenarios of Sino-European Norm Contestation

4. Abhishank Mishra (Jawaharlal Nehru University) Reconceptualizing Catalytic Nuclear War in South Asia: An Exploration of Emerging Sub-conventional Pathways to Escalation

 

1.20 - 1.30 pm: Closing and next steps

Panel participants please register by Friday 16 January. For other attendees registration will close two hours before the event begins.