BISA 2027 virtual conference - Conflict and cooperation in a changing world
Welcome to the event management area for the virtual conference -#VirtualBISA2027. Here you can register for your place at the conference.
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MO11 Panel / Climate, Conflict and GovernanceSponsor: Environmental degradation, development and transformationConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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As climate change and biodiversity loss intensify, Earth system tipping points are increasingly recognised as urgent governance challenges. While Earth System Science (ESS) has played a central role in understanding planetary processes and biophysical thresholds, World System Science (WSS) is emerging as a field concerned with the societal, political, ethical, and governance dimensions of planetary transformations. Yet social science approaches to tipping points remain underdeveloped, particularly regarding questions of justice, multispecies relations, and governance. This paper develops a conceptual framework for integrating multispecies justice into WSS research on Earth system tipping points. Drawing on political ecology, multispecies international relations, sustainability transformations, and decolonial scholarship, it argues that Earth system tipping points should be understood not only as biophysical thresholds, but also as situated socio-ecological systems in which ecosystems, territories, and forms of life are shaped by power relations, inequality, and human–non-human entanglements. The paper proposes a research agenda organised around five dimensions: tipping point perceptions, multispecies injustices, transformative possibilities, interspecies diplomacies, and tipping point futures. It argues that a multispecies justice perspective can generate more inclusive and relational forms of governance capable of addressing ecological collapse whilst supporting equitable and sustainable futures across species.
Author: Joana Castro Pereira (Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto) -
Western Sahara remains one of the longest unresolved cases of colonial occupation and territorial militarization in the contemporary international system. Since Spain's withdrawal in 1975 and the subsequent Moroccan occupation, violence has been sustained not only through direct repression but also through military infrastructures that reorganize space, mobility, and conditions of life across the desert. This paper examines the Moroccan Berm and surrounding minefields as colonial infrastructures that materialize occupation through ongoing forms of ecological and multispecies violence. Drawing on political ecology, decolonial scholarship, and critical approaches to infrastructure, non-human agency, and more-than-human relations, the paper analyzes how the wall fragments territory, restricts human and non-human mobility, disrupts fragile desert ecologies, and undermines Saharawi pastoral and nomadic lifeworlds. Central to this analysis is the recognition that non-human actors — including animals, plants, soils, winds, and water — are not passive recipients of colonial violence but active participants in the (re)configuration of territorial control. Based on academic literature, humanitarian and NGO reports, UN documentation, environmental studies, and qualitative interviews, the analysis argues that the Berm operates not merely as a military barrier but as a durable infrastructure of colonial ordering inscribed into the landscape itself, one that enrolls non-human agencies in sustaining and reproducing structures of domination. Its effects extend across bodies, ecosystems, temporalities, and practices of inhabiting the desert, generating forms of slow violence that disrupt not only mobility and ecological relations, but also the intergenerational transmission of Saharawi pastoral and nomadic knowledge. By approaching the Western Sahara conflict through the lens of colonial infrastructures, multispecies relations, and non-human agency, the paper seeks to reposition the conflict not simply as a geopolitical dispute, but as an ongoing process of territorial and ecological domination.
Authors: Simón Pardo de Donlebún Versaci , Joana Castro Pereira (University of Porto)* -
Since the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement and over 60 international organizations and governing bodies, the world has reached a critical juncture marked by polycrisis, including but not limited to ongoing climate change, environmental degradation, injustice, and multidimensional contestations across the globe. Meanwhile, China’s global environmental governance has gained traction amid the US’s abdication. China has mainstreamed its Chinese-style ‘Nature-based solutions’ (NbSs) globally since 2019. By contrast, international experts remain skeptical of China’s NBSs. The skepticism stems from the Chinese state's immense power to steer a renewable revolution that challenges the European/Western convention in unprecedented magnitude. This necessitates a proper reflection of China’s NbSs and the global politics looming around it. This article aims to reflect on China’s NbSs in light of this critique. For this reflection, the article introduces an eco-security-Daoist perspective, drawing on ecological security discourse and philosophical Daoism. The article argues that China’s NbSs must realize (1) climate action and strategies that transcend the binary of mitigation and adaptation, (2) bottom-up resistance against ‘greenwashing’, ‘virtue-signaling’, and ‘weaponization of climate change politics’, and (3) democratize state-directed governance.
Author: Joe Lin (University of Bristol) -
Climate change adaptation is key to global environmental governance. For questions like whether adaptation represents genuine resilience-building or merely a form of redemption for historical environmental injustices? , the answer lies in examining the enduring colonial legacies that have shaped developmental process historically. To understand climate adaptation policies, industrialised Global North has to be evaluated in their contribution towards accelerating climate crises. Perhaps this throws light on adaptation burdens on Global South in terms of just transition and climate justice. The central questions addressed are how do climate vulnerabilities and adaptation capacities of Global South are influenced by colonial legacies? and what is the contribution of indigenous knowledge systems to resilient and equitable adaptation strategies ? Is it an alternative to provide context specific solutions to climate risks? As a prominent player in Global environmental governance, the role of United Nations Environment Programme is elucidated related to its policies for promotion of adaptation, capacity-building and climate justice. Qualitative approach is employed along with policy analysis of post colonial societies. Finally, transformative adaptation requires both resilience building and a broader commitment to equity and ecological justice.
Author: Vijaya Chamundeswari Vemulapalli (Jawaharlal Nehru University) -
Governments increasingly adopting militarised strategies to address environmental degradation (Corredor-Garcia & López Vega, 2023), a phenomenon that has been referred to as “green militarisation” (Lunstrum, 2014). The existing literature benefited from extensive fieldwork in Asia (Barbora, 2017; Dwyer et al, 2015) and Africa (Massé and Lunstrum, 2016; Massé et al., 2017b; Witter and Satterfield, 2018). Notably, the context of the Amazon Basin has been largely ignored (Corredor- Garcia & López Vega, 2023). This analysis uses a case study design to explore the discursive production of green militarization in the case of Operation Mercury, undertaken by the Peruvian government in the region of La Pampa, where mining is strictly prohibited (Dethier et al, 2023). How did the Peruvian government justify adopting Operation Mercury to address environmental degradation produced by illegal gold mining? To respond to this question, this study employs discourse analysis as its primary research technique. Data was collected from public addresses by Peruvian government officials involved in Operation Mercury, covering its two-year period. The findings suggest that militarised interventions can be justified as tools not only to combat environmental degradation or associated crimes but also to reassert state authority, especially in regions where governance is weak.
Author: Gabriela Gómez Mantilla (PhD Student Justice, Law, Criminology and Security, American University)
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MO11 Panel / Conflict and Contestation in KashmirSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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The abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A from the Indian Constitution in August 2019 marked a decisive rupture in Kashmir's political landscape. The removal of the region's semi-autonomous status, accompanied by a communications blackout and ban on protests, changed the conditions under which civil society organisations could operate. This paper examines how the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a women-led organisation representing families of the forcibly disappeared in Kashmir since 1994, maintains its internal cohesion in this severely restricted environment.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 23 APDP members across urban and rural Kashmir, the paper argues that APDP's cohesion after 2019 rests on four interconnected parameters. These parameters are: a shared identity forged through collective suffering (museebatuk rishteh); the emotional companionship that sustained members when monthly public protests were banned; a system of mutual authentication and publicity that continues despite the organisation's deliberate policy of remaining unnoticed (nan chini neraan); and financial interdependence between the organisation and its working-class members. These parameters show how, in the face of intensified state surveillance and repression, a grassroots women's organisation transforms personal grief into a durable form of political endurance. They also offer broader lessons for civil society resilience under authoritarian conditions.Author: Rohi Jehan -
This paper will examine how rap has become a key site for negotiating Kashmiri identity under conditions of intensified state control after 2019. It focuses on how young Kashmiri artists use rap to construct voice, belonging and political subjectivity in a restricted public sphere.
Indian occupied Kashmir is one of the most heavily militarised zones in the world and has witnessed widespread human rights violations, including rapes, killings, torture, and enforced disappearances. In 2019, the Indian government revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which had granted the region semi-autonomous status, while placing the entire population under lockdown. Scholars link these changes to a shift towards settler-colonial practices, including legal land reorganisation that enables dispossession and opens the sale of land to non-Kashmiris for military and industrial purposes. Following the 2019 abrogation, the valley was placed under a digital siege marked by communication blockades, internet restrictions, censorship and heightened surveillance. In this context, the paper aims to bring attention to the voice of young Kashmiris, who are caught amidst dispossession, settler colonialism, surveillance and censorship.
Drawing on analysis of lyrics and visual performance from digital platforms, this paper will demonstrate how rappers articulate experiences of surveillance, dispossession and everyday violence. It situates these practices within global hip hop traditions of resistance, while engaging International Relations debates on power, voice and representation. The paper’s central claim is that Kashmiri rap is not only a form of protest but also a cultural practice through which artists make sense of their lives and assert agency under constraint. In doing so, it contributes to debates on culture and politics in conflict and settler colonial contexts.
Authors: Madiha Khan , Rohi Jehan* -
Radicalisation in contemporary conflict zones is no longer confined to physical spaces such as roads, habitations, or organisations; it has shifted to digital platforms. This research paper examines this shift, focusing on how encrypted messaging, social media, and pseudonymous online communities have restructured traditional radicalisation pathways. The objective of the study is to understand that increasing state control over physical spaces, such as surveillance, mobility restrictions, and Internet Shutdowns, does not stop the process of radicalisation; rather, it deepens and shifts to digital pathways that are harder to detect. This paper employs comparative qualitative analysis as its method, focusing on two or three conflict zones, with Jammu and Kashmir as a case study, comparatively evaluating the secondary sources, such as Think Tank reports and scholarly literature.
Key findings show that there is a Paradoxical Relationship between physical restrictions and Digital Radicalisation: the more physical restrictions increase, the more radicalisation networks adapt through encrypted and surveillance-resistant channels. This research paper makes a theoretical contribution to security studies by reimagining radicalisation not as a fixed geographic process but as a dynamic and adaptive system.Author: Aradhana Devi (University of Allahabad) -
Intercultural dialogue is widely promoted as a means of fostering understanding and cooperation in culturally diverse societies. Yet existing scholarship is overwhelmingly derived from Western experiences and assumes conditions of institutional stability, safety, and positive intergroup contact. Consequently, little is known about whether meaningful dialogue is possible in fragile non-Western contexts characterised by intractable conflict, competing nationalisms, and deep historical mistrust.
This paper addresses this gap through an original study of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), one of the world's longest-running intractable conflicts. Drawing on qualitative research with diverse diaspora communities from both Indian-administered and Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir, it examines whether and under what conditions intercultural dialogue can occur across deeply divided communities. The paper develops and empirically tests a model of Intercultural Dialogue within the Transformative Framework (ICDwTF), which prioritises safety, reciprocity, and trust-building rather than immediate conflict resolution.
The findings demonstrate that dialogue can generate meaningful relational transformation even in highly polarised settings when it is ethically designed and contextually grounded. By positioning diaspora as an alternative dialogic space and centring experiences from the Global South, the paper advances a new theoretical and methodological framework for understanding dialogue in fragile contexts and shows how cooperation can be imagined and cultivated in deeply divided societies.
Author: Uroosa Mushtaq (Coventry University) -
The relationship between state’s conflict management strategies and the transformation of violence in intractable conflicts remains insufficiently theorised in conflict studies scholarship. While existing scholarship explains the rise and fall of armed violence and its various mobilisation strategies, they are unable to account for the transformation of armed violence to unarmed collective violence and civil resistance. This chapter fills this gap by arguing that the intensity of state repression and non-state actors' (militarised and civil) cohesion and fragmentation shapes the trajectory of their responses towards the state. By contrasting the histories of centre-periphery conflict in Pakistan's Balochistan and Indian-administered Kashmir, where armed insurgency exists with collective unarmed violence, this chapter provides the scope conditions under which armed insurgency dominates over unarmed violence and vice versa.
The chapter proceeds in three parts: First, it examines how state conflict management strategies reshape patterns of violence to identify similarities and differences between the two case studies. Second, it traces the emergence of unarmed collective violence and explains why they become popular during certain periods and not in others. Third, it shows how the coexistence of armed insurgency and unarmed collective violence has transformed the structure of conflict and the state’s response towards it.Authors: Rishabh Yadav (Jamia Millia Islamia)* , Divyangana Harit (JNU)
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MO11 Panel / From Maritime Security to Securing Outer SpaceSponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: Andrew Neal (University of Edinburgh)
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The maritime corridor connecting the South Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific has shifted from a residual category in middle-power strategic thinking to a primary axis of contestation and cooperation. Three structural changes drive this shift: reduced American willingness to underwrite global maritime security; instability across Middle Eastern trade routes that has revived the Cape Route as a primary trade corridor; and the consolidation of - licit and illicit - trans-Pacific flows linking South America to Asian markets. This paper asks how Japan, India, and Brazil can coordinate their maritime, defense-industrial, and supply chain security policies across this two-ocean corridor. Drawing on the concept of domain complementarity, the paper identifies four sub-domains where trilateral cooperation is feasible: sea-lane governance and maritime domain awareness, defense-industrial collaboration, counter-narcotics and transnational organized crime, and the protection of energy and critical minerals supply chains. South Africa, Australia, and the African littoral states figure as nodes on this corridor, while China's economic and maritime presence is treated as a structural condition shaping cooperation rather than a target of containment. The paper closes with policy proposals for advancing trilateral maritime cooperation.
Author: Daniel Rio Tinto (Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV)) -
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the question of Russia’s power and its challenge to international order and European security has come to the fore with renewed potency. However, in that time little attention has been paid to Russia’s position as a space power in the changing international environment. Given the new ‘space race’ in the 21st century and the salience of space both for Russian policy makers and in Russia’s popular culture and imagination, making sense of Russia’s current space policy is critical to fully understanding its great power ambitions. How Russia navigates contemporary matters and issues regarding outer space will shape, to a greater or lesser degree, the new space race in the future, and will have an impact on global space governance and on whether space will be a realm of rivalry or cooperation. By adopting a social constructivist approach, the paper will look at the ideas and meanings around Russia’s and other states’ roles in space affairs as seen by Russian elites, and at how the latter’s perceptions create a context for certain foreign policy behaviours regarding space and not others (cooperation, competition, international law-making, participation in global governance structures).
Author: Yulia Kiseleva (New Economic School) -
In 1976, eight equatorial states issued the ‘Bogotá Declaration’, arguing that the allocation of orbital slots and spectrum through the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) filling regime is advantageous to spacefaring powers, and encloses the supposedly ‘province of all mankind’ under the rhetoric of openness. The declaration’s claim was dismissed as an attempt at national appropriation of a common asset of mankind. Fast forward to half-a-century, low-orbital mega constellations such as Starlink, OneWeb, and Kupier are occupying the orbital shells and spectrum at an unprecedented pace. This occupation by constellations reproduces the possession of orbital space that the Bogotá Declaration was protesting. The paper asks why the logic of occupation was deemed illegitimate when peripheral states made the claim, and legitimate when exercised by the metropolitan powers.
Theoretically, the study is grounded in the theories of indirect-rule and coloniality of governance, arguing that the orbital law administers space as a frontier: a common province for all but whose legal architecture leads to de facto occupation by space-faring powers whilst rendering the subaltern claims inadmissible. The paper bridges an episode from the New International Economic Order era with the contemporary scramble for orbital slots, bringing theories of frontier and indirect rule, developed for territorial governance, into conversation with astropolitics that is characterized by security framing. The study adds to the scholarship by demonstrating how the ITU-Outer Space Treaty’s legal architecture becomes a mechanism of dispossession, rather than limitation by turning cooperation into conflict across North-South divide.
Author: Aryan Pratap Singh (South Asian University) -
Active debris removal (ADR) involves removing defunct satellites and large non-functional objects from orbit. Despite its widely recognised benefits, investment in ADR capabilities remains limited. This presents a puzzle: despite widespread rhetorical support for space sustainability, Japan is unique in actively deploying ADR capabilities without strong economic or regulatory drivers.
To explain this variation, the paper draws on 63 semi-structured interviews and document analysis to examine Japan's evolving ADR ecosystem, including JAXA's Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration programme, Astroscale's missions, regulatory initiatives, and public-private partnerships.
The findings suggest that Japanese actors have justified investment by linking debris remediation to broader objectives including technological leadership, industrial development, and responsible participation in the space domain. These overlapping rationales have sustained support despite uncertain economic incentives and limited regulatory requirements.
The paper makes two contributions to International Studies. First, it advances understanding of first-mover behaviour in global public goods provision, highlighting the political foundations of leadership where collective benefits are recognised but incentives remain weak. Second, it extends analyses of international cooperation beyond agreement and commitment to who bears the costs of implementation.Author: Sylwia Gorska (University of Lancashire) -
Understanding the philosophical significance of maritime strategy is crucial for a nation seeking to develop a distinct and contextually relevant approach to maritime power. Throughout history, influential military theorists such as Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Chanakya, Jomini, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Mahan have contributed to the formation of enduring strategic paradigms. Among these thinkers, Sunzi's Art of War, inscribed on thirteen bamboo strips approximately 2,500 years ago and comprising 6,071 characters, stands as a foundational text in Chinese military thought. Historically safeguarded by ancient Chinese kingdoms, this compendium of strategic wisdom, authored by Sunzi in the State of Qi (770–476 BC), continues to inform contemporary state-level strategic planning, including aspects of maritime affairs. Despite the prevailing influence of Western Mahanian concepts in global maritime discourse, China has increasingly sought to draw upon its own indigenous traditions, particularly the Art of War, in framing its maritime strategy. This paper explores the applicability of Sunzi's principles to China's contemporary maritime strategy in the Indo-Pacific region. Particular attention is given to how ancient strategic thought informs contemporary patterns of cooperation and contestation through instruments such as maritime militias, strategic port development, maritime presence operations, artificial island construction, and legal warfare (lawfare). The research addresses a significant issue: the necessity of understanding how non-Western strategic philosophies influence maritime behaviour and strategic interactions within the contemporary geopolitical environment. Employing both descriptive and analytical methodologies, this study utilises secondary sources encompassing historical texts, books, journals, and policy documents. Preliminary findings point to a distinctly Chinese model of maritime strategy rooted in classical philosophy and adapted to modern objectives. The study argues that this strategic approach has important implications for regional cooperation, maritime governance, connectivity, and strategic competition among states of the Global North and South across the Indo-Pacific. The ongoing research will further assess its practical implications and its impact on the evolving maritime order of the Indo-Pacific.
Author: Chaminda Roshan Kulatunga (University of Peradeniya)
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MO11 Panel / How is technology shaping global politics? Past, present, and possible futuresSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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South Asia is a distinctive geostrategic environment characterized by a perilous geography, intractability of the longstanding rivalry, a fraught border, short launch-to-impact times, and three geographically contiguous nuclear weapon states (NWS) persistently engaged in testing each other’s resolve to confirm whether escalation is both ‘controllable and calculable’. The dynamics of interaction in South Asia, particularly between India and Pakistan, has been explained theoretically through the ‘stability-instability paradox’. With the sharpening of rivalries in the broader pursuit of escalation dominance, both India and Pakistan have continually sought new advantages and technological breakthroughs to improve their position, and to the detriment of strategic stability. Militaries in South Asia foresee the potential deployment of lethal autonomous weapon systems in anti-access or area denial operations deep within the adversary’s territory, and Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD) operations across the Kashmir border. Fully Autonomous weapon systems, based on their capability to autonomously track, select, and engage targets at superhuman speed, with an opaque human-machine interface, will have transformative effects on stability in South Asia. The central research question explored in the paper was whether autonomous weapons pose a challenge to Stability in South Asia.
Author: Abhishank Mishra (SRM University) -
Contemporary space exploration is increasingly justified through appeals to humanity’s collective future. Governments, international organisations, and commercial actors present lunar settlement, planetary expansion, and the pursuit of a multi-planetary future as projects undertaken on behalf of humanity as a whole. These narratives frame space exploration as a shared endeavour capable of transcending political divisions and advancing collective human interests. Yet such universal claims coexist with profound inequalities in participation, representation, and decision-making within the global space sector. This paper seeks to examine how appeals to “humanity” function in contemporary space exploration and asks who has the authority to define humanity’s future beyond Earth. Drawing on critical and decolonial approaches to international relations, it analyses how dominant visions of the future are shaped by specific political, economic, and epistemic assumptions yet presented as universal aspirations. The paper argues that contemporary conflicts surrounding space governance are not only disputes over resources, institutions, or geopolitical influence, but also struggles over whose visions of the future become authoritative. By foregrounding the politics of futurity in the second space age, the paper contributes to broader debates on conflict, cooperation, and inequality in an era of rapid technological change and contested global futures.
Author: Bhargavi PBA (University of Delhi) -
This study examines how the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into governance systems is transforming the cognitive and institutional dimensions of political leadership. Drawing on theories of political psychology and organizational decision-making, it introduces the concept of technologically mediated leadership—a framework for understanding how algorithmic decision-support systems reshape the boundaries between human judgment and machine computation. Combining leadership trait analysis (LTA), computational text analytics, and comparative case studies of the United States, China, and Russia, the study investigates how leaders’ cognitive traits influence their engagement with AI tools in foreign policy, national security, and crisis management. Empirical analysis traces how AI adoption modifies decision speed, information processing, and accountability structures within both democratic and authoritarian systems. The findings suggest that AI-driven governance reconfigures not only the informational environments of leaders but also the psychological and ethical foundations of authority itself. By integrating behavioral analysis with computational methods, this article advances a novel framework for analyzing leadership and legitimacy in the algorithmic age of global governance.
Author: Abbas Mammadov (Washington State University) -
Abstract:
The accelerating diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across various domains of strategic significance such as military, economic and information, has introduced a structural tension at the core of great power politics. The states, here, simultaneously compete to establish AI dominance while recognizing the systemic risks that unregulated AI development poses to collective stability in the international arena. This paper examines the condition wherein the same AI capabilities that incentivize arms race and great power rivalry also generate the shared vulnerabilities that make cooperation among the states, both necessary and politically viable.
Drawing on Keohane and Nye's complex interdependence framework alongside Baldwin's relational conception of power, this paper argues that AI does not merely replicate the Cold War deterrence logic. Instead, it produces a novel strategic environment characterized by challenges of opacity, speed and domain-diffuseness that raise the costs of conflict while simultaneously complicating the nature of confidence building measures (CBMs) essential for cooperative regimes. The paper applies this framework comparatively across the United States, China, the European Union and other major AI powers, demonstrating that AI is simultaneously concentrating frontier capabilities among a narrow cluster of actors while enabling selective asymmetric leverage for the some actors pursuing strategic autonomy. The paper then concludes by assessing whether meaningful AI governance agreements are achievable among the US, China, and EU and under what conditions the alignment choices of other actors become structurally determinative in shaping the power trajectory of these actors.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Arms Race, Great Power Rivalry, Complex Interdependence, Domain-Diffuseness, Relational Power, Strategic Autonomy
Authors: Utkarsha Mahajan (Symbiosis International University) , Shafat Yousuf (Symbiosis International (Deemed University))*
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MO11 Panel / Shifting World Orders: Collapse, Contestation and EmergenceSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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The post-World War II liberal international order has been partially premised (albeit oftentimes falling short) on the racial equality of all states within the international system, self-determination, and norms to mitigate international anarchy. However, the emerging global illiberal international order, led by Trump, Bolsonaro, Farage, Milei, Orban, and others represents a return to a pre-World War II international order that seeks to reinscribe race and racialization back in as an organizing principle of international order. This is because race and racialization are useful for legitimizing and advancing their ontological view of world politics, and because it helps invigorate other processes that strengthen illiberal, far-right actors and their actions, while weakening the liberal international order. In particular, this article focuses on how illiberal actors seek to replace norms of racial equality by reintroducing racial hierarchy within the international system, and working to reanimate White Supremacy and Imperialism, as detailed through a discussion of Trump’s foreign policy actions during 2025-2026. Building from critical scholars working on race and international relations, this article theorizes race and racialization, on the one hand, and the emerging illiberal international order, on the other hand, focusing on their symbiotic relationship that seeks to upend the liberal international order – not with novel ways of doing politics – but by returning to past norms and legitimizing methods.
Author: José Pérez (Texas A and M, University-San Antonio) -
This paper examines how Donald Trump’s second presidential term has reshaped patterns of conflict and cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and wider transformations in the international order. Focusing on developments since January 2025, the paper analyzes shifts in U.S. security commitments, NATO relations, military assistance, and diplomatic engagement with both EU and non-EU states in the region.
The study argues that Trump’s renewed emphasis on transactional alliance politics and selective security commitments has intensified strategic uncertainty across CEE, producing divergent regional responses. While some states have sought deeper bilateral ties with Washington and increased defense cooperation, others have accelerated efforts toward European strategic autonomy or adopted more ambiguous positions toward Russia.
Using policy analysis, official statements, and regional political discourse, the paper explores how changing U.S. priorities are reshaping transatlantic relations and the balance between conflict management and regional cooperation. More broadly, the paper contributes to debates on alliance credibility, geopolitical fragmentation, and the future of the Euro-Atlantic security order in a rapidly changing world.
Author: Ioana Dorhoi (Michigan State University) -
Over the past three decades, the liberal international order has been anchored in norms of democracy, human rights, international law, and multilateral governance. However, this order is increasingly contested, as persistent conflicts, rising autocratisation, and global humanitarian crises expose tensions within its institutional and normative foundations. This paper examines how the authority and legitimacy of international legal frameworks and norms are being renegotiated in world politics.
Moving beyond narratives of external backlash, the paper argues that the current legitimacy crisis is also rooted in internal contradictions within the liberal order, including its technocratic expansion and Western-centric design. It explores how state and non-state actors –particularly populist and illiberal regimes– strategically appropriate or disregard liberal discourses to legitimise exclusionary or authoritarian policies. In doing so, it highlights the perpetual and dynamic nature of the politics of international law and norms, and the shifting, evolving meanings of compliance, accountability, and legitimacy.
By reconceptualising norm contestation as a driver of transformation rather than merely a sign of decline, this paper contributes to debates in international relations, international law, and global governance. It offers a nuanced framework for understanding the resilience, adaptation, and possible futures of the liberal international order, with implications for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners engaged in transnational governance.
Author: Emilio Rodriguez-Triocci (EUI) -
As debates over the liberal global order’s crisis intensify, scholarly attention has shifted to whether a coherent alternative is emerging. Much of the literature assumes that the erosion of Western dominance requires not only a ‘push’ away from the existing order but also a corresponding ‘pull’ toward a viable counter-order (e.g. Allan, Vučetić, and Hopf 2020). This paper challenges that assumption by examining how geopolitical orientations are produced in liminal contexts, where the ‘East’ appears less as a coherent counter-bloc than as a fragmented assemblage or simply ‘not-the-West.’ We propose that repulsion functions as an independent ordering mechanism: actors orient geopolitically not toward a coherent alternative, but away from the existing order, producing alignments without shared normative or institutional commitments. Focusing on Serbia as a paradigmatic case, the paper asks whether elites and publics are envisioning a new international order or a durable non-order sustained by repulsion. Combining survey and focus-group data with critical discourse analysis, the paper argues that anti-Western sentiment drives alignment even where alternative visions remain vague and underdeveloped. It further probes the mechanism’s scope through multilevel analysis of Eurobarometer data, suggesting that repulsion may function as a broader ordering principle during prolonged interregnum.
Authors: Milan Varda (University of Belgrade) , Tijana Rečević (University of Belgrade)*
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From their origins in challenging ongoing colonialism, both Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies have developed important bodies of understanding regarding our colonial present, and the possibilities for decolonization. Despite early interventions, both have trended towards centring individual cases, and operating within the context of existing states and the state system. Both challenges potentially limit the fields’ possible contributions.
To move away from these limitations, this roundtable brings together participants to propose a 'middle range' transnational approach. We argue transnationalism offers great possibility for the fields to view the interactions and exchanges that take place outside of currently-dominant contexts. By looking across cases, sites, and settler states, we can better understand the intertwined phenomena of settler colonialism and Indigenous organizing and governance, including the enduring importance of Indigenous nations that have been historically linked to each other and other polities and social movements. Participants’ interventions will highlight how a transnational perspective will help recover and study these links.
Sponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsChair: Liam Midzain-Gobin (Brock University)Participants: Emily Grafton (University of Regina) , Sarah Maddison (University of Melbourne) , Matt Wildcat (University of Alberta) , Adam J. Barker (Brock University) , David Stirrup (University of York) , David Macdonald (University of Guelph) -
10:15
Coffee and Networking Session
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MO11 Panel / Between Regional Governance and Regionalised SovereigntySponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
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The intensifying United States (US)-China great power rivalry often forces small states into opposing dyads, with observers hypothesizing that the small Southeast Asian states would follow a similar pattern of fragmentation. What these debates often overlook, however, is the institutional design of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which allows these states to wield collective power to withstand shifting economic and political axes. In fact, a closer look at the bloc reveals how the ‘ASEAN Way’ provides practices, norms, and mechanisms that allow for flexibility and strategic autonomy, rather than simply being price takers in international politics. Through examining discourses, coordinated trade and foreign policy, and interviews with policymakers and civil society actors, we argue that the ASEAN plays an outsized role in shaping international relations. This paper also furthers the role of actors from the margins in the Global South in shaping international norms, aside from the role-model institutionalism, such as the European Union. Specifically, large states also seek the legitimacy of smaller states to affirm their position on the global hierarchy. Consequently, the great powers are also compelled to consider and abide by the bloc's normative preferences.
Authors: Hong Nhung Tang (National Taiwan Normal University) , Le Dang Khoa Nguyen (Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore) -
Contemporary transformations in global governance increasingly challenge state-centric and Westphalian understandings of sovereignty. This paper examines how the ECOWAS intervention in conflict management reflects the emergence of regionally mediated forms of political authority within postcolonial Africa. While existing scholarship often frames intervention through liberal peacebuilding or humanitarian governance, this paper argues that ECOWAS represents a distinct form of postcolonial regional governance grounded in democratic legitimacy and multilateral coordination, facilitating regional political consensus.
Drawing on postcolonial theory and critical constructivism, the paper conceptualises this development as “regionalised sovereignty”: a governance formation in which sovereign legitimacy is negotiated through layered regional and international structures rather than territorial autonomy alone. The paper explores how legitimacy is constructed between competing actors including ECOWAS and wider international institutions. The paper argues that ECOWAS demonstrates the emergence of decentralised forms of multilateral governance in which regional organisations increasingly exercise forms of authority traditionally associated with universal global institutions. In doing so, the paper contributes to wider debates surrounding conflict, cooperation, and institutional transformation by highlighting how postcolonial regionalism is reshaping contemporary global political order.Author: Hope Johnson (Cardiff University) -
Since the 1980s, the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) have been identified as key elements of African regional integration and have been critical parts of the African Union (AU)'s work. The Abuja Treaty and the AU Constitutive Act mandate the relationship. It is guided by the 2008 Protocol on Relations between the RECs and the AU and the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Cooperation in the Area of Peace and Security between the AU and RECs. Moreover, Article 33 of the Protocol makes clear that it shall enter into Force when signed by the Chairperson of the AU Commission and by the Chief Executives of at least three RECs, as it did on 10 November 2021, and accordingly, no ratification is required. In contrast, the MoU makes clear that peace, security, and integration matters should be handled by the lowest, most local competent authority—primarily RECs—before being escalated to the continental level. How does the partnership work in a contested political environment? Drawing on case studies across the African continent, the paper argues that while the intervention by the AU and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on the surface appears to be timely and designed to eradicate any forms of democratic backsliding, interventions across Africa are marked by challenges which stem from the principle of subsidiarity remaining vaguely defined during the intervention processes and between the two actors. Despite the matter of subsidiarity being clear in the principles, coordination between the AU and ECOWAS remained uneven, vague, at times duplicative, and national ownership insufficiently embedded in the reform process.
Author: Andrew Tchie (NUPI) -
This paper examines why the New International Economic Order (NIEO) has not been explicitly revived during the recent sequence of Global South-led G20 presidencies, despite the persistence of many of the structural conditions that originally animated it. Focusing on the presidencies of Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa, the paper asks whether the NIEO has disappeared from contemporary global economic governance or whether its core concerns have been translated into a more pragmatic and institutionally acceptable language. It argues that these presidencies have not abandoned the NIEO agenda, but have reframed it through the vocabulary of debt sustainability, development finance, food and energy security, climate justice, digital inclusion, supply-chain resilience and multilateral reform. The G20, unlike the UN General Assembly of the 1970s, does not provide a platform for a comprehensive redistributive programme. Yet it has become a site where Global South states seek incremental reform from within existing institutions. The paper therefore contributes to debates on North–South relations, international political economy and global governance by showing how the NIEO survives less as a formal programme than as a fragmented reformist impulse within contemporary multilateralism.
Author: Mohanasakthivel J (Manohar Parrikar Institute For Defence Studies and Analyses) -
The escalating humanitarian crisis in Myanmar has posed significant threats to the human security of Myanmar civilians and broader regional security, thereby calling for ASEAN Centrality in addressing the crisis. The paper analyses the feasibility and efficacy of ASEAN’s Fight-Point Consensus (5PC) plan for Myanmar, and proposes pathways for overcoming the present impasse through the assertion of ASEAN Centrality. Employing a liberal institutionalist–English School framework and a comparative case study design, this paper analyses the responses of ASEAN and other Global South regional organisations like AU and ECOWAS to military coups within their respective regions. By situating these responses within Southeast Asian and African international societies and their associated primary institutions, the paper synthesises lessons and best practices regarding regional crisis management. Through this comparison, the paper concludes that the ongoing gridlock regarding the implementation of 5PC is set to continue without any adjustments to the current approach, strictly based on ASEAN Way, and suggests that moderate adjustments to the ASEAN decision-making procedures, the institutionalisation and expanded mandate of the ASEAN special envoy, and the intensification of ASEAN-led proactive engagements with ASEAN’s key dialogue partners like China and Australia, offer the means to break the impasse and assert ASEAN Centrality.
Author: Myat Sandar Zaw (The Organisation for Threat Assessment and Peacebuilding)
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MO11 Panel / Developments in contemporary security politicsSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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The US-Israel War on Iran has been one of the most decisive conflicts when it comes to understanding the changing world order. The war was fought for people’s minds on social media like X, YouTube and Facebook. As the global media has played an important role in global agenda-setting and legitimising or delegitimising different international norms and practices, this paper studies prominent content on YouTube on the Iran War. It attempts to understand how this politics reflects itself in the discourse in the global media, so that the battle for global positioning is also fought on the media platforms. As YouTube has become an important source of news globally, and the news is consumed and shared widely through videos, shorts and reels, thereby influencing public opinion across borders, it is pertinent to analyse how these dynamics played out during this war. The popular and relevant content on YouTube has been selected with the help of Google Search from February 28, 2026, when the war broke out to the end of May 2026. The paper tries to understand how knowledge construction takes place through the dissemination of information, misinformation and ideas on prominent issues of global politics.
Author: Ritambhara Malaviya (University of Allahabad) -
Copenhagen Securitization theory traditionally focuses on the ‘speech act’. This has been criticized for ignoring the daily administrative and bureaucratic processes that occur in the real world. This paper seeks to fill this gap by using the CLASE Model to measure the Effectiveness of securitization. By combining securitization theory and public policy analysis tools, this paper argues that framing an issue as a security threat (securitization) will not be effective just because the actor declares it as a threat. It only becomes effective when the administrative tools are activated after the framing. To measure an effective securitization, this paper develops the CLASE model: Competence (the command authority of the actor), Legalization (creation of new policies/laws), Allocation (extraordinary budget or budget shift to accommodate the issue), Structure (reorganization of institutional structure), and Externalization (change in foreign policy orientation). This model maps different degrees of securitization effectiveness, ranging from rhetoric to low, medium, and highly effective securitization, based on how many elements are activated during the process. This model provides a critical bridge between the emergency measurement framework and Riskification's long-term planning, offering a new pathway to examine the bureaucratic transformation resulting from the securitizing frame.
Author: Murni Kemala Dewi (Newcastle University) -
Recent debates on the European Union’s geopolitical turn have largely focused on strategic discourse, while paying less attention to how this shift is embedded in concrete external policy instruments. This study examines EU foreign aid to its neighbourhood as a key site where geopoliticisation can be traced. It argues that EU aid has increasingly been reoriented through a security-connectivity nexus: on the one hand, aid is mobilised to strengthen neighbouring states’ capacity to manage security risks, institutional fragilities, border pressures, and hybrid threats; on the other, it is used to reshape energy, infrastructure, transport, digital, and economic linkages in strategically significant ways. The study adopts a mixed-methods design, combining qualitative analysis of European Neighbourhood Policy documents, progress reports, and related EU policy texts with quantitative examination of aid allocation data. The findings point to a gradual reorientation of EU neighbourhood aid, whereby security and connectivity concerns have become increasingly prominent alongside established developmental objectives. While this reorientation became visible before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the post-2022 context has accelerated and legitimised the use of aid as an instrument of strategic positioning in the EU’s neighbourhood.
Author: Ahmet Bilal Tüzgen (Turkish National Defence University)
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MO11 Panel / Nations and Nationalism in a Changing WorldSponsor: Connections and disconnections in borders, mobility and technologyConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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This paper investigates how state-backed institutions facilitate renewed rounds of investment, i.e., recoupling, in industries undergoing technological transformation. While the global production networks (GPNs) literature has largely focused on processes that lead to the creation of strategic coupling, and more recently on cases of decoupling amidst geopolitical upheaval, recoupling processes, and the leading role played by state-backed institutions in them, remain underexplored. By empirically examining the least-likely country case of the UK, the paper traces the evolution of state-backed institutional support for the UK automotive industry, and then analyses the cases of Nissan Motor Manufacturing UK and Jaguar Land Rover to identify the mechanisms and roles performed by state-backed institutions within upgrading alliances to secure repeat investment as part of the automotive sector’s electrification transition. The paper argues that innovation-supporting state-backed institutions, increasingly driven by geoeconomic competition, act as correctors of network failures to enhance the competitiveness of the investment sites that lead firms are considering as part of technological transformation.
Author: Alen Toplisek (University of Derby) -
The 2024 Tenet Media indictment exposed a Russian state-backed operation financing prominent American political podcasters, yet the content itself was produced by authentic domestic voices expressing genuinely held views. This paper argues that such operations render attribution-based defences obsolete, and proposes an alternative: attribution-agnostic “rhetorical fingerprinting.” Drawing on a corpus of 6,437 political podcast episodes spanning the 2024 U.S. presidential cycle, including 405 archived Tenet Media transcripts, I apply a six-dimensional computational framework measuring causal reasoning, emotional sequencing, persuasive techniques, thematic saturation, sentiment, and blame attribution. Findings show Tenet’s rhetorical profile aligned at 94–96% with domestic right-wing podcasts; classification models performed no better than chance in distinguishing them. Strikingly, the Russian-funded outlet mentioned Russia less than any domestic cluster, strategic minimisation that erased visible signs of sponsorship. Foreign influence, I argue, now operates as environmental manipulation: amplifying and stabilising existing domestic discourse rather than inserting foreign narratives. Democratic resilience therefore requires monitoring rhetorical environments ( intensity, saturation, convergence) rather than hunting foreign actors. The paper concludes by outlining a scalable monitoring architecture and its safeguards against censorship, reframing influence operations as a problem of ecosystem health.
Author: Caroline Swartz (UCL) -
References to Europe's "Christian roots" have played a significant role in the construction of European identity, particularly in debates on continental integration and the definition of Europe's cultural boundaries. In recent years, however, this notion appears to have evolved from a distinctive feature of Europe into a broader narrative of a purported "Christian civilization." This concept no longer refers to a shared historical trajectory or to a characterization of the West. Rather, it functions as a political instrumentalization of an alleged Christian cultural heritage, invoked by actors both outside Europe, as in the case of Christian nationalism within segments of the American right, and even outside the West, as in the case of Russia, where Christianity is sometimes mobilized as a cultural justification for opposition to elements of liberal politics.
This paper analyzes this development as a process of redefining collective identities that transcends traditional geographical and confessional boundaries. It argues that references to Christianity increasingly serve as identity markers that distinguish a culturally homogeneous "us" from a plurality of "others" perceived as threats to social, moral, and political order. The paper suggests that this globalized Christian-civilizational narrative may provide a symbolic foundation for a new form of political polarization centered on values, identities, and competing visions of contemporary society.Author: Alessandro Jesi (Università degli Studi di Torino) -
The paper analyzes counter-disinformation policies in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as a distinctive case of democratic resilience amid rising polarization, hybrid threats, and information pressure. The primary research question this study investigates is how the Baltic States operationalize their counter-disinformation mechanisms in practice. The starting point is the hypothesis that, driven by their unique security environment and a proactive public policy approach, these states have developed a multidimensional model aligned with the 'whole-of-society' approach. This model integrates legal regulations, strategic communication, media literacy education, fact-checking development, collaboration with media and civil society organizations, as well as international coordination.
Methodologically, the study draws on the analysis of strategic documents, expert reports, and comparative literature. A core element of the research design consists of semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with key stakeholders - including representatives of state institutions, non-governmental organizations, the media, and the research community - across all three countries. These interviews provide crucial empirical insights for assessing the practical effectiveness and implementation of the examined policies. The paper argues that while Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have developed diverse instruments for responding to disinformation, their common denominator is the conceptualization of information resilience as a fundamental pillar of democratic security. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the effectiveness of these solutions depends not only on regulatory frameworks but also on robust coordination among stakeholders and societal trust in state actions.
Author: Julia Dobrowolska (University of Warsaw)
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MO11 Panel / Prospects and Pitfalls for Post-Conflict SocietiesSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London)
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Scholars have become increasingly interested in the phenomenon of illiberal state-building. These processes are often cast as distinct from, and in fundamental tension with, liberal state-building endeavours. Yet existing accounts of democratization tend to foreground the failure of liberal projects without attending to the prior illiberal state-building efforts they encountered, or asking why those efforts succeeded or failed in the first place. This article addresses that gap through a paired, structured comparison of Cambodia and East Timor as critical cases. Both cases feature extensive external illiberal state-building efforts, and eventually large-scale international involvement in support of liberal state-building. Together, they show that liberal and illiberal state-building endeavours are deeply intertwined at both the international and domestic levels, and that the outcomes of illiberal state-building can dramatically impact the prospects for democracy. In Cambodia, the relative success of illiberal state-building allowed a reconstituted authoritarian regime to triumph despite massive UN investment (etc) and large-scale mass support for democracy. In East Timor, despite intensive military occupation and large-scale investment, Indonesian efforts not only failed but unified and consolidated resistance around an explicitly democratic alternative. Ultimately, it highlights both news factors to consider when assessing all state-building efforts and insights into the success and failure of illiberal and liberal state-building.
Authors: Geoffrey Swenson (City, University of London) , Neil Loughlin (City St. George's, University of London) -
Post-conflict security arrangements often require ex-combatants to place their safety in the hands of the state institutions they once fought, yet the individual dimensions of this transition remain underexplored in the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) and security sector reform (SSR) literatures. This paper addresses that gap through a case study of Colombia's security architecture following the 2016 peace agreement, focusing on the National Protection Unit (UNP), the body responsible for evaluating risk and assigning protection measures to FARC-EP peace signatories. The UNP operates under an institutional design that formally codifies trust as a prerequisite for effective protection: Decree 299 of 2017 requires that personnel in its Special Subdirectorate hold the endorsement of Comunes, the political party that emerged from the FARC-EP. A decade after the agreement, this arrangement faces mounting pressure. Fragmentation within the signatory community, administrative reforms imposed without consultation, and the killing of over 400 former combatants have strained the legitimacy of the protection system from within.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with UNP personnel and peace signatories, this paper examines how this architecture of trust is lived, contested, and managed from the inside, centering on risk analysts designated by Comunes and peace signatories navigating the renegotiation of wartime cognitive frameworks in a post-conflict setting.Author: Gabriela Gómez Mantilla (PhD Student Justice, Law, Criminology and Security, American University) -
Over the last few decades, the liberal peace(building) paradigm has faced compound challenges. Interventions informed by liberal principles have been the subject of intense criticism, fuelling debates on whether its era has ended. Simultaneously, there has been growing literature that analyses the illiberal authoritarian peacebuilding strategies used by governments. Despite this, there is a gap in the literature focused on comparing these two strategies. This dissertation fills this gap by investigating the comparative effectiveness of liberal and illiberal peacebuilding models in achieving long-term stability, using the case studies of Rwanda and Burundi. Drawing on a mixed-methods research approach, this study assesses the political, economic and social dimensions of long-term stability by employing quantitative indicators and qualitative thematic analysis. Additionally, process tracing is used as a supplementary research method to uncover the causal mechanism between the respective peacebuilding strategies and stability outcomes.
The key findings indicate that Rwanda’s illiberal peacebuilding model outperforms Burundi’s liberal peacebuilding model in terms of political and economic stability. However, this comes at the cost of significant repression, human rights violations and limited civil freedoms. Conversely, Burundi’s liberal peacebuilding model fostered higher levels of social stability but ultimately faltered as a result of growing authoritarianism and political volatility. These findings suggest that though both liberal and illiberal models offer distinct advantages, neither reflect a sustainable pathway to long-term stability. Consequently, this study offers valuable insights for both the academic debate and practitioners.
Author: Hanan Banda (University of Bath) -
The origins of child soldiering in Burundi: Militarisation, Youth Politicisation and Ethnic Violence
This paper examines the historical roots of child militarisation in Burundi, challenging the prevailing scholarly focus on the civil war (1993 – 2005) as the primary context for understanding child soldiering in the country. Drawing on archival research, oral historical interviews, and secondary sources, the study traces patterns of child involvement in armed conflict across three key episodes of post-colonial ethno-political violence: the 1965 ethnic massacres and government repression, the 1972 Hutu rebellion and subsequent genocide, and the civil war. The article argues that child militarisation in Burundi is driven by deeply embedded cultures of militarism and ethnicism transmitted to children and youth over decades. The greater visibility of child soldiers during the civil war reflected a shift from episodic massacres to protracted warfare rather than a novel phenomenon. The study further demonstrates that militarisation exists along a continuum, with resistance to child recruitment coexisting alongside its practice. By situating child soldiering within broader frameworks of politicisation, militarism, and labour, this research addresses a gap in the literature on child and youth militarisation in Burundi. The findings highlight the limitations of Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration programmes when fundamental societal, political, economic, and cultural factors remain unaddressed.
Authors: Nicolas Hajayandi (University of Burundi) , Pamela Nzabampema (University of Exeter) , Stacey Hynd (University of Exeter) -
Participatory and action-oriented research approaches are increasingly recognised as a means of producing knowledge in conflict settings. Less attention, however, has been paid to whether the research process itself can function as a conflict transformation intervention. This paper explores that question through Facilitative Listening Design (FLD), a community-led action research methodology implemented among Cambodian and Thai participants investigating online conflict between the two countries. During the research process, escalating tensions culminated in armed conflict, resulting in more than 100 deaths and the displacement of over half a million civilians across both countries. Drawing on longitudinal focus groups, interviews, participant observation, and reflective accounts, the paper examines the experiences of twenty Cambodian and Thai community researchers who engaged in a structured process of intergroup contact, collaborative fieldwork, collective analysis, and sustained reflection. The findings demonstrate that transformation emerged through multiple pathways, including shifts from suspicion to solidarity, greater critical awareness of competing narratives, deeper empathy through listening, and the humanisation of perceived adversaries. Importantly, these changes did not emerge through dialogue alone, but through participants jointly researching the conflict and engaging with community perspectives from both sides. The paper argues that action research can serve not only as a mode of knowledge production but also as a process of conflict transformation. In doing so, it contributes to emerging conversations between participatory and action-oriented research and peacebuilding by repositioning inquiry itself as a site of intervention.
Author: Raymond Hyma (University of Warwick / Monash University)
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MO11 Panel / Teaching and Pedagogy in a Changing WorldSponsor: Teaching and pedagogy in a changing world.Convener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Freelance and online education have rapidly expanded in recent years, accelerating the speed and scale at which specialised knowledge is produced, accessed and circulated globally. This paper examines the effects and dynamics of this proliferation in the now larger and growing market for intelligence education and intelligence analysis, where private vendors, freelance educators and informal learning groups and platforms increasingly compete with traditional academic and other institutional programmes. The paper battles with the boundaries, limits, opportunities and risks of the proliferation and commodification of epistemic knowledge in intelligence, and the transformative, as well as destabilising impacts to contemporary knowledge distribution of intelligence and security topics. It raises questions over the decentralisation of intelligence education and training, authority of knowledge and the validation of expertise in a field that so far developed under secular epistemic communities. The study future casts potential scenarios of collaboration and dissent amongst traditional and non-traditional educational providers and stakeholders in intelligence. Ultimately, it reflects on the evolving role of academic and teaching programmes in Intelligence Studies, considering how pedagogical and methodological practices are now called to adapt to the shifting epistemic cultures described in this paper.
Author: Angeliki Martinou (Brunel University of London) -
Amid the proliferation of technological innovations such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) that are changing how students learn and a global political arena characterized by upheaval, crisis, and conflict, there is increasing impetus to reconsider how we teach international politics. The mainstream of the field – especially in North America – remains dominated by positivist research and pedagogy, with its focus on value-free knowledge and the separation of the researcher from their object of study. Accordingly, many international politics courses seek to introduce students to various paradigms, themes, and topics from an ostensibly objective perspective. However, in the present era, where much of what has been taken for granted as settled knowledge in the field is constantly being challenged, and the stakes of international politics feel immense, if not life-or-death, this pedagogical approach is neither well equipped to explain the present moment nor best placed to face the future.
To speak to this, drawing on critical perspectives in IR, which emphasize the importance of context and positionality, I designed two simulation-based introductory global politics courses in my first year as an Assistant professor of Politics at Acadia University. In contrast to the types of simulations often used in the field of International Relations, where students are placed in positions of power (such as delegates in Model United Nations panels), students in these classes occupied roles with varying degrees of power, from leaders of postcolonial states negotiating with the IMF to forcefully displaced families crossing borders. Highlighting specific simulations that engendered animated discussions, the paper draws out the advantages of this pedagogical approach, contending that simulations can be effective in helping the next generation of global politics students grasp the weight of their research and scholarship, by placing them as participants in global politics, rather than positioning them as neutral observers.Author: Fikir Haile (Acadia University) -
Gamification is a recognised method for managing business personnel performance and motivation. In modern Eurasian countries, this practice is now gaining popularity in universities. Despite criticism from advocates of traditional methods of education, the scale and variety of gamification methods and means introduced are slowly being incorporated into the curriculum, even as obligatory teaching practices.
This paper presents the set of results of the experiment of introducing gamification practices to teaching International Politics and International Relations in Armenia, Tajikistan and Russia in 2018 - 2025. Gamification was applied as an additional method of teaching and evaluating (including mid-semester tests and course exams at the end of it) to both graduate and undergraduate students, studying such subjects as History of International Relations (2d year of BA studies), International Security (3d year of BA studies) and Peace Research (2d year of MA studies).
In this paper, I introduce two blocs of methods and practices that were applied. First, I discuss how the semester exam in each of the three cases was divided into 3 stages with a choice for students to take a full- or partial exam using a “take-home exam” method that is still not widely recognised in Armenia, Tajikistan and Russia, and the results of this experiment. Second, the paper discusses the application of a role-play with an open-ended decision and some game theory practice that were applied for graduate students. Also, I highlight the major problems with student motivation, group performance successes and failures, and some psychological-cultural issues that were revealed as obstacles or accelerators during this study experiment across three universities in these countries.Author: Natalia Piskunova (Moscow State University)
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MO11 Panel / The Role of Leadership in GeopoliticsSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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This article examines how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified war for international audiences following Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack. Drawing on a corpus of 217 English-language speeches and statements from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office (2023–2024), it reconceptualises hypernationalism through Lacanian theory and Critical Fantasy Studies. The analysis shows that Netanyahu’s discourse was structured around existential assumptions, aspirations of national fullness, enemies as existential threats, and heroic guarantors. The findings suggest that war was framed not as a contingent response but as a symbolic necessity that organised desire, naturalised antagonism, and legitimised violence.
Authors: Claudio Coloma (Universidad de las Americas) , Daniel F. Morales Vásquez (Universidad Andres Bello)* -
This paper would like to focus upon proto-fascism as part of US foreign policy under the Second Trump administration, as it is not a fully-fledged fascist regime yet. Various academic works have analyzed US foreign policy by locating “America first” in transactionalism, great power politics, hard and soft power, or the decline of the Liberal International Order. These analyses tend to focus on the Trump administration’s self-projection of strength in either repositioning the US globally or in dealing with other countries, even if the policies are not successful. Instead, this paper emphasizes the US self-projection of weakness, or victimhood, which is embedded in fascism. Fascism heralds victimhood by which the progress of other groups is regarded as degrading to their own group, weakening the natural order, with therefore a need to rejuvenate to regain their strength and position. Some scholarship on (authoritarian) populism and fascism also analyze the humiliation by others. However, this paper would like to make the separate contribution that these discussions hide the more corporal aspect of this victimhood: the diseased body politic which can only be strong through cleansing or violently removing it from parasites in terms of race, gender, religion, and liberal elites.
Author: Carina van de Wetering (Leiden University) -
What causes leaders, operating within comparable structural constraints, to interpret the same foreign state in radically different ways? This paper develops an affective-cognitive account of presidential perceptions through a comparative study of John F. Kennedy’s and Richard Nixon’s images of India. For Cold War Washington, India was neither ally nor adversary, but an interpretive provocation that was democratic yet non-aligned, postcolonial yet geopolitically indispensable, and rhetorically anti-imperial yet institutionally closer to the West than to the communist bloc. A diachronic comparison of U.S. foreign policy toward India reveals that the same strategic indeterminacy could be read through strikingly different presidential logics. In Kennedy’s case, the Sino-Indian War placed India within a narrative of democratic vulnerability, making its survival appear consequential not just for Asian balance-of-power politics, but the political future of the postcolonial world. Nixon’s India, by contrast, emerged from the Bangladesh crisis as a self-righteous, Soviet-leaning power whose regional ambitions imperiled the Pakistan channel to China and affronted his sense of presidential authority. Drawing on archival documents, memoranda, oral histories, and crisis-era discourse, including newly declassified pre-presidential and crisis-era materials from the Nixon and Kennedy archives, this paper advances a conceptual account of how leaders stabilize ambiguity into meaning, contributing to debates on interpretation, emotion, and cognition in foreign-policy analysis and great-power strategy.
Author: Navroz Singh (University of Delaware) -
In India, Narendra Modi’s political authority has come to stand for a distinctive convergence of charismatic leadership, majoritarian consolidation and far-right populist success. Yet the emergence of Hindu traditionalists, or ‘trad’ digital subcultures unsettles this account. Rather than positioning Modi as the realised embodiment of a Hindu civilisational project, trad actors increasingly recast him as a figure of betrayal. The article therefore interrogates how a far-right formation comes to direct its antagonism inwards, against its own most powerful political figure, under conditions of extraordinary majoritarian dominance. It argues that such intra-identitarian antagonism reveals a deeper ontological instability within hegemonic projects. Drawing on Lacanian understandings of the object-cause of desire (objet petit a), it shows how hegemonic success can expose rather than repair the anxieties that far-right projects promise to overcome. Through a multimodal critical discourse analysis of trad anti-Modi memes circulating between 2021 and 2022, the article shows how memes become a privileged vernacular form through which intra-identitarian ontological (in) security is staged, intensified and made affectively shareable.
Author: Ananya Sharma (Ashoka University)
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MO11 / Plenary roundtable - Order and Disorder in a Changing World
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MO11 Panel / Contesting Accountability and its Limits in ConflictSponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Why is the alliance between the United States and Israel becoming so debated today? To understand the present, we need to look at the past. This paper connects the history of this relationship, starting from President Truman’s decision to recognize Israel in 1948, to what is happening right now. For decades, supporting Israel was an undisputed choice in American politics, shared by both main parties and driven by clear strategic interests. Today, however, things look very different. The alliance is no longer taken for granted. Instead, it has become a major point of discussion and deep division inside the United States. This study looks at why this shift is happening. It examines how new generations of voters, changing ideas among the general public, and sharp political divisions in Washington are challenging the traditional idea of unconditional American support. By looking closely at these internal changes, the paper shows that the future of US foreign policy in the Middle East depends not just on international events or wars, but on the political debate inside America itself. It proves that even the strongest alliances must adapt when the society behind them changes.
Author: Eva Fornoli (University of Padova) -
Questions of whose knowledge counts have become increasingly prominent across peacebuilding scholarship and practice. Yet less attention has been paid to how differently positioned actors within the same research space understand what knowledge is and what forms of knowledge matter. This paper examines an epistemological tension that emerged within a collaborative academic-community inquiry involving Cambodian and Thai youth researching online conflict between their countries through Facilitative Listening Design (FLD). Drawing on focus groups, interviews, autoethnography, and two years of collaborative engagement, the paper explores a persistent disconnect between my own positioning as a PhD researcher embedded within Global North academic institutions and participants’ understandings of the project taking place in the Global South. While I sought evidence of knowledge contributions to scholarship and policy, participants repeatedly emphasised knowledge as their own learning, relationships, and practical action. The tension culminated in a follow-up focus group held after armed conflict erupted between Cambodia and Thailand. Reflecting on the project's contribution, participant-researchers argued that the most important knowledge produced was not the empirical findings but the friendship they had built across conflict lines. In a context where dominant narratives increasingly constructed Thais and Cambodians as enemies, friendship itself became an embodied and relational form of knowledge that countered the status quo in both contexts. The paper argues that participatory inquiry may generate competing epistemologies, raising important questions about whose knowledge counts and how knowledge is valued across Global North–Global South research partnerships.
Author: Raymond Hyma (University of Warwick / Monash University) -
Despite undergoing repeated negotiation, long-running international conflicts seldom achieve permanent resolution. Within such conflicts, diplomatic interactions revolve around strategically significant resources which constitute ‘value’ in negotiation. As negotiations progress, the trajectory of value undergoes a significant transformation. This transformation is shaped by Lax and Sebenius’ ‘negotiator’s dilemma’ which is a synthesis between value creation and value claiming.
This study advances the value creation-value claiming framework and introduces ‘value minimisation’ as an embedded mechanism across successive negotiations. Value minimisation refers to the strategic suppression of opposing party’s potential to claim, assert and expand value through negotiation. Enduring conflicts undergoing iterative negotiations thus provide a framework for examining value minimisation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict presents a well-structured empirical context through interim agreements within the period of the Oslo Accords (1993) to the Taba Summit (2001) to study the progression of value minimisation. By deferring negotiation of strategically significant issues such as Jerusalem, refugee rights and final status, these interim agreements cumulatively manifest value minimisation. The study conceptualises value minimisation as an embedded mechanism within negotiations, demonstrating how co-operation aimed processes can facilitate and sustain contestation. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on the co-existence of co-operation and contestation within global politics.Authors: Shafat Yousuf (Symbiosis School of International Studies)* , Unnati Mohan (Savitribai Phule Pune University) -
Humanitarian accountability standards increasingly shape organisational legitimacy, donor access, and participation within global governance, making them an important site through which power operates in the humanitarian sector. As formal accountability mechanisms become more influential, understanding who defines these standards and whose practices they privilege becomes an important question for International Relations.
This paper asks: how do organisational position and forms of capital shape engagement with international accountability standards?
Drawing on an original descriptive analysis of 273 member organisations of the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) Alliance, a global network promoting quality and accountability in humanitarian action, the paper identifies uneven patterns of participation in formal verification processes. Certification rates appear substantially lower among Southern faith-based organisations (approximately 4 to 5 per cent) than Northern faith-based organisations (approximately 35 per cent), within a membership in which faith-based organisations represent around 30 per cent.
Using a Bourdieusian framework centred on field, habitus, doxa, and capital, the paper compares four CHS Alliance member organisations to explore whether differential engagement reflects broader power relations embedded within humanitarian accountability systems. Therefore, the paper examines how standards that appear universal may privilege particular organisational forms and shape unequal access to legitimacy and recognition.Author: Loveleen Kumari (University of Portsmouth)
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MO11 Panel / Exploring Resources and ConflictSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: Juanita Elias (University of Warwick)
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Transboundary water disputes in postcolonial regional systems are often explained and looked at through the lens of hydrological scarcity or institutional failure. However, they are rarely reducible to these elements. In fact, they unfold within broader architectures of external patronage that condition how states perceive threats, frame interests, and calibrate responses. This article examines how foreign policy dependency hereafter (FPD): the degree to which a state's external behaviour is constrained by its asymmetric reliance on more powerful actors, shapes escalation and restraint in interstate water disputes, offering an analytically grounded account of how global power hierarchies structure conflict dynamics at the regional level.
I develop the argument through a process-tracing analysis of the Senegal–Mauritania water dispute between 1971 and 1998. Drawing on dependency theory and foreign policy analysis, FPD is operationalised through a weighted Foreign Policy Dependency Index (FPI), constructed from five observable dimensions of elite-level constraint. Applied to a corpus of primary documents from FRUS, Le Monde, and Le Monde Diplomatique… The FPI is cross-referenced against a four-point Conflict Trajectory Index (CTI) across four historical phases.
The analysis finds that high FPI scores broadly coincide with periods of low inter-riparian conflict. More significantly, the collapse of FPI: most sharply when France withdrew its diplomatic engagement in 1989, correlates with peak conflict intensity: documents recording FPI = 0 consistently correspond to CTI = 4. This supports the proposition that FPD operates not as a static background condition, but as a dynamic restraint mechanism contingent on active patron engagement.Author: Malak Belakhadar (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University) -
Commodity booms can generate economic gains and social costs at once, particularly where institutions are weak. This paper provides evidence that gold-price shocks raise violence and agrarian conflict in the Brazilian Amazon, and that they do so by expanding gold extraction itself. We build a shift-share (Bartik) design - interpretable as a continuous difference-in-differences - that combines pre-sample municipal exposure to mining with international gold prices and exchange-rate variation, together with satellite-based measures of mining activity. Exogenous increases in gold profitability expand artisanal (garimpo) and overall gold mining, and this expansion raises homicide rates, the number of agrarian conflicts, and the number of peasant families in conflict, with the largest and most precisely estimated homicide effects borne by Black and mixed-race populations. The effects are concentrated in municipalities with exploitable gold endowments and differ across extraction regimes: garimpo mining maps onto lethal violence, while broader gold-mining activity maps onto land conflict. We find no comparable effects for industrial extraction, and evidence that official homicide counts understate the true mortality burden of mining expansion. The findings challenge the view that formalization and property rights alone can mitigate the social costs of extractive booms, and point to entrenched criminal landscapes that benefit from state inaction.
Authors: Daniel Rio Tinto (Fundação Getulio Vargas) , Sofia Amaral (Harvard University)* , Bruno Pantaleão (Fundação Getulio Vargas)* -
This paper will look at how international organisations frame the issue of food security in international trade discourse. This research will map the international organisations involved in food security governance in international trade, looking at how agriculture and trade officials negotiate food security in international organisations.
In a multipolar world, in which the US operates in isolation, withdrawing from international cooperation, it is important to understand the role of international organisations in global economic governance.
Building on constructivist theories on post-exceptionalism of agriculture in international trade, and drawing from the results of fieldwork in Brussels, Geneva, and Rome, this paper will adopt a qualitative research design, using interviews and content analysis of official documents to assess how trade and agriculture officials address the issue of food security in international trade. Interviews from officials from different international organisations (WTO, FAO, EU), diplomats, and NGOs will provide
Framed around three recent food security crisis, namely the Global Food Crisis of 2008, the War in Ukraine, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, this paper aims to understand how traditional non-trade issues like food security are discussed in international trade, and the role of non-trade specific organisations in the multilateral trading system.Author: Salvatore Barillà (Newcastle University) -
This paper examines the Houthi's use of water as a weapon within the group's struggle with the Yemeni government. Previous groups have used natural resources to support their campaign, such as Al-Shabaab’s sale of charcoal as a source of funding, but it is less common for those natural resources to be the weapon of terror. The paper compares the Houthi’s use of water to Islamic State’s control of the Tigris and Euphrates in the mid-2010s and argues that while the latter used that control to extend their social and political power in the region, the Houthis used denial of water as a punishment strategy against resistant communities. Drawing on the literature on terrorism and the environment and Mbembe’s necropolitics, the paper asks whether the weaponization of an essential resource, water, is simply a different type of rebel tactic or whether it represents a conceptually distinct phenomenon.
Author: Gavin Cameron (University of Calgary)
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MO11 Panel / Gender, Embodiment, and East Asian CulturesSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConveners: Sonja Nicholls (University of Bristol) , Chalisa Chintrakarn (University of Birmingham)Chair: Colin Y. Yang (University of Bristol)
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Body politics has historically been trivialised in social inequality discussions. Yet, feminist scholarship increasingly recognises the body as a crucial site, through which identity, femininity, and agency are negotiated. Given growing aesthetic pressures across Asia, this presentation intends to examine how feminism manifests in the beauty contexts of China and Thailand: two dominant aesthetic markets in Asia. Based upon qualitative research on young women, the presentation unpacks how beauty practices are associated with self-expression and individualised empowerment. This means it illuminates the prevalence of postfeminism. In both contexts, narratives around self-beautifying for themselves, as opposed to men, are prominent. However, the transnational aspect presents some divergences. Regarding Thai women, the Korean wave was central to their cosmetic surgery undertaking, with respect to K-beauty standards and ‘natural’ looks, the Korean influencer/celebrity terrain, and South Korea’s worldwide surgical reputation. By contrast, in Chinese women’s self-beautification, Korean culture is peripheral compared to localised preferences and norms. Instead, national pride permeates their beauty engagement. This intra-Asian comparison will make a novel contribution to dialogues about non-Western postfeminist manifestations, highlighting positive outcomes and pitfalls from aesthetic regimes, as well as sociopolitical shifts and tensions towards the future of global politics.
Authors: Chalisa Chintrakarn (University of Birmingham) , Hua Ma (University of Stirling) -
K-Pop is a cultural phenomenon reaching and generating millions in technologized societies across the world. While existing scholarship examines K-Pop idols’ production and commodification of femininity/ies through neoliberal economic governance, research needs to address how these femininity/ies are specifically shaped by techno-neoliberalism.
To address this, this paper focuses on aespa, one of the most commercially successful K-Pop girl groups. Since their debut, aespa have cultivated a futuristic brand dubbed their ‘iron flavour’ (쇠맛), featuring avatar counterparts, AI-generated characters, and a virtual universe. Drawing on Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies, we examine how aespa perform distinctly techno-neoliberal constructions of gender, race, and sexuality. We analyse four aespa music videos, employing a feminist post-structural discourse analysis (visual, aural, and linguistic methods) to understand how these create meaning.
We find that aespa perform a distinctly techno-liberal femininity, representing the next stage in K-pop’s commodification of gendered bodies. Produced through techno-neoliberal digital infrastructures, virtual worlds, and algorithmic forms of visibility, aespa intensifies the commodification of femininity/ies as endlessly (re)producible and exploitable. Femininity becomes an industrial site in itself. Given K-Pop’s accelerated cross-border flow, understanding the gendered, political implications of this techno-neoliberal aesthetic is crucial for IR going forward.
Authors: Sonja Nicholls (University of Bristol) , Anna Davey-Mitchell (University of Bristol) -
How does gendered domination inscribe itself onto women's bodies, and how do those same bodies become sites of resistance? Drawing on six interviews and six autobiographies by North Korean women, this paper adopts an embodied feminist framework to examine how women contest and reshape political order through everyday bodily practice, in North Korea and after.
In North Korea, the state regulates women's bodies through daily rituals and naturalised gendered norms. Women internalise these as simply "how one is meant to live," what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence. Yet bodies do not comply perfectly. Small transgressions, styling hair, riding a bicycle, speaking back, constitute Scott's quiet resistance: rarely named political, but pushing back against embodied domination nonetheless. After migration, embodied capacities expand across national borders. Women enter new civic and labour spaces, and engage in retrospective naming: reinterpreting past experiences as indoctrination and gendered violence. When this moves into autobiography and public testimony, private memory becomes shared feminist narrative, opening new possibilities.
The paper argues that in authoritarian East Asian contexts, the body is both the primary site of political control and the first terrain of bottom-up feminist politics, with implications for how we understand gender, cooperation, and tension across the region.
Author: Hazel Y Choi (Cardiff University) -
This research examines the interplay between professional culture and gendered norms in Chinese journalism, focusing on the enduring phenomenon of the "trophy journalist" (花瓶记者). In collectivist contexts like China, implicit behavioural expectations operate as powerful social scripts that shape career trajectories and professional identities. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, field theory, and qualitative data from 47 frontline female journalists, the panel explores how gendered occupational norms are embodied, internalised, and negotiated in daily newsroom practice. Participants analyse how these norms constrain women’s access to core journalistic domains, influence affective and bodily experiences, and shape perceptions of professional competence. The panel also considers the ways in which female journalists resist, adapt to, or reproduce these norms, thereby co-constructing the gender culture of Chinese journalism. By highlighting the embodied, discursive, and structural dimensions of gendered professional life, this panel contributes to comparative discussions in gender studies, journalism, and the sociology of professions. It offers insight into how professional cultures can both reinforce and challenge gender inequalities, providing a critical lens for understanding the reproduction and transformation of gendered power relations in non-Western media contexts.
Author: Alex Chang Liu (Fudan University) -
Recent studies have looked into the rise of feminist discourses and activities in China, contributing a substantial body of discussion on how young women build connections, seek mutual support, construct narratives, and reject Confucian cultural constraints. Despite extensive literature on these feminist resistances, who represent Chinese women, and who are represented as Chinese women, remain notably uncontested. This study explores the power imbalances and tensions that are (re)produced in today’s Chinese popular feminism, based on interviews with feminist activists, online content analysis and digital ethnographic data. I examine the ‘exclusive’ nature of Chinese feminists’ activism that is dominated by urban single middle-class elite women, in which disadvantaged working-class rural women are vastly marginalised. This is investigated from the angles of (1) the platforms and formats in which feminist debates mostly take place, (2) their unequal access to digital tools for bypassing censorship and transnational social media, (3) the expanding digital media literacy gap between privileged and underprivileged women, as well as (4) limited opportunities to take part in offline events. I maintain that the power imbalances among Chinese activists are entwined with political suppression and structural inequalities in the repressive regime.
Author: Yi Wang (University of Reading)
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MO11 Panel / Gendering Power: Radicalisation, Rights, and Resilience in a Changing WorldSponsor: Justice, inequality and exclusionConvener: Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester)Chair: British International Studies Association
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My thesis examines the gap that exists, within Muslim-majority countries, between the international universal model of gender equality under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and Islamic fundamentalist discourse which promotes a patriarchal construction of gender roles at the national level. I argue that Islamic feminism, which draws its legitimacy from Islamic sources and recognises the religious needs of Muslim women, can promote and support their interests better than CEDAW, in certain contexts, such as Bangladesh. My case study of Bangladesh challenges the notion that State reservations and Islamic discourse within the national space are the primary obstacles to gender equality for Muslim women. It also demonstrates that an increased engagement of the State, NGOs and women’s organisations with CEDAW at the international level does not necessarily translate into improved status for Muslim women within society or significantly change their inferior positions within the family. Through my findings in Bangladesh, I aim to contribute to the broader conversation on the limits of the international universal equal rights frameworks in improving the status of religious Muslim women, and the conditions under which alternative approaches like Islamic feminism can advance their rights more effectively.
Author: Farah Diba Sonda (University of Birmingham) -
This paper focuses on Afro-Jamaican rural working-class women who engage in craft trading in the formalised craft markets in Jamaica’s urbanised resort towns. Drawing on primary data from ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with craftspeople, I argue that craft markets as a site of work and as a living community is sustained by women’s work, that is, both work done predominantly by women as well as their social reproductive strategies. In the context of an infrastructure of containment and capture, which I define as the quotidian structures that condition and organise re/productive labour in the spatially-specific resort towns such that value is available for elite capture, it is the everyday labour of women that navigates and resists this infrastructure and maintains craft markets as sites of life-work (Mullings, 2021). The paper draws on feminist political economy’s concept of ‘the Everyday’ and historicises it via Caribbean political economy’s plantation thesis to highlight how Black rural women workers extend the historical logics of the plot in their everyday practices of negotiation, survival, claims-making and economic mobility under new modes of dependent (racial) capitalism. My analysis underscores the ongoing labour of Afro-Jamaican women in responding to the uneveness of Jamaica’s ‘development project’ across scales.
Author: Tka Pinnock (York University) -
Projects within international organisations (IOs) are guided by policy monitoring frameworks incentivising the incorporation of policy concerns. However, these frameworks are often inconsistently applied, subject to external political pressures, and used to signal compliance and cooperation. This paper studies how the World Bank (the Bank) has classified gendered projects between 2000-2024 and reported them to the OECD’s DAC through the Creditor Reporting System’s Gender Equality Marker to observe how the Bank’s internal project classifications translate when reporting to another IO, and whether they reflect political pressures and between-IO dynamics.
Through text analysis methods, a fine-tuned ModernBERT transformer model is used to assess Bank project classification. In addition, a scoring system for evaluating gender considerations within IO project documents is introduced. Theoretically, the paper advances how external political pressures and between-IO dynamics influence gender as a policy concern and how it may be used as a political pawn within projects. This gives rise to the possibility of gender washing which can have tangible effects in member countries through gendered harm and lacklustre development efforts as institutional claims fail to meet action. With a focus on gender, the paper brings nuance to how tumultuous global political developments reshape institutional operations and objectives.Author: Ada Ruohonen (University College Dublin) -
This paper argues that misogyny should be understood not only as gender prejudice or social inequality, but also as a form of political radicalisation shaped through ideological narratives, digital ecosystems, and processes of social reinforcement. While existing scholarship frequently examines misogyny through sociological, criminological, or feminist frameworks, less attention has been given to its political dimensions and radicalising potential.
Drawing on political sociology, propaganda theory, and digital politics, this research explores how misogynistic narratives are produced, normalised, and amplified across online and offline spaces. It examines the role of digital platforms, influencer cultures, and transnational online communities in shaping misogynistic identities among young males, while considering how these narratives intersect with patriarchal systems and honour-based norms.
Using a comparative focus on the United Kingdom and Pakistan, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding misogyny as an ideological process that mobilises ideological consent, reinforces gendered hierarchies, and, in extreme cases, legitimises violence ranging from online abuse to honour-based violence and femicide. In doing so, it seeks to reposition misogyny within debates on political extremism, radicalisation, and contemporary forms of gendered violence.Author: Azra Syed (SOAS University of London)
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MO11 Panel / On Digital Colonialism and Authoritarian ConvergencesSponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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This paper develops the concept of algorithmic colonialism as a new form of international power through which data extraction, infrastructural dependency, narrative control, behavioural governance, and identity capture reshape relations between the Global North and the Global South. Existing debates on digital colonialism often focus on platform dependency, surveillance capitalism, or ownership of data. This paper extends that debate by arguing that the deepest form of algorithmic power is not only the extraction of information, but the external structuring of human identity, social belonging, political imagination, and decision-making.
The paper introduces a Third Generation International Relations framework to explain how global power is moving from territorial and industrial domination toward symbolic-intelligent domination. In this shift, artificial intelligence, platform infrastructures, predictive systems, and automated governance reproduce inequality, dependency, and epistemic hierarchy.
By connecting AI governance, postcolonial theory, international political economy, and human agency, the paper asks how vulnerable societies can resist algorithmic capture without rejecting technological development. It proposes an anti-capture framework based on data sovereignty, infrastructural autonomy, narrative plurality, behavioural accountability, and protection of human identity.
Author: Osama S. Qatrani (The Open University) -
Existing scholarship in international political economy, international business, and media studies generally suggests that Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs) behave - and are likely to be portrayed - differently from their U.S. counterparts. At least in Western media outlets. Divergent institutional environments, media dynamics, and intensifying geopolitical pressure would all lead us to expect differences in how firms from the two countries are portrayed in the same media outlet. Yet our analysis of approximately 85,000 environmentally relevant news articles published between 1980 and 2023 in leading U.S. (The New York Times), mainland Chinese (China Daily, Global Times), and Hong Kong (South China Morning Post) newspapers reveals a different pattern: Chinese and U.S. MNEs receive broadly similar aggregate levels of negative environmental coverage within the same media outlets, despite originating from different political-economic systems. Why does convergence emerge where existing scholarship would expect divergence?
Drawing on liberal, constructivist, and realist perspectives, this paper develops a framework linking convergence to market pressures, transnational norm diffusion, and strategic state interests. By attempting to explain why U.S. and Chinese MNEs are evaluated similarly on an aggregate level, the paper contributes to debates on corporate legitimacy, global governance, and the relationship between conflict and cooperation in the contemporary international political economy. Doing so, the paper underlines media as an important arena in which corporate legitimacy is constructed and contested.
Author: Maria Ljung (Bern University of Applied Sciences) -
Existing studies on the international politics of authoritarianism often focus on vertical processes of autocratization — how powerful states spread authoritarianism through passive diffusion and active promotion to smaller states. In Southeast Asia, this literature remains largely shaped by analyses framed around China’s authoritarian presence. Yet vertical frameworks alone cannot explain how democratic backsliding persists across the region; the horizontal dimension — how authoritarian regimes reinforce one another through peer-to-peer cooperation — demands closer attention. This paper examines one such case: how the authoritarian regimes of Myanmar and Thailand have reinforced one another. While recent scholarship has examined Thailand’s response to Myanmar’s 2021 coup, it has treated the relationship as unidirectional, neglecting the ways in which both regimes have actively sustained one another. This paper instead asks: why do Myanmar and Thailand engage in reciprocal authoritarian cooperation? It argues that two conditions explain this cooperation: first, as post-coup regimes, both seek mutual support to manage shared legitimacy crises; and second, their shared, porous border produces sustained cross-border pressures that make cooperation mutually necessary.
Author: Yatana Yamahata (Kyoto University) -
In today's data-driven global order, personal data holds significant social, economic and political value. The transnational nature of personal data flows demands effective global data protection governance. While the OECD Privacy Guidelines and the Convention 108 are foundational data protection instruments, the European Union (EU) is a pioneer regulatory actor shaping a global data protection regime. The extraterritorial reach of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) has embedded rules, norms, principles, and decision-making procedures within the apparatus of data protection governance at the national, regional and global levels. However, South Asia represents a distinct case, as no State in the region has adequacy status under Article 45 of the EU GDPR. Despite the absence of a formal adequacy mechanism, South Asian States have adopted data protection reforms influenced by the EU GDPR. This qualitative research draws on primary and secondary data, including interviews with experts, through the lens of Krasner's regime theory. The research study demonstrates that the EU GDPR is an influential regulatory anchor in shaping a data protection regime alongside an evolving regime complex, driven by regulatory fragmentation arising from innovation-led development priorities and sovereignty concerns in South Asia.
Author: Aarshiya Chowdhary (Jawaharlal Nehru University) -
Personalised digital communication has become a source of strategic uncertainty in contemporary international relations. This paper examines how foreign-policy actors in Pakistan interpret Donald Trump’s social media posts and public digital statements as possible signals of US policy. Rather than asking whether social media ‘matters,’ I investigate when personalised communication is treated as actionable diplomatic input, bargaining signal, domestic political theatre, agenda-setting device, or noise requiring verification through conventional diplomatic channels. I argue that Pakistani officials and foreign-policy elites interpret Trumpian communication through a hierarchy of credibility shaped by source authority, issue area, crisis intensity, and access to direct diplomatic channels. Posts concerning Iran, India, Kashmir, Afghanistan, China, or sanctions are therefore unlikely to be treated uniformly. Some generate urgency, media management, or backchannel clarification, while others are discounted as performative politics for US domestic audiences. To test this argument, I primarily use semi-structured interviews with Pakistani diplomats, politicians, retired officials, defence analysts, foreign-policy journalists, and think-tank experts, alongside analysis of selected Trump-era episodes in Pakistan-US relations. By shifting attention from the production of digital diplomacy to its external reception, I hope to show how security-sensitive states process ambiguity generated by personalised US leadership.
Author: Mohammad Hamza Iftikhar (Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS))
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MO11 Panel / Reconfiguring Power and Inequality in Global Political EconomySponsor: Justice, inequality and exclusionConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: Aljoscha Karg (University of Amsterdam)
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Ocean data has emerged as a new site of geopolitical competition despite the absence of clear international governance mechanisms. The control over oceanic data redefines maritime sovereignty in the digital era, constituting a new form of maritime power. Satellite observations, hydrographic surveys, seabed mapping, autonomous underwater vehicles, marine biodiversity databases, and AI-enabled maritime surveillance have transformed ocean data into a critical source of geopolitical and economic power. Yet, maritime scholarship remains limited on data ownership and control. This led to a series of questions, viz-a-viz, (1) How is the extraction, ownership, and governance of ocean data reshaping inequalities in the Blue Economy? (2) Who benefits from the global political economy of ocean data? (3) Can the Blue Economy remain equitable when its most valuable resource is increasingly data rather than fish or minerals? (4) Why does UNCLOS regulate maritime spaces but remain largely silent on the ownership and governance of ocean data? This paper advances the ‘Ocean Data Colonialism’ theory explaining how technologically advanced states and private corporations increasingly extract, monopolize, and commercialize marine data, producing new forms of inequality within the Blue Economy. This distinct dimension of maritime power enables asymmetrical influence over scientific research, resource governance, environmental monitoring, and strategic decision-making. Drawing on critical political economy, critical data studies, and ocean governance scholarship, the paper employs qualitative document analysis of international legal instruments, Blue Economy policy frameworks, and global marine data initiatives to demonstrate how digital infrastructures are reshaping authority at sea. By repositioning ocean data as a strategic geopolitical resource, the paper extends debates on digital sovereignty beyond terrestrial domains in the 21st century maritime order.
Author: Preeti Bora (Jamia Millia Islamia) -
Financial subordination examines and theorizes the persistent and structural asymmetries developing and emerging economies face in the global financial and monetary architecture. At the same time, critical legal scholars have been emphasizing the fundamental, if not foundational, role of the law in institutionalizing spatially uneven economic relations and imperial exploitation. However, to this date, the literature on financial subordination has only implicitly engaged with its legal dimension. Against this background, this paper examines two rules at the core of international monetary cooperation and currency exchange: Articles IV and VIII of the International Monetary Fund’s Articles of Agreement. Drawing on IMF reports and expert interviews, the analysis finds that these provisions (re)produce uneven international monetary relations in three ways: by casting monetary crises as failures of domestic policy, by demanding market-determined and freely floating exchange rates, and by pressing governments toward tight macroeconomic policies. Findings also reveal how some non-state actors in developing and emerging economies benefit from IMF-led monetary governance at the expense of their countries’ broader development prospects. Finally, the paper concludes by reflecting on the potential of empirical and methodological research at the intersection of critical legal thought and financial subordination.
Author: Aljoscha Karg (University of Amsterdam) -
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is the leading international investor in housing finance in emerging market economies and is an active transmitter of housing financialization to these states. Yet, critical approaches towards the role of the IFC within the global financial market remain sparse within IPE literature. This paper hopes to make up for this dearth of literature by drawing attention towards how the IFC continues to play an integral role in shaping the housing markets in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies – despite decreasing relevance of many other International Organizations (IOs) worldwide. The IFC strongly advocates for the growth of the primary mortgage market, and development of the secondary mortgage market (through the creation and trade of Mortgage-Backed Securities) in EMDEs. Further, the IO’s insistence on unregulated commercial subprime mortgage lending and the linking of Mortgage Companies to depositary institutions contributes to the exacerbation of vulnerabilities of economically weaker sections within EMDEs. This research will employ a regulationist approach to explain the sustained influence of the IFC and the impact of its housing investments in EMDEs. Such an analysis will enable us to situate the IFC within the global financial and housing market in a world where the nature of IOs is changing.
Author: Keerti Narayanan (University of Warwick) -
This paper addresses a key gap in existing scholarship on right-wing political influencers by examining them as foreign policy actors, whose discourses on Islam and Middle East crises since the beginning of the Gaza War(2023-) construct a common story about the region across these elements of the international right. Focusing on the discursive links between prominent British, Finnish, and Swedish YouTube commentators, a transnational agenda is shown to be at play. The study reveals the ways in which evolving communication technologies are used to strengthen inequalities between the Global South and Global North through the production of digital media content. By mapping their interpretations of the West’s engagement with the region, the study contributes to an understanding of the power relations operating within their discourses. Drawing from International Relations (IR) scholarship on race, these commentators are shown to often reproduce racialised narratives via appeals to civilizationist discourses, which help manufacture discontent against Middle-Eastern adversaries and legitimise geopolitical positions. Importantly, the study highlights the preoccupation prominent new media influencers have with questions of world order, and how this contributes to a radicalisation that extends beyond the domestic sphere.
Author: Jukka Seppala (University of Aberdeen) -
Contemporary international relations increasingly foregrounds transnational risks such as climate change, pandemics, AI governance, cyber insecurity, and nuclear proliferation. These developments appear to resonate with Ulrich Beck’s claim that modern societies have entered a “risk society,” in which political agendas are organized around the management of manufactured risks. However, the global character of risk has not displaced geopolitical rivalry, and states continue to pursue strategic competition and power interests.
This paper asks whether world politics has genuinely shifted from wealth politics to risk politics. Drawing on Beck’s risk society theory and debates on modernity and globalization, I develop a framework of “risk–power hybridization.” I argue that risk governance is often securitized and politicized, thereby legitimizing rather than superseding traditional power politics. Consequently, shared risks do not necessarily produce stronger international cooperation. Instead, they can intensify contestation through unequal capacities, asymmetric burdens, and competing risk narratives.
By integrating sociological theory with IR scholarship, the paper challenges linear accounts of a “post-Westphalian” transformation and offers a political-sociological reconceptualization of global risk as a structured arena of geopolitical struggle, compared to a transcendental condition that dissolves power competition.Author: Junxian Wang (London School of Economics and Political Science)
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TU12 Panel / Conflict and Cooperation in a Changing WorldSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Security communities are conventionally built on shared identity, mutual trust and dependable expectations of peaceful change (Deutsch, Adler and Barnett). But what happens when the very region itself, a putative community inhabits, is not a given but a strategic construct? The "Indo-Pacific is such a construct- an idea that knits the Indian and Pacific Oceans into a single strategic space sustained by the US commitment and Indian participation, and animated above all by the management of China's rise. This paper takes the 2026 reversion of the US Indo-Pacific Command to its older title, US Pacific Command, as a revealing inflection point. Materially, the change is slight; discursively, it signals the contingency of the construct on which the region's security cooperation exists. The paper argues that the Quad and the 'free and open Indo-Pacific' architecture display the outward features of an emergent security community while lacking its foundations: their cohesion depends on a contingent, externally authored geography rather than thick mutual identification, leaving them vulnerable to reversal when great-power commitment wavers. It asks what durable regional order required when the region itself is a choice.
Author: Oorja Tapan (Jawaharlal Nehru University) -
Drawing from performance ethnography and utilizing “Creative Voice” as an innovative, arts-based methodology, this ethnographic inquiry presents A Tale of Clans, an exploration of systemic conflict and Panagkauli (reconciliation) among the Manobo-Pulangiyon of Bukidnon province in the Southern Philippines. This ethnographic work reveals that protracted intra-communal conflicts are deeply rooted in historical ruptures, namely colonial legacies, capitalist expansion, and plantation economies that weaponize “divide-and-conquer” strategies. Furthermore, the intersection of asymmetric power dynamics, divergent interests, and cultural hegemony over ancestral domain claims profoundly underlies these disputes. Consequently, these fractures have severed indigenous rituals, cultural belief systems, and kinship ties, engendering collective trauma, existential despair, and acute psychosocial distress. Conversely, the community's return to their ancestral homeland encapsulates decades of indigenous resistance against encroaching corporate interests. While enduring divisions persist, “A Tale of Clans” conceptualizes Panagkauli as a vital conduit for collective memory, reconciliation, social cohesion, and transformative hope in times of ruptures. Overall, this paper emphasizes that the Manobo-Pulangiyon maintain that, through the divine intervention of Magbabaya (the Supreme Being), Panagkauli serves as an indispensable mechanism for reunifying both the clan and their ancestral lands.
Author: Bryan Lee Celeste (Central Mindanao University) -
Between June 2025 and February 2026, Iran refused to weaponise its nuclear programme despite recovering from Israeli-US strikes on its major facilities. Its stockpile stood at 440.9 kg of 60%-enriched uranium. Diplomatic off-ramps had closed with the E3 snapback in September 2025, the JCPOA had expired in October, and its regional allies had been severely weakened. Tehran had every material incentive for nuclear breakout. Realist proliferation theory predicts exactly that outcome. It did not happen.
An integrated strategic culture and ontological security framework explains this puzzle. Process-tracing three identity mechanisms across 150 coded elite statements and primary IAEA, intelligence, and diplomatic sources shows that ideational constraints causally prevailed over survival incentives, failed alliance guarantees, and organised hardline factional pressure. Shia jurisprudential prohibitions on nuclear weapons and Iran’s revolutionary self-narrative constrained decision-making even as material logic pointed toward weaponisation.
Senior IRGC commanders pressed the Supreme Leader to revoke his anti-nuclear fatwa; parliamentary factions echoed the demand in writing. He reaffirmed it regardless. This restraint held until Ali Khamenei’s death in the February 2026 war removed its institutional foundation.The case constitutes a hard test against realist proliferation models, with direct implications for scholarship on coercive deterrence, nuclear decision-making, and identity-based restraint under acute geopolitical conflict.
Authors: Shafat Yousuf (Symbiosis International (Deemed University)) , Syed Jalil Hussain (Islamic University of Science and Technology)* -
Taiwan is a key player in the global economy and geopolitics, given its dominance in semiconductor manufacturing and its strategic location in the Taiwan Strait. The One China Principle, proposed by the Beijing government, asserts that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China and that any country establishing diplomatic relations with China must break official ties with Taiwan. This constrains Taiwan’s formal diplomatic relations with the UK and engagement with global affairs. Without official channels, cultivating informal relationships through educational exchanges, and Soft Power becomes more significant. This study seeks to investigate how British exchange students' perceptions of Taiwan change following exchange programs and how they translate these attitudes into behavioural intentions upon returning home. Longitudinal in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 British exchange students, 15 international students, and five program coordinators will be conducted. Theoretically, this research provides an insight into the correlations between two dimensions of Soft Power: attitudinal change and behavioural intention, utilizing the Theory of Planned Behavior, which has been uncovered in international relations. Practically, the findings will be valuable for policymakers in leveraging educational exchange programs as means to improve bilateral relations.
Author: Tam Thi Pham (Aston University) -
At the ROK-US summit in October 2025, President Lee Jae Myung made an unusually direct request to President Trump: US support for Seoul’s pursuit of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). Seoul’s interest in conventionally armed SSNs dates back to the 1990s; the covert “362 Project,” launched in 2003, stalled amid technological limitations and US nonproliferation objections. This renewed push offers a window into middle-power strategy in the Trump era. The paper argues that waning confidence in US extended deterrence—intensified by transactional alliance management, burden-sharing disputes, and volatile crisis signaling—has shifted Seoul’s calculus toward SSNs as a survivable, non-nuclear means that enhances deterrence without overt proliferation. Yet the binding constraints are legal and institutional, not technical. South Korea operates under dense obligations: the NPT, IAEA safeguards, the INFCIRC/153 paragraph 14 “naval propulsion” provision, NSG guidelines, and, critically, the 2015 US–ROK 123 Agreement, which limits enrichment and reprocessing without prior US consent. The paper analyzes feasible pathways—such as LEU-based propulsion, fuel leasing and take-back, auditable paragraph 14 arrangements, and enhanced transparency—and the alliance bargaining they require. It concludes that an SSN program is politically attractive as a hedge, but legally viable only if embedded in strengthened safeguards and predictable US–ROK consultations that protect nonproliferation credibility while addressing South Korea’s deterrence needs.
Author: Se Young Jang (University of Vienna)
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TU12 Panel / Global Energy Supply Chains and Competition for Critical MineralsSponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Control over critical minerals has proved to be a fundamental dimension of the geopolitical competition between the United States and China. Among them, lithium is particularly valuable for the energy transition as a key input for lucrative electric vehicle markets.
Securing control over lithium supply chains has become a priority for both U.S. and Chinese Administrations and private companies operating within their economies. But international competition also faces the domestic political realities in countries where critical minerals are located and extracted. In these countries, conflicting political and economic interests seeking investment and power add another layer of competition which can shape relationships both internally and externally.
Taking Argentina as a case study, this research explores the complex interplay between federal and provincial governments in the extraction of lithium and how this conditions relationships between Chinese and U.S. competition. Drawing on works that explore the political economy of extractivism, this research presents a twofold contribution: analysing the subnational level, an area generally unexplored; and incorporating international influences over extractive models, which have been largely explained solely by domestic factors.
Author: Julian Velazquez (University of Glasgow) -
Indonesia-China nickel industry cooperation has been praised as a fresh model of cooperation, allowing a developing country like Indonesia to upgrade its position in the global critical minerals chain. However, critics have shown how it also produces exclusion, generates inequality, and damages the environment, making the project resemble an enclave than a successful national industrial endeavor. This problematizes the promising success narrative surrounding the two countries' cooperation. Enriching this critical literature, this research explores an underexplored aspect of the Indonesia-China nickel industry: the labour regime. Drawing on one month of fieldwork at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), this paper makes two arguments. First, tracing the historical development of extractive labour regimes, it shows that IMIP's labour regime converges with the broader neoliberalization of extractive labour globally. Second, while reproducing this neoliberal logic, IMIP does so through a specific spatial modality: the industrial park. Both realities, the paper argues, stem from the political economy of the Indonesia-China labour encounter: China's industrial park model, centralized politics of Indonesia's downstreaming agenda, and the casualization of labour law. Lastly, this paper enrich the debates on Indonesia-China cooperation: its celebrated success rests on the exploitative neoliberal model rather than a new emancipatory one.
Author: Nandito Oktaviano (Indonesia University) -
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine transformed global energy politics, but less attention has been paid to Moscow’s position in the emerging critical-minerals order. This proposed paper asks how war, sanctions, and Western de-risking have altered Russia’s capacity to derive geopolitical leverage from mineral production and partnerships across the Global South. Rather than equating mineral endowments with power, it conceptualizes mineral power as relational: it depends on a state’s position across extraction, processing, finance, technology, logistics, and market access. Focusing comparatively on palladium and nickel, the paper examines two supply chains in which Russia remains significant but occupies markedly different structural positions. In palladium, highly concentrated production sustains Russian leverage alongside Southern African producers. In nickel, the rise of Indonesia and China-centered processing networks increasingly constrains it. Russia therefore combines substantial mineral capabilities with growing restrictions on capital, technology and Western markets. Its post-2022 response has included efforts to embed mineral cooperation within wider projects of multipolarity and partnership with non-Western states, including through BRICS+ and Russia-Africa relations. The paper argues that this shift is best understood as a contested re-networking of strategic supply chains. Conceptually, it contributes to geoeconomic debates by showing that resource power rests not on reserves alone but on the capacity to maintain and reorganize cross-border networks.
Author: Maxime Duchateau (Université de Montréal) -
This paper provides a comparative analysis of Sino-Lithuanian and Sino-Czech relations to address the following question: why did Lithuania withdraw from what was originally known as the 16+1 framework of cooperation between China and Central and Eastern Europe, while Czechia remained, despite repeated statements of intent to exit by political elites in both countries? Existing literature emphasises the agency of Lithuanian and Czech political elites and their grievances regarding the limited economic benefits generated by the framework, Russia-China cooperation, and China’s human rights record (i.e., direct economic, security, and normative considerations), while paying less attention to the role of indirect factors, particularly supply-chain dynamics, in shaping elite rationales for remaining in or exiting the 16+1. As a result, existing explanations do not fully account for the divergence in the two states’ foreign policy decisions.
To address this gap, the paper examines the broader geo-economic structures that both constrain and enable political agency, focusing on the countries’ positions within Germany-CEE-China automotive production networks and the extent to which these positions informed elite attitudes towards the 16+1. Particular attention is paid to the ‘Lithuanian effect’ (i.e., China’s weaponisation of supply chains against local automotive component suppliers following Lithuania’s withdrawal from the framework and the opening of Taiwan’s representative office under the designation ‘Taiwanese’ shortly thereafter). The paper explores not only how this episode influenced the views of Czech political elites after Lithuania’s exit, but also the extent to which supply-chain considerations shaped elite attitudes prior to that.
The empirical analysis focuses primarily on structural factors, linking the study’s independent variable (i.e., states’ positions within the core–semi-periphery–periphery structure of the global economy) to its dependent variable, namely a specific foreign policy decision. At the same time, it accounts for variations in foreign policy outcomes that cannot be explained by structural factors alone, examining instead how structural and agential factors interact to shape foreign policy choices.
Author: Dominika Remžová (University of Nottingham and Central European Institute of Asian Studies) -
Indonesia’s nickel boom is usually read through the language of strategic minerals, industrial upgrading, and great-power competition. This paper asks what becomes visible when the same transition is read from the local level. Drawing on Indonesia’s nickel sector, it examines how green industrial policy produces uneven local externalities through land pressure, pollution concerns, labour tensions, fiscal dependence, and contested promises of development. The paper argues that these local effects are not peripheral social costs of the energy transition. They shape the political durability of supply chains that the United States, China, and Europe increasingly treat as strategic infrastructure.
The paper contributes to international studies by connecting global supply-chain politics with subnational political economy. It shows how the clean-energy transition creates new forms of cooperation and contestation between producing regions, national governments, foreign investors, and downstream markets. Indonesia’s nickel transition illustrates a broader problem for green industrialization in the Global South: supply chains cannot be made resilient through investment, trade agreements, or technology standards alone if the places that host extraction and processing experience the transition as externally imposed. A credible transition therefore depends on how global climate ambitions are negotiated locally.
Author: Muhammad Faiz Krisnadi (National University of Singapore)
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22
TU12 Panel / Intermediaries of Order: Historicising and Decentring International Political Economy from Empire to Global ChinaSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConveners: Oksana Levkovych (London School of Economics and Political Science) , Aasim Khan (King Fahd University Business School)Chair: Oksana Levkovych (London School of Economics and Political Science)
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This paper compares two Chinese-associated projects in separate provinces of Pakistan: the Gwadar Port in Balochistan and the Thar coal and energy projects in Sindh, in the south-east of the country. It demonstrates that the trajectory and results of these infrastructural projects depend as much on Chinese actors as on local histories and regional politics. In Balochistan, Chinese investment is understood as an extension of the state and is therefore resisted, causing delays to the project. In Sindh, by contrast, the projects are seen as an alternative to the state and are therefore accepted and welcomed by the political elites. These divergent trajectories show that infrastructural projects are the result of entanglements between Chinese corporations and investment, on the one hand, and local histories and regional politics, on the other. By emphasising that resistance or acceptance of Chinese investment must be understood through grounded analysis, the paper contributes to the theorisation of “Global China” from below and moves away from simplistic notions of “debt-trap diplomacy” and “China as an alternative.”
Author: Asad Abbasi (University of Sussex) -
This paper historicises the current sense of a “collapsing liberal order” by returning to an earlier hegemonic transition that the contemporary, US-centric debate tends to forget: Britain’s drawn-out turn from free trade to protectionism between the 1880s and the 1930s. Drawing on archival sources, it shows that the concepts and policy ideas brought to life by the US–China rivalry - reciprocity and retaliation, “unfair trade,” the strategic use of tariffs, and the reorganisation of economic blocs - were already being developed and deployed by a declining liberal hegemon a century ago. Against systemic IPE theories’ tendency to read policy as a near-automatic response to material decline, the paper foregrounds the path-breaking agency of critical individuals who reinterpreted structural conditions and acted as “switchmen,” redirecting the trading order rather than merely registering its shifts. The aim is conceptual as much as historical: to show that terms like “liberal order” and “its collapse” compress a far richer repertoire used to conceptualise the re-organisation of economic relations that were at once imperial and regional — mercantilism, the “scientific tariff,” reciprocity, agency within structure — and to recover that vocabulary as a way of thinking about today’s restructuring of the global economic order, including the rise of China, without flattening it into a single US-centred story.
Author: Oksana Levkovych (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
South–South cooperation has remained a persistent feature of international development debates, and its relevance is evident in constant public refrains even as its visibility has receded in the current moment, particularly in the context of disruptive technologies. While North–South debates over inequality, welfare, and power asymmetries continue to find headlines, the idea of South–South cooperation has evolved slowly and become significantly less visible over time. This paper traces the changing politics of technology transfer, science and technology cooperation, information and communication technologies, and innovation from the Buenos Aires Plan of Action (1978) to the Doha South Summit (2005).
Drawing on official conference documents, background papers, and development reports, the paper argues that South–South cooperation increasingly shifted from an emphasis on collective self-reliance and “brain drain” toward a broader concern with connectivity, trade, investment, information networks, and governance involving non-state actors. Rather than viewing development solely through the lenses of market integration or structural dependency, these debates offer a more realistic conception of what the paper calls “shadow governance” — where cooperation occurs through a combination of creative agency and weakness in the global structures of IPE. The framework helps explain how politics works under conditions of declining public visibility, and how intermediaries help countries navigate structural inequalities while opening possibilities for regional and transnational linkages.
Methodologically, the paper combines documentary analysis with historical evidence on technology transfer and its utilisation across developing regions. In doing so, it identifies the growing importance of regional intermediaries — including merchants, brokers, financiers, technology distributors, logistics providers, and entrepreneurial cities — in facilitating the movement of technology, expertise, and capital. The paper argues that these actors occupied an increasingly important place in both the practice and the imagination of South–South cooperation, pointing toward forms of economic intermediation that remain insufficiently theorised within mainstream international political economy.
Author: Aasim Khan (King Fahd University Business School) -
This article critically examines, from the perspective of historicising International Relations (IR) theory, how and why the concept of the “Global South” has been received within the epistemic community of Chinese IR. Specifically, it investigates how this process has been moulded by the entanglement — both political and economic — among different agents in China’s academia and policymaking. The article begins by tracing the critical junctures in China’s reception of the concept from 2016 to 2026, identified as “Global South moments.” It then explores why this reception has been fractured and non-linear, transcending the dichotomy of “liberal vs. non-Western.” It proposes that China has adopted the concept through “retrospective discovery” (after Rosenberg 2000) — that is, by revisiting its historical semantic transformation and embracing it only to uncover its legitimising value for realist purposes. Consequently, the article aims to provide a methodological and conceptual toolkit for understanding how political discourses are adapted through local intermediaries in changing circumstances. Practically, it also reflects on how the conceptualisation of the “Global South” reveals the relationship between China’s policymakers and academia, and its implications for understanding China’s rise in current global politics.
Authors: Bingshuo Li (Renmin University of China)* , Zizhu Wang (Wenzhou-Kean University)
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TU12 Panel / Navigating Justice Across Borders, Institutions, and Everyday LifeSponsor: Justice, inequality and exclusionConvener: Jamie Hagen (University of Manchester)Chair: British International Studies Association
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Transitional justice (TJ), processes of seeking redress for past and ongoing violence, has become increasingly professionalised as a global justice discourse. TJ ‘entrepreneurs’ (Madlingozi 2010) constitute a global TJ industry (Nagy 2008) that develops standardised policies and toolkits to be implemented across diverse TJ contexts. While there are plural approaches to TJ, many of which disrupt the universalised discourse, international organisations and practitioners are frequently understood as the producers of TJ expertise. This construction of who embodies expertise (and therefore also who lacks it) reflects longstanding colonial and epistemic hierarchies, with international actors dominating TJ policymaking and knowledge practices despite growing discursive commitments to local agency and expertise. In this paper, I trace how TJ expertise is constructed at the United Nations (UN), one of the most visible institutions of standardised TJ (Davidian and Kenney 2017). Informed by scholarship on the politics of TJ knowledge (Jones and Lühe 2021), I map the UN’s TJ policy ecosystem and identify what expertise means, which actors are constructed as embodying expertise, and what thematic areas constitute the UN’s expertise. This is important for understanding the broader politics of TJ expertise and for amplifying diverse TJ knowledges and advancing epistemic justice.
Author: Caitlin Biddolph (University of Technology, Sydney) -
There has been an increasing interest in gender at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has manifested in a proliferation of written and visual discourse on women and gender. However, the IMF’s novel ‘feminist’ output continues to depend on and (re)produce a limited vision of political, economic, social and familial life. In this paper, I use a queer theoretical approach to (visual) discourse analysis to interrogate the treatment of heterosexuality, care, intimacy and households within the IMF’s gender discourses. I analyse 77 of the IMF’s publications on gender and women from 2001-2023. I examine the explicit and implicit ways that the IMF defines the ‘household,’ as well as its representations of work within a binary of ‘burdensome’ care work and ‘empowering’ paid work. I find that the IMF’s discourse gives the gender binary, heterosexuality, reproduction and monogamy a pre-discursive quality, rendering them the ‘natural’ foundation for economic production. By presenting intimacy, care and households within the heterosexual (or heteronormative) monogamous structure, the IMF’s discourses create invisible, illegible and queer subjects, who do not conform to the (re)productive ideals of neoliberal capitalism. This has important political effects, as it curtails the possibility to imagine life outside of capitalism, neoliberalism, the gender binary and heterosexuality.
Author: Georgia Peters (University of Sydney) -
Climate justice has emerged as a central analytical framework for understanding how societies negotiate the distribution of climate burdens and benefits under conditions of deepening environmental risk. As a first-year PhD project, this study examines how principles of fairness, participation, and inclusivity shape the prospects for sustainable peace and security in climate-vulnerable states, with a focus on Bangladesh. Anchored in Nancy Fraser's Social Justice Theory (Fraser 2010), the research investigates how meaningful participation, self-expression, and equal influence over outcomes are ensured in negotiation processes within national and international environmental governance. The study employs a combination of Event Ethnography, Semi-structured Interviews and Document Analysis as methodology to trace how justice claims are articulated, contested, and institutionalised in the climate negotiations. By analysing these negotiation dynamics, the research aims to illuminate how justice-oriented governance practices can enhance institutional legitimacy and support more peaceful, resilient climate policy pathways for vulnerable countries.
Author: Swornaly Chanda (Aston University) -
The climate crisis represents a collective challenge that is increasingly being recognized as a threat to global peace and security. Among the many challenges, the issue of climate-induced displacement has been recognized as a major threat globally. The growing frequency and intensity of climate-related events around the world, particularly in the regions of the global south like South Asia, have resulted in a considerable increase in climate-induced displacement, which has disproportionately impacted vulnerable communities. This issue of disproportionate impacts and displacement poses significant challenges and brings to the table discussions about climate justice, environmental sustainability, and economic development in such regions. Following such loss and damage, the capacity to adapt, particularly by the regions of the global south, is relatively limited and constrained. The concept of loss and damage is also understood as a negative consequence of climate change, which leads to massive destruction in all spheres of a society. This paper tries to explore the relationship between climate-induced displacement, the concept of loss and damage, and climate justice in the current context. The paper will examine the ways in which diverse institutions and conferences have emerged and evolved to include such themes of loss and damage and climate impacts relating to displacement and migration. It will focus on mechanisms, like the Warsaw International Mechanism for loss and damage, the most recent loss and damage transitional committee meetings, and various resolutions from the Conference of Parties plans, and study how they aim to tackle and address this nexus of climate displacement and loss and damage, with a special focus on the South Asian region. It will highlight what measures are being worked upon to mitigate such climate-induced challenges, build resilience within communities, and improve adaptation strategies.
Author: Ateka Hasan (Jamia Millia Islamia) -
The debates about ‘development’ and ‘rights’ have been around since the end of the Second World War. Initially, the discourse on development and rights was studied separately. It was in the latter half of the 20th century when rights (Human rights) started to be seen as a part of the development discourse. Earlier studied separately, both concepts seem to have merged in the 1970s with the emergence of the ‘right to development’, which emerged from the sustained efforts of third-world countries on the international stage, calling for the proper redistribution of resources. As a result, the ‘right to development’ was recognised internationally. However, since then, debates have emerged, and scholars have begun to question the incorporation of human rights into the development discourse. There was a division among the scholars, with one supporting this merger, claiming that this incorporation has re-politicised development practices and brought the question of accountability into the picture. Others find this incorporation merely rhetorical. This paper examines the debate on the incorporation of human rights into the development discourse using the example of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013, an Act enacted to address food security challenges in India. This Act can be seen as a manifestation of the adoption of the rights-based approach in development policies. Using the debate posed above, this paper will analyse whether the right to food can politicise the discourse on development, or is it merely a rhetorical addition to the economic narrative of development?
Author: Mahavir Bhagat (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
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TU12 Panel / Understanding Peace and Security in India and BeyondSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Recent studies show that internet shutdowns have become a prominent instrument of digital governance in India, raising important questions about state power, security, and digital rights in the world’s largest democracy. This paper applies securitisation theory to examine the reasons these restrictions have been imposed and how experts understand their implications for the country. Methodologically, the study combines a longitudinal analysis of Freedom on the Net and Access Now reports from 2019-2023, secondary data analysis of ‘Interview Dataset on Digital Governance of Social Media Platforms in India and the United Kingdom’ (Kurt, 2026), and document analysis of legislation, government documents, and other relevant reports. Initial findings suggest that internet shutdowns have been conducted mostly to maintain public order especially at times of protests, violence prevention, and security management. These processes are supported by extensive legal frameworks that facilitate the normalisation of internet restrictions. The findings provide an important lens for understanding how India legitimises extraordinary digital controls while maintaining claims to democratic governance. By examining India as a leading Global South country and world’s largest democracy, the paper contributes to debates on digital governance, security, and democratic accountability.
Author: Seher Kurt (University of Glasgow) -
Recent global upheavals have had a profound influence on international architecture, and nowhere is this more visible than in Southeast Asia. For decades, the region’s foreign policy has rested on hedging – avoiding binary choices while relying on the US for security commitments and China for economic benefits. Discussions on US-China ‘rapprochement’ often assume that reduced great-power competition will lower pressure on states caught in the middle of this rivalry. This paper argues the opposite: reduced great power confrontation does not simply lower tension; instead, it reconfigures risks and opportunities. The paper studies the effect of recent transactional de-escalation and bilateral reproachment between the US and China – highlighted by the Busan trade truce and the Beijing Summit – in Southeast Asia. The study finds that rather than easing regional pressure, the rapprochement has exposed the region's vulnerability by undermining the credibility of US security commitments, recalibrating the scope of Chinese economic statecraft, and narrowing the bargaining space available to regional countries. The paper concludes that while Southeast Asian countries are already diversifying and hedging against the scenario, they should reinvest collectively in ASEAN’s institutional core. The paper contributes to understanding the limits of middle-power agency amid great-power rapprochement.
Keywords: Southeast Asia, US-China rapprochement, Hedging, ASEAN, Risk and Opportunity
Author: Prisie L Patnayak (Jawaharlal Nehru University) -
Over the last two decades, the US-China strategic competition has peaked in the Indo-Pacific, challenging the region’s small states to conduct fair bilateral relations with both major powers. This paper investigates Bangladesh’s foreign policy toward the US and China amid this geopolitical rivalry. While existing literature examines the Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from the perspectives of the major powers, this research explores how a small state maintains its bilateral relations with both superpowers while prioritising its national interests and security. Applying the theoretical framework of balancing, bandwagoning, non-alignment, and hedging from a small-state perspective, the research finds that Bangladesh pursued hedging between 2009 and 2024 to foster its relations with the US and China, avoiding a tilt to a single power and any strategic military alliance. It cooperates with China’s BRI through economic and development partnerships, while responding positively to the US IPS by publishing its own Indo-Pacific Outlook (IPO). The paper applied qualitative research methods, using academic sources, government whitepapers, and think tank publications. It has contributed to the International Relations field, bridging theoretical gaps in small states’ hedging diplomacy toward major powers in the Indo-Pacific, which is applicable for further research.
Author: Md. Rakib Hasan (Cardiff University) -
Within the context of the ‘new cold war’, resulting in a wedged bipolar system emerging in the Indo-Pacific, there are growing vulnerabilities associated with independent, stable, and doctrinally entrenched strategic positions. Post-colonial states such as India have looked to escape the pressures of heightened great power competition to assert their interests as they harness institutional mechanisms and benefits extended by both rivals in the great power contest. The existing literature characterises India’s behaviour as either balancing or hedging vis-à-vis the United States and China. The paper seeks to provide a new conceptual anchoring of post-colonial state behaviour by introducing ‘strategic liminality’ as an explanation. Strategic liminality reveals the complex, unfixed, and multifaceted nature of discursive repertoire shaping India’s sense of self vis-à-vis its engagement in the Indo-Pacific. This novel conceptualisation provides a model to explain state behaviour in the Indo- Pacific characterised by skilful bargaining behaviour within the power structure of the region. By dissecting India’s diplomatic behaviour, the article demonstrates how it has creatively utilized strategic liminality to pursue foreign policy goals and economic objectives.
Author: Abhishank Mishra (SRM University) -
While the civil-war spillover literature documents the burden on neighbouring states, it tells us far less about the mechanisms that cause that burden to compound or the interests that allow the conditions producing it to persist. This paper argues that the answer lies not in geographic proximity or structural contagion alone, but in the interests of outside powers with infrastructure and resource stakes in the conflict zone, who benefit from managed instability. When those powers selectively engage with warring factions rather than push for a negotiated settlement, the incentive for coordinated resolution vanishes, leaving conflict-adjacent host states to absorb the accumulating costs. The paper develops a three-stage framework to trace this dynamic: geopolitical competition creates a permissive environment for conflict protraction; this in turn sustains transnational conduits - displaced population recruitment, ethnic kinship networks, and narcotics-arms flows - that progressively narrow the host state's strategic options. The framework is applied to Myanmar's post-2021 civil war and its consequences for Bangladesh, drawing on semi-structured interviews with foreign ministry officials and military officers conducted in 2026. The paper contributes an account of how structural interest misalignment converts localised spillover into a compounding strategic predicament, with particular relevance for small states navigating great-power competition.
Author: Shah Md Shamrir Al Af (Bangladesh University of Professionals)
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TU12 Panel / Who Decides? Power, Policy and Exclusion in Contemporary GovernanceSponsor: Justice, inequality and exclusionConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: Alice Chessé (McGill University)
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Care workers in the National Health Service (NHS) have experienced deep transformations in their labour due to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has enforced understaffing, workload pressures and new management practices, reorganising everyday dynamics of care. Moreover, as neoliberalism broadly rearranges the distribution of care within families, it also transforms what care is and encompasses. This research explores how workers perceive and deal with these transformations. It asks how they are making sense of everyday dynamics of care in the context of neoliberal reorganisation. In order to do so, it analyses personal narratives in vlogs of nurses and doctors in the NHS. The narratives show how workers are absorbing neoliberal transformations through an increase in their emotional labour. They are constantly negotiating and adapting to conflictive demands imposed by neoliberal rationality over care. The narratives present a series of emotional practices that workers develop to compensate for the increasing burden of their workload and to maintain their own capacity to care. Through this narrative analysis, I connect emotional labour to the subjective dimension of neoliberal transformations, and suggest that neoliberalism changes everyday care relations not only through the access to healthcare, but also by changing how care work is experienced by workers.
Author: Amanda Antonette (Federal University of Santa Catarina) -
The historiography of the political economy of global wealth inequality remembers the 1980s as the global neoliberal backlash against 1970s proposals for universal welfare policies. At the global level, diplomatic negotiations to implement the New International Economic Order (NIEO) failed to establish a universal “welfare world.” At the national level, it started a long trend of welfare state retrenchment in affluent liberal democracies, followed by the global adoption of social investment policies in the mid-1990s. While these two stories are generally told separately, recent scholarship on reproductive and racial capitalism shows that these historiographies silence how imperial extraction and exclusion have enabled liberal welfare state development. Taking this imperial context as starting point, this paper tells an alternate history of welfare state retrenchment that centers the transnational circulation of social policy scripts across the Global North and South. Through engagement with new archival material from the OECD and UNCTAD pertaining to Mexico’s involvement in negotiations over the implementation of the NIEO and its accession to the OECD, I show that Mexican diplomats and economists have played an important yet understudied role of brokerage in the articulation of new global social policy scripts embracing conditionality at the expense of universality.
Author: Alice Chessé (McGill University) -
Generative artificial intelligence is increasingly used to evaluate political information, summarize candidate profiles, and generate strategic recommendations. As these systems become embedded within democratic information environments, they may begin to function as informal political gatekeepers that shape perceptions of political legitimacy and electoral viability. Yet little research has examined how AI systems evaluate political candidates or whether they reproduce existing inequalities in democratic representation.
This paper introduces the concept of algorithmic electability to explain how generative AI systems may reproduce assumptions regarding political leadership, legitimacy, and candidate viability. Drawing on an experimental study conducted across six major generative AI platforms, the analysis evaluates candidate profiles that vary across LGBTQ identity cues, gender presentation, and leadership style while holding qualifications constant. The findings indicate that AI systems frequently distinguish between competence and electability. Candidates who depart from conventional leadership expectations are often evaluated as equally qualified but less politically viable. The magnitude of these effects varies substantially across AI models.
The paper argues that generative AI should be understood not merely as an information technology but as an emerging political institution capable of influencing democratic representation. As AI systems become increasingly integrated into political communication and decision-making processes, understanding their role in shaping perceptions of political legitimacy becomes an important challenge for democratic governance.
Author: Zachary Baum (Rutgers University) -
Participatory approaches are often presented as a means of redistributing power and fostering more equitable relationships between academics and communities. Yet participation itself does not eliminate hierarchy. This paper examines how power was negotiated, resisted, and reproduced within a long-term collaboration between a PhD researcher and community partner leads from Cambodia and Thailand undertaking conflict research. Drawing on autoethnographic vignettes and interviews with collaborators, the analysis explores how power surfaced through three dimensions of the partnership: academic affiliation, funding, and friendship. Findings demonstrate that efforts to create more equitable forms of collaboration were continually unsettled by institutional identities, resource control, prior relationships, and differing understandings of authority and expertise throughout research implementation. Power repeatedly resurfaced in unexpected ways, attaching itself to university affiliations, budget responsibilities, and even the long-standing friendships among the research leads. At times, practices intended to foster inclusion generated new forms of exclusion, particularly around who felt able to shape decisions, influence research directions, and define the meaning of participation itself. Rather than presenting participation as inherently empowering within research design, the paper argues that participation is better understood as an ongoing negotiation of power. Examining these tensions contributes to broader debates on justice, inequality, and exclusion within community–academic partnerships
Author: Raymond Hyma (University of Warwick / Monash University)
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TU12 / Plenary roundtable - AI, Drones, and More: The Future of Peace and Conflict
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TU12 Panel / Developmental and Environmental Challenges in the Global SouthSponsor: Environmental degradation, development and transformationConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Social acceptance has become a central concern in debates on energy transition, particularly as governments (central and local governments) pursue policies framed around “urgency,” “speed,” and “scientific” imperatives that often compress deliberative spaces for citizens. Building on the multidimensional framework of social acceptance (Wüstenhagen, Wolsink & Bürer, 2007; Elis et al., 2023), this paper conceptualizes acceptance not as a static attitude but as a processual and political phenomenon shaped by shifting landscapes, policy regimes, and market mechanisms. Social acceptance emerges through interactions across time, power, and scale—an insight that becomes increasingly relevant as energy transition‑related industries expand into resource‑rich regions of the Global South.
Using the case of the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Central Sulawesi, this paper illustrates how social acceptance evolves across the phases of nickel extraction, industrialization, and socio‑technical regime consolidation. The Morowali case reflects what is called the ‘processuality’ of social acceptance. In the early phase, local elites supported the allocation of 4,000 hectares of land in Bahodopi Sub‑District, driven by hopes of the local elites and communities that the nickel industry—anchored by PT Bintang Delapan Mineral and PT Sulawesi Mining Investment—would bring employment and development in the district. However, as mining expanded and the coal‑fired captive power plant was constructed, concerns over environmental degradation, labor conditions, and unequal benefit distribution intensified. Acceptance declined as communities experienced the material and social consequences of rapid industrialization, compounded by limited avenues for meaningful participation due to centralized permitting and weakened local governance. While renewable energy innovation is often associated with hopes for decarbonization and local development, conflicts surrounding land, pollution, and governance continue to pose major challenges for the political sustainability of the transition.
The paper will use process tracing as a method to demonstrate the conditions under which social acceptance is formed, negotiated, or withdrawn. Drawing from the case, the paper will seek an opportunity to contribute to the debate on social acceptance, according to Elis et al. (2023), which differs depending on the levels of diversity among key decision-makers in shaping the likelihood of developing acceptance or, on the contrary, losing trust and making resistance. The study shed light on how institutional lock-in reserves a logic of extractivism in the politics of social acceptance, in turn making Indonesia’s energy transition a processual and uncertain.
Keywords: energy transition, social acceptance, extractivism, lock-inAuthor: Indah Surya Wardhani (Universitas Gadjah Mada) -
This article draws from the Multispecies Justice framework to explore whether multispecies principles have been employed in Brazil’s 2025 Plano Nacional de Desenvolvimento da Bioeconomia. Despite Brazil's assured stance in global bioeconomy leadership and the unparalleled biological wealth of its Amazonian territories, scholars, policymakers, and civil society actors have yet to engage with the implications of this new model of sustainable economic development for justice between human and non-human beings. Previous research has continuously shown how sustainability language is instrumentalised in public policy, but its employment in national bioeconomy governance plans considering the misrecognition of nonhuman rights has barely been taken up in literature. Nevertheless, MSJ offers a valuable matrix for interpreting the PNDBio’s instrumental ontology of life in contrast with the relational practices of the Amazonian sociobioeconomy. This paper shows that the PNDBio strategically appropriates the term sociobioeconomy without necessarily aligning with Indigenous and rural communities’ values or making genuine efforts to address intersecting, more-than-human calamities and injustice. This research is a theory-informed critical discourse analysis of a public policy document. It concludes that Brazil’s national bioeconomy reshapes human-nonhuman relationships based on a rationale of economic valuation of life.
Authors: Maria Macedo (University of Porto) , Joana Castro Pereira (University of Porto)* -
The dominant Anthropocene discourse on climate change is being challenged on various grounds for placing a collective onus for the climate crisis on an abstract entity called humanity. The legal discourse that underlies the International climate change legal instruments continues to be Anthropocentric. This paper tries to explore if and how the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) aligns with the Anthropocene discourse. This paper further tries to study whether India has been utilising the principle of CBDR in alignment with the original object of the principle.
Author: Parnil Yodha (Jawaharlal Nehru University) -
This paper explores the changing meanings and practices of state sovereignty vis-à-vis international climate finance while executing climate mitigation projects in developing countries. It uses the concept of “sovereignty bargain” developed by Karen Litfin (1997) to argue that developing countries have established a set of sovereignty-claims in relation to international climate finance through international climate change negotiations. However, while executing the projects funded by international climate finance domestically, national governments often renegotiate these claims leading to a loss of sovereignty for them. As a case in point, the paper focuses on India’s solar park scheme, the “Development of Solar Parks and Ultra-Mega Solar Power Projects”, under the National Solar Mission. Part one of the paper theorizes the relationship between state sovereignty and international climate finance as a set of sovereignty-claims established by developing countries through UNFCCC principles like CBDR-RC. Part two studies the plug-and-play model of India’s Bhadla (Rajasthan) and Rewa (Madhya Pradesh) solar parks, wherein the state provides infrastructural and fiscal incentives to international climate finance and Solar Power Developers to mitigate risks associated with these projects. Part three analyzes how the Indian state loses its sovereignty-claims in these projects due to the asymmetrical nature of risk-sharing among the different stakeholders. In conclusion, the paper argues that the gap in theory and practice of state sovereignty is symptomatic of the conflict between the international and national politics of climate change.
Author: Sonal Negi (Jawaharlal Nehru University) -
Scholarship on environmental upgrading within global value chains (GVCs) has made substantial contributions to understanding how sustainability governance reshapes supplier-buyer relations and distributes costs and benefits across supply chains. Yet a critical blindspot persists: the informal sector. Despite informal economic activity accounting for the majority of employment across the Global South and being structurally embedded within the GVCs undergoing environmental upgrading, its position within these processes remains almost entirely unexamined. This article addresses that gap through an analysis of environmental upgrading in Morocco's garment and textile industry - a sector whose competitive foundations rest on the deep structural integration of formal and informal production. Drawing on Phillips' (2011) framework of adverse incorporation and Bair and Werner's (2011) concept of disarticulation, it argues that environmental upgrading operates along three axes of formal-informal restructuring: intensifying the production of informality by redrawing formal-informal boundaries through firm expulsion and workforce casualisation; producing disarticulation for specific informal actors whose livelihoods are structured around material flows that environmental compliance reorganises; and deepening adverse incorporation for those who remain, as compliance costs travel downward through informal arrangements while governance protections do not. The findings point toward the need to place formal-informal restructuring at the centre of critical GVC scholarship on the green transition.
Author: Josh White (University of Sheffield)
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TU12 Panel / International Aid, Trade Policy and Global Monetary RegimesSponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), established in 2015 and primarily promoted by China, has been central to debates over the type of development it seeks to promote across Asia and beyond. Since its inception, the AIIB has sought to establish credibility and legitimacy by co-financing projects with established institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and by adopting high environmental and social standards. This study, however, focuses on a project solely financed by the AIIB to examine how the processes underlying project financing and implementation can negatively affect local populations. It relies on semi-structured interviews with affected communities, project analysts, and experts involved in the AIIB-financed project, providing a grounded perspective on the bank’s operational and social impacts. This work contributes to ongoing debates about the AIIB's modus operandi and how it differentiates from other multilateral development banks.
Author: Matteo Cianforlini (University of Bologna) -
As the Philippines navigates geopolitical tensions alongside uncertain global markets, the spotlight has been on the government’s ability to secure its economic interests against a volatile security backdrop. The active pursuit of economic diplomacy ranks high on policymakers’ agendas. While this is the conventional approach to Philippine foreign policy (FP), it can also be argued that the scope of FP analysis does not only include issues that directly impact economic diplomacy—it also involves studying how the space for acceptable policy is defined and made possible.
It is in this spirit that this paper examines the financialisation of remittances as a FP tool. The critical importance of remittances to the Philippines has already been widely discussed but there has been relatively limited attention given to the financialisation of remittances. The significance of remittances in this context can be illustrated in terms of (i) how remittances have affected long-standing dependence on external funding, and (ii) how this has shaped the Philippines' policy space and exposure to external risks.
Studies on remittance flows between the Global North and Global South have captured the persistence of inequalities underpinning relations between host and home countries. This paper aims to offer a more nuanced assessment of the financialisation of Philippine remittances that puts the fragmentation of sovereignty and its implications for the Philippines’ position in the global political economy at the centre of the analysis.
Author: Te-Anne Robles (University of the Philippines Diliman) -
This paper investigates whether Argentina’s transition from an exogenously expanding exchange rate band in 2025 to an inflation-indexed regime in early 2026 represents a genuine stabilization or a discretionary framework that replicates historical structural vulnerabilities. By auditing a four-fold framework of data variables—including official state-reported indices, the Dólar Blue rate, crowdsourced metrics from Numbeo, and primary price tracking of housing, utilities, transportation, and private retail sectors—this study identifies the limitations of a monetary policy defined by administrative discretion.
Using the Ecuadorian dollarization experience as a comparative benchmark, the research evaluates the hypothesis that Argentina’s current regime sustains an interventionist environment that masks a profound credibility gap. Built upon an empirical foundation spanning late 2025 through November 2026, the study utilizes initial multi-provincial field research and an ongoing six-month longitudinal audit to measure the divergence between institutional anchors and lived economic reality. The analysis intends to determine if this "monetary trap" provides a false floor for stability while incurring higher transaction costs than a formalized currency transition. Ultimately, this research examines how these residual failures dictate Global South strategic alignment and assesses the risk that discretionary indexed bands may be inadvertently teetering on the edge of historical inflationary patterns.
Author: Eric Pardue (Golden Gate University/Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador) -
Foreign aid budgets have faced sustained retrenchment across OECD donors, creating space for an alternative form of public development lending delivered through national development finance institutions (DFIs). Yet DFIs vary markedly in their resourcing strategies: while some donor governments rely on public resources, others have restructured ownership by incorporating private financiers as shareholders. This paper documents a process of ownership privatization and its distributive consequences for DFI investment abroad. I argue that privatized ownership reshapes bilateral development finance allocation, making DFIs more sensitive to credit risk in recipient countries and less responsive to donor foreign policy motivations. To test this argument, I draw on an original project-level dataset of 7,248 investments extended by 12 DFIs between 1970 and 2024, alongside an original organizational-level dataset on DFI ownership structures. I show that greater private ownership share is associated with reduced financing to countries experiencing sovereign credit downgrades, and find no effect of geopolitical alignment on investment allocation — indicating that privatized bilateral finance behaves differently from traditional aid. These findings shed light on structural changes in Western foreign assistance and the political economy of contemporary development finance.
Author: Nicolas Bau (University of Geneva) -
How does geopolitical pressure travel through multilateral institutions? We answer this question through one concrete conduit: trade concerns at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Trade concerns are committee-based interactions through which members contest, coordinate, and cooperate on trade and regulatory policy. We construct a novel dataset of more than 30,000 member interventions across five WTO committees from 1995 to 2025, identifying the states involved, the affected products and industries, and the policy measures at issue. Combining these data with text analysis, coalition networks, and interviews, we show that technical cooperation is politically exposed but not politically subsumed. Participation patterns are mainly driven by economic interdependence: members are substantially more likely to raise concerns against partners whose markets matter for their exports. While our results also suggest that geopolitical alignment can matter for the politics of initiation, political distance and rivalry do not systematically predict more confrontational objectives, more intense language, or more securitized framing. We further find that institutional design matters: states rely more on security and geopolitical framings in more political committees, while more technical committees act as effective buffers against politicization. Technical forums thus provide an important site where cooperation can persist under political strain by being channeled through institutional routines, technical procedures, and repeated interaction.
Authors: Christian Winkler (University of Oxford) , Yueyi Li (Princeton University)* -
Since the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) operationalised its effectiveness assessment framework in 2013, not one jurisdiction has achieved High Effectiveness on Immediate Outcome 5 – the standard measuring whether competent authorities actually know who owns and controls companies. This universal failure persists across every income level, legal tradition, and institutional capacity. It is better understood as a failure of political will than of institutional capacity.
This paper argues that the gap between FATF's legal standards and policy implementation is structural rather than incidental. Drawing on organised hypocrisy theory, political economy analysis, and post-colonial institutional theory, it proposes six mechanisms through which conflicts of interest, from standard-setting to supervision to prosecution, systematically produce divergence between legal mandate and policy outcome.
Using Nigeria as a critical case with comparative analysis of the United Kingdom and South Africa, including a natural experiment produced by their simultaneous FATF grey-list exit in October 2025, the paper examines how nominal cooperation within FATF conceals a deeply asymmetric architecture. Source countries in the Global South bear the compliance burden while destination countries in the Global North maintain the opacity structures that enable illicit flows. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the architecture.Author: Samira Bello (Cardiff University)
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TU12 Panel / Making and institutionalising peace and securitySponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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The Middle East and North Africa is often dubbed the least economically and politically integrated region in the world. This paper contributes to debates on regional cooperation in the Middle East by examining the integration efforts that accompanied the Madrid/Oslo peace process in the 1990s. At the critical juncture that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War, aspirations for a peaceful Middle East often intertwined with a paradigm that cast boycotts and tariffs as relics of the past. Focusing especially on the multilateral working groups and the World Economic Forum-sponsored MENA Economic Summits, this paper sheds light on an often overlooked phase of the region’s history. Drawing on recently declassified archival material and elite interviews, it uncovers unsuccessful attempts at regional institution-building, as well as the often contested vision of “the new Middle East” that underpinned them. It further shows how these initiatives were perceived as integral to peace-making efforts in Israel-Palestine and beyond. Finally, it posits that some of the concepts and projects devised in the 1990s were later rediscovered and reclaimed by actors in the region and worldwide.
Author: Mattia Serra (Geneva Graduate Institute) -
Policymakers and commentators are increasingly debating Ukraine’s post-war security through Cold War precedents: the ‘West German model’ of gradual integration into Western security structures, and the ‘Korea model’ of an armistice along a frozen front line. Both models presuppose that Russia will accept a bounded outcome in which Ukraine survives as a protected sovereign state, rather than seeking the full subjugation of Ukraine. Yet Russia’s declared aims remain maximalist, pointing to Ukraine’s complete conquest. This calls into question whether either model’s central precondition, that Russia would accept a bounded settlement, can hold. This paper tests the conditions behind each model against Ukraine, including whether a credible guarantor remains available, from either the US under the current administration or Europe. It argues that the conditions behind these analogies do not hold in Ukraine’s case, meaning they offer false comfort rather than a workable template. It warns that a freeze built upon a false template could enable Russia to rearm and return, increasing the risk that Ukraine’s post-war settlement becomes a pathway to renewed war, and potentially wider escalation involving NATO.
Author: Jordan Heyburn (Queen's University Belfast) -
The research explores the aesthetic representation of post-conflict narratives as a way of broadening understandings of contemporary reconciliation challenges, especially in postcolonial societies where deep-rooted antagonism is still vivid. By taking the everyday as ‘(a) site where language, performance and agency […] contribute to the remaking of world politics’ (Björkdahl et al. 2019), the study zooms into creative performances as an everyday practice where narratives are portrayed in a way that is difficult to be captured in written texts. Working with data collected through observations and focus groups from conflict resolution classes (2023-2025), the research contests that aesthetic approaches to peace and war have political potentials to go beyond mainstream narratives by offering two main contributions: first, aesthetic narratives open up a locus to challenge ‘us versus others’ perspectives though empathetic practices that allow multivocal narratives to coexist. Second, performances as everyday aesthetic space reveal hidden narratives expressed through emotional dynamics, often overlooked in official narratives. The originality lies in suggesting critical approaches to understanding reconciliation narratives, practiced and empowered through aesthetic means, for developing inclusive historical narratives with others, rather than against them, and this by bringing lights into ‘everyday narratives’ (Stanley and Jackson 2016) in postwar societies.
Author: Emilia S. Heo (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University) -
The diversification of mediators in international conflicts is not a new phenomenon. Since the end of the Cold War, a multitude of small and medium-sized states, regional and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO’s), and individuals have increasingly assumed roles as peacemakers. As a result, the field of peace mediation has become ‘crowded’.
A recent development, however, is the emergence of unconventional mediators. Unlike traditional mediators, whose legitimacy is commonly associated with key principles such as impartiality, inclusivity, national ownership, respect for international law and normative frameworks, and the production of high-quality peace agreements, unconventional actors frequently conduct mediation independently of an established mediation framework. Actors such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and, more recently, Pakistan illustrate this trend and reflect a broader transformation in the practice of peace mediation.
The research examines why conflicting parties increasingly turn to unconventional peace-makers and explores conditions under which they can facilitate durable mediation outcomes. Methodologically, the paper draws on literature in IR and conflict management. Recently brokered peace initiatives will be used as illustrative examples. The research argues that their appeal stems from their normative flexibility and pragmatism in mediation initiatives, allowing them to adjust the norms underpinning these initiatives rather than adhere to them rigidly.
Author: Feline Geukens (University Hasselt)
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TU12 / Meet the Editors of Review of International Studies and European Journal of International Security
This session will feature editors from both BISA journals – Review of International Studies and European Journal of International Security. Join Professor Andy Hom (RIS) and Professor Andrew Mumford (EJIS) for an informal and interactive session where you can ask questions about publishing, the editorial process and what makes a strong submission. Whether you’re thinking about submitting your work, have questions about peer review, or simply want to find out more about the journal, this is your opportunity to put your questions directly to the editors.
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TU12 Panel / Power and influence in the global economySponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
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The rise of passive investment structures such as BlackRock and ETFs, which hold vast capital with minimal control, has coincided with the expansion of structures such as limited partnerships, holding companies and dual-class shares that grant outsized control to certain owners. How should we understand this ambivalence?
Political economists have focused on asset managers and institutional investors, framing contem-porary capitalism as a form of “monopoly capitalism.” However, this perspective overlooks the rise of high-control capital structures, described as “neo-patrimonial capitalism.” Rather than re-presenting competing tendencies, we argue that these developments are mutually constitutive.
Based on six years of fieldwork in family holdings, private equity and asset management, we argue that contemporary capitalism is neither dominated by dispersed financial ownership nor by patri-monial control alone, but by the articulation of both within hierarchical layers of capital. Econo-mic power stems not primarily from ownership itself, but from the capacity to orchestrate different forms of capital and distribute control, returns, risk and responsibility unevenly across them. High-control actors can thus mobilise low-control capital while maintaining concentrated control.
Our article reconnects debates on financialisation, wealth concentration and capitalist power by shifting attention from financial intermediaries to the patrimonial centres that organise capital ac-cumulation.Authors: Quentin Belot Couloumies (Université Grenoble Alpes) , Théo Bourgeron (University of Edinburgh) -
Which post-crisis global financial governance signals are interpreted as credibility-enhancing by key market gatekeepers? Classic principal-agent accounts expect delegation, monitoring, and policy constraints to strengthen commitment and increase market confidence. This paper presents an alternative theoretical account by developing the notion of market-mediated credibility. It argues that credibility in global financial governance is partly produced through private-sector intermediaries, especially credit rating agencies (CRAs), whose evaluative logic differs from institutionalist expectations. Rather than rewarding institutional strength as such, CRAs may privilege signals that combine reputational validation with short-term stability, policy flexibility and access to liquidity. Empirically, the paper uses sovereign credit ratings as a proxy for how market gatekeepers interpret international financial commitments. It examines three post-2008 arrangements that embody distinct credibility signals: soft-law coordination through the Financial Stability Board, regional supervisory oversight through the European Systemic Risk Board, and liquidity insurance through Federal Reserve swap lines. Using panel data for 47 countries from 2005 to 2016, the findings suggest that club-like coordination and discretionary liquidity support are associated with more positive rating effects than formalized oversight. The paper, therefore, challenges the assumption that stronger delegation automatically enhances credibility. It contributes to research in Global Governance and International Political Economy by showing how the credibility of global financial governance is mediated, translated, and reworked by the same private market actors, who then evaluate member states' creditworthiness.
Author: Paolo Stohlman (University of Bologna) -
After 30 years from the publication of a firm critique of the East Asian Miracle, the World Bank has recently issued a new report, recognising industrial policy as an appropriate vehicle for economic development. Why are international economic organisations shifting their approach towards industrial policy?
This paper will investigate how the idea of industrial policy has travelled from East Asian economies to the major international organisations. Contributing to debates on norm diffusion and East/West political economy, this paper will look at China’s role in economic governance in the past twenty years. China’s ideas of state-led growth and state intervention on industrial policy, that have often been criticised as against the western principles of free trade and hindered by international organisations like the World Bank, are now recognised as valuable means to growth.
Building on constructivist theories of norm diffusion and change, this paper will analyse how the idea of industrial policy circulated in international economic governance. This paper will adopt a qualitative analysis approach, looking at primary documents of international organisations (e.g. official reports, minutes of meetings, Trade Policy Reviews), as well as official documents of China from national database of the Ministry of Foreign Commerce. The paper aims to understand how the Eastern idea of industrial policy has influenced Western international organisations, analysing China’s discourse in international organisations like the World Trade Organisation.Author: Salvatore Barillà (Newcastle University) -
Recent debates in IPE have highlighted the central role of European banks in the globalization of finance and the development of contemporary financialisation. Yet these debates have often paid limited attention to the diversity of European banking systems. Comparative Political Economy (CPE), by contrast, has traditionally emphasised institutional diversity and the uneven trajectories of national financial systems in Europe. However, this diversity has often been theorised through a limited set of ideal-typical models. In particular, German banking has frequently served as the archetype of a European model of “organised finance”, characterised by large universal banks, long-term bank–industry relations, patient capital, and the coordination of industrial investment.
This paper argues that the Italian case reveals important limitations in this approach. Because of its differences from the German model, Italian banking has often been characterised as dysfunctional, hybrid, or exceptional. Such labels have made it difficult to conceptualise Italian finance on its own terms and, in turn, to theorise both its transformation and its contribution to wider processes of European financialisation. More broadly, they tend to conceptualise institutional change as adaptation to external pressures rather than as a process shaped by the strategies and competitive struggles of financial actors themselves.
Building on recent work on extroverted financialisation and raiding finance, the paper examines how Italian banks and financiers engaged with offshore finance and leverage-based strategies from the post-war period onwards. In doing so, it shows how Italian banks were not merely shaped by European financialisation but actively participated in its construction. The paper, therefore, proposes an alternative way of theorising European financialisation, one that takes national diversity seriously while analysing how distinct banking systems actively contributed to broader transformations in European finance.
Author: Jacopo Maria Magurno (University of Sussex) -
Diamond trade governance is managed via the Kimberley Process, an international certification regime designed to prevent conflict diamonds from being traded, with a focus on traceability and origin. Because the Kimberley Process was not designed to be linked to a particular state, G7 countries have developed a parallel system to address sanctioned states, which specifically focuses on Russian diamonds. How do sanctions reshape global trade networks, and what role might intermediary states play in facilitating trade diversion?
This paper is located within the sanctions literature but looks beyond compliance and economic coercion to focus on sanctions’ effects on geopolitical alignment: recent scholarship shows that sanctions often lead to diversion and adaptation for the target state, as opposed to a straightforward exit and exclusion from a typical market. Hence, using Evelyn Goh and Cheng-Chwee Kui’s understanding of hedging, the paper considers the role of intermediary states such as India and the United Arab Emirates, and their relations with Russia and the G7 in the diamond trade.
The paper first looks at the relationship between the Kimberley Process and the G7 sanctions architecture. It then traces trade flows within the Russian context by developing an event-study design based on UN Comtrade, Eurostat, and national customs data. Finally, it draws on the hedging literature to assess the role of intermediary states and to evaluate how the Russian diamond trade flow might have been reconfigured rather than eliminated.Authors: Virginie Grzelczyk (Aston University) , Yannick Maier (Independent)
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TU12 Panel / Power, Information and Misinformation in a Changing WorldSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Scholars across disciplines acknowledge that resilience develops not from extraordinary human capacity but from the dynamic interplay of psychological and sociocultural factors embedded in ordinary daily life. Research among indigenous people and communities living in conflict zones show resilience emerges from both conservation of local ways of being, and from everyday acts of active resistance. Literature has attended less carefully to the specific case of women who absorb the effects of prolonged conflicts and are burdened with caregiving and maintaining community relationships? Using the work of cultural anthropologists on "violences of everyday" and the resilience in cultural contexts, this research examines how Nagorno-Karabakh women’s mundane daily activities and life-affirming beliefs empower them to build resilience amid war and displacement. The ethnographic fieldwork was conducted between September-October 2024 and in August 2025 in Armenia where they are currently sheltered. What emerges is a culturally generated resilience rooted in everyday practices and narratives of mothering, mourning, and cooking that defy geopolitical remapping and contest the politics of cultural erasure.
Author: Karin Saghdejian (University of Leeds) -
The rise in ethnonationalism in India and the growing vulnerability of minorities correspond to the resurgence of global conservatism and its fabrication of internal enemies. Building on scholarship that situates anti-Muslim hostility within a global imperial genealogy, this project examines how contemporary Indian Islamophobic media discourses are embedded in and reinforced by transnational narratives of the “Muslim enemy” amid the worldwide rise of hypernationalism. It argues that Indian right-wing media does not merely reflect local ethnonationalist anxieties but actively reproduces them by mobilising globally circulating Islamophobic tropes, affects, and legitimising frameworks. While Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire provides an important conceptual starting point, this study extends the analysis by examining how such narratives are operationalised within specific Indian media ecosystems. Methodologically, it combines critical discourse analysis with comparative media analysis of television news, digital platforms, and selected AI generated images, read alongside transnational Islamophobic media narratives. Focusing on the post-2014 political landscape, the study demonstrates how exclusionary discourse normalises minority vulnerability and contributes to democratic erosion in contemporary India. Situated primarily within media studies, and informed by cultural and identity studies, this research examines the mediated production of anti-Muslim hostility and its political consequences.
Author: Esha Jaiswal (Cambridge University Press) -
As traditional institutions falter and geopolitical competition intensifies, the capacity to assess and communicate political risk has become indispensable — yet existing frameworks remain largely shaped by and for great powers. This paper addresses that gap by presenting a novel methodology of risk assessment, designed to deliver a structured weekly global risk report produced by researchers at the Center for Global Studies (CEG/UnB). The paper proposes a replicable methodology combining Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) data collection with a qualitative framework grounded in hypothesis-testing and fuzzy-set logic. Through this lens, diffuse international signals are transformed into country-specific actionable assessments of externally-originated political risks. To demonstrate the methodology empirically, the paper traces the Hormuz Strait crisis and reconstructs how its global dynamics produced measurable risk exposure within the Brazilian context — illustrating both the conflict-cooperation tensions inherent in energy corridor disputes and their asymmetric consequences for peripheral actors. Drawing on risk analysis theory and a qualitative single-case study design, this research advances a policy-oriented, replicable model for political risk reporting adaptable to other middle powers navigating an increasingly volatile international order.
Authors: Bruno Lass (University of Brasília) , Jales Caur (University of Brasília) -
South Asia is a distinctive geostrategic environment characterized by a perilous geography, intractability of the longstanding rivalry, a fraught border, short launch-to-impact times, and three geographically contiguous nuclear weapon states (NWS) persistently engaged in testing each other’s resolve to confirm whether escalation is both ‘controllable and calculable’. The dynamics of interaction in South Asia, particularly between India and Pakistan, has been explained theoretically through the ‘stability-instability paradox’. With the sharpening of rivalries in the broader pursuit of escalation dominance, both India and Pakistan have continually sought new advantages and technological breakthroughs to improve their position, and to the detriment of strategic stability. Militaries in South Asia foresee the potential deployment of lethal autonomous weapon systems in anti-access or area denial operations deep within the adversary’s territory, and Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD) operations across the Kashmir border. Fully Autonomous weapon systems, based on their capability to autonomously track, select, and engage targets at superhuman speed, with an opaque human-machine interface, will have transformative effects on stability in South Asia. The central research question explored in the paper was whether autonomous weapons pose a challenge to Stability in South Asia.
Author: Abhishank Mishra (SRM University) -
Small states are materially weak but not voiceless. At the UN General Debate (UNGD) they routinely confront crises involving great powers, yet whether they name and blame the powerful actor, or speak instead through principle and indirection, remains poorly understood. This article develops the concept of rhetorical non-provocation, a practice of articulating positions while withholding direct, accusatory naming of a powerful state. Drawing on the UNGD Corpus, it analyzes more than ten thousand crisis-window speeches across four cases, namely, the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the war in Ukraine, and the South China Sea disputes, using dictionary-based measure of naming, tone, and restraint, complemented by a speech-vote comparison. Indirect restraint, not silence or condemnation, is the dominant mode found, where small states discuss crises overwhelmingly through sovereignty, international law, and de-escalation rather than blame, and avoid naming the relevant power specifically. This restraint is conditional since geographically exposed states name aggressors openly, while unprotected ones hedge. Comparing speeches with UNGA votes on resoutions directly related to crises reveals widespread quiet condemnation, which means, states support condemnatory resolutions while declining to name the aggressor. Restraint, the article argues, is a form of diplomatic agency rather than weakness.
Author: Manish Jung Pulami (The University of Osaka)
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15:45
Coffee and Networking Session
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TU12 Panel / Domestic politics and International RelationsSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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The proposed presentation is based on Chapter 6 of my PhD research, analysing “British Labour and building the back-channel legacy: Labour ministers and advisors assert intelligence authority in Northern Ireland, 1995- 1996”. The presentation will examine British Labour’s party-political approach to building its back-channel legacy as it approached government. Key to this assessment is analysing whether British Labour used existing back-channel architecture to shape its understanding of republicanism after the movement gained new public political standing from 1993, following Chiffon’s exposure. Back-channel architecture is taken to include a spectrum from Hume-Adams, the formal MI5-mandated Duddy back-channel and a series of informal British Labour-Sinn Féin channels which emerged more concretely in this 1995 – 1996 period. Around four channels are known to date, as well as several accompanying efforts which were closed off as the UK state developed its handle on back-channel politics in Northern Ireland. Instigation of informal channels was achieved privately to protect bipartisanship as the British state experimented with how such cross-party cooperation might contribute to counterterrorism at the political level. Informal channels protected British Labour’s political reputation where public opinion on, and the political cost of, Labour back-channel use remained unpredictable.
Author: Polly Bowerman (Anglia Ruskin University) -
How does the circulation of images shape the construction and international projection of Brazilian environmental policy during Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administrations (2003–2010)? This paper examines how official images were strategically employed to promote Brazil’s environmental agenda in the international arena. Drawing on the assumption that images function not merely as illustrative elements but as instruments of power capable of shaping narratives, producing legitimacy, and influencing global perceptions, the study is situated at the intersection of International Relations, visual politics, and aesthetic theory. The research aims to analyze the role of images in the international projection of Brazil’s environmental policy, focusing on their production, dissemination, and symbolic effects. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, interpretive, and descriptive approach, combining visual analysis and discourse analysis. The empirical corpus comprises official photographs, diplomatic records, environmental summit imagery, and governmental communication materials produced during Lula’s governments. Preliminary findings indicate that visual representations played a central role in constructing Brazil’s international image as an environmentally committed actor. The images consistently highlighted Brazil’s participation in multilateral forums, engagement with international leaders, and symbolic associations with the Amazon, suggesting that aesthetic practices significantly shaped external perceptions of Brazilian environmental policy.
Author: Maria Gabriela Mendonça Mazzarella (UFPE) -
Many people have heard of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), but what about organisations such as Tories Against Cruise and Trident (TACT) or the Young Conservatives’ Youth for Multilateral Disarmament? Nuclear disarmament is associated with left-wing politics, yet anti-nuclear politics on the right remains overlooked. This paper analyses ‘Conservative anti-nuclearism’ from WW2 up to 2024, revealing a 79-year anti-nuclear stance among elite and grassroot Conservatives, uncovering perhaps the shyest of Tories – those opposed to nuclear weapons.
Not only will this paper present a fascinating, untold and counter-intuitive narrative of opposition to nuclear weapons from within the Conservative Party, it also opens an entirely new research field: Conservative anti-nuclearism. Amid rising nuclear tensions in Europe over Ukraine – driven by the actions of right-wing governments associated with the so-called ‘nationalist international’, from Putin’s Russia to the second Trump presidency, a possible National Rally victory in France and a potential Reform government in the UK – alongside the Conservative Party’s current period out of office – exploring the counter-narrative of conservative anti-nuclearism offers a fresh perspective on nuclear disarmament in a way that may appeal to conservatives more than anti-nuclearist policies emanating from their traditional unilateralist associations on the left.
Author: James Simpkin (Craven College)
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TU12 Panel / International Climate Governance: Between Crisis and DiplomacySponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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In recent years, the role of youth and youth-led initiatives has garnered significant attention in transboundary water diplomacy discourses. Both international and national discourses have increasingly acknowledged youth as critical agents in establishing dialogue in sectors demanding multi-stakeholder engagement. In South Asia, where shared waters have increasingly become a source of contention rather than cooperation, youth-led forums have emerged as an effective platform in visibilising agency and building dialogue in areas otherwise characterised by conflict. Taking a cue from recent literature on relational water diplomacy, this study situates youth as critical agents of change in this transition and asks how meaningful changes in water diplomacy can be fostered through youth leadership. Drawing on some emerging youth-led initiatives, it demonstrates a range of sectors where youth participation can bridge local and diplomatic narratives and build cross border dialogue. The study also highlights some of the challenges youth forums face within the existing framework and provides a way forward.
Author: Yubaraj Das (South Asian University) -
The climate crisis has brought to light the startling divide between the Global South and Global North. While the South, despite having small historical emissions, experiences terrible climate impacts ranging from rising sea levels to extreme weather events, the North, which is responsible for the majority of emissions, struggles to balance responsibility with economic considerations. The South demands reparations and rapid carbon reductions, citing the grave threat climate change poses to its communities and economies. They emphasise the burden of limited resources and little financial support as they try to adapt. The debate extends to include the concept of climate justice. Climate justice proponents claim that the most vulnerable communities, particularly those in the Global South, bear a disproportionate share of the impact of climate change. As a result, these communities confront significant environmental degradation, loss of livelihoods, and greater vulnerability to natural catastrophes, prompting them to migrate in quest of safety and security. Climate migration is a looming consequence. Millions of people who have already been displaced by climate disasters are seeking asylum, prompting concerns about mass exodus and resource scarcity in the South, as well as ethical and legal quandaries in the North about how to manage climate refugees. The paper will analyse this global divide and try to answer the question: How do historical and contemporary circumstances, as well as varying stakeholder viewpoints on reparations, emissions reductions, and climate migration, contribute to the complex and shifting climate divide between the Global South and North?
Author: Ateka Hasan (Jamia Millia Islamia) -
On 16 December 1975 the Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC) opened in Paris gathering 27 diplomatic delegations from the First and Third Worlds to conduct high-level negotiations over the reform of global economic governance. The first diplomatic conference between oil producers and consumers, the CIEC meant to negotiate a solution to the oil crisis as well as the implementation of the Declaration for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Often forgotten from mainstream histories of global governance, the conventional historiographic account of the Conference is a story of failure attributed to divisions between OPEP and non-OPEP G77 members. These accounts underappreciate the institutional innovation that the CIEC constituted as the first attempt at a form of institutionalized cooperation between former empires and newly independent countries along principles of universal redistribution and equitable representation, long before the G20. How exactly did the CIEC fail to establish a lasting precedent for a new form of multilateral cooperation between North and South ? I study this case of failed institutional change through a granular analysis of diplomatic negotiations between 1975 and 1977. Engaging with CIEC and French archives, the analysis centers the evolving relation between two leading diplomatic delegations, France and Algeria, on the backdrop of the renegotiation of their own postcolonial relation.
Author: Alice Chessé (McGill University) -
How do hydrocarbon-dependent states participate in international climate governance when climate commitments intersect with the economic conditions supporting national development? This paper examines Saudi Arabia through a longitudinal analysis of its climate contributions and related institutional records from 2015 to 2025.
The study follows the 2015 intended nationally determined contribution, the 2021 updated NDC, the first Biennial Transparency Report submitted in March 2025 and the Second NDC communicated in December 2025. Across these documents, economic growth, diversification and hydrocarbon-export revenues remain part of the way Saudi Arabia describes its mitigation contribution. Alternative development pathways also enter the projected emissions reference against which mitigation is presented.
The 2025 material shows how these nationally specified premises are carried into more structured reporting under the Paris Agreement. Relevant assumptions and economic-diversification measures are subject to common disclosure requirements, while technical expert review does not extend to judging the adequacy or appropriateness of the NDC itself. The Second NDC also uses a 2040 endpoint rather than the 2035 endpoint encouraged for contributions communicated in 2025, adding a further consideration when comparing successive contributions.
The paper revisits conditional integration as a way of describing continued institutional participation alongside nationally specified economic premises. It also distinguishes documented negotiating advocacy from evidence of causal influence over agreed outcomes. The broader contribution concerns how development priorities are expressed, disclosed and reviewed within common climate-governance procedures.
Author: Marene Madi (SOAS University of London)
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TU12 Panel / Multilateral politics, global governance, and changing international normsSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: Simon Rushton (University of Sheffield)Chair: TBC
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This research affiliates to Global(-ized) IR as it diversifies traditional and nationally-produced Brazilian Foreign Policy literature by underscoring new patterns from BFP historiography. A foreign policy in exile can be defined based on Edward Said’s concept of exile. In exile, the thinker adopts viewpoints that accuse a stratified system of producing marginalizing hierarchies, while voicing the belief that the exiled is more capable of grasping said stratified reality and of thus forging solutions that are more compatible and representative of such realities. This article argues that the BFP discourse before the UN has historically been in exile even in times of military authoritarianism. Aiming to figure out the extent to which exile has pervaded BFP, the Brazilian discourse before the UN, particularly its speeches, is compared throughout those military administrations and the preceding Independent Foreign Policy from which the dictatorship claimed to break away. It is therefore concluded that a FP in exile stems from a militant thought that pervades foreign policy that portray a militant identity against a so-called frozen structure within the international system at the same time as they yield proposals that while revamping said structure, offer solutions that are supposedly more representative and hence more effective in for Global South realities.
Author: Mariana Kalil (Brazilian War College) -
My presentation will consist of the key findings from my recently published (May 2026) PhD thesis. These key findings include:
- In the UNFCCC, populism does not translate into a uniform set of positions or behaviours for right or left wing populists. This is because populists are constrained by (1) their country’s interests being embedded within the UNFCCC’s institutional logic, and (2) their country’s place within the broader hierarchy of power of the international order. As a result, populists magnify existing country positions, rather than dramatically change them.
- When populists are not constrained, they act more overtly instrumentally and in support of their domestic political agenda, and their tactics and rhetoric become more disruptive, assertive and extreme in their tactics and rhetoric
- COP delegates act as ‘mitigating intermediaries' for right-wing populist governments - proactively hedging the more radical aspects of the populist's agenda, and using ’soft signalling’ to preserve their own social capital within the negotiations, and their country’s longer term interests within the negotiations.
Author: Adam Barnett (University of Lincoln) -
The idea of that the United States and China are in a ‘great power competition’ and that competition extends to the ‘cislunar environment’ has become a domineering rhetorical paradigm, at least within the United States. Much of this focuses on the strategic importance of ‘cislunar space’ and the potential resource wealth of the Moon. This paper will explore the similarities between current discussions over future lunar governance and the discussions over Antarctic governance after the Second World War. It draws on archival work I have been undertaking on the Antarctic minerals regime. One aspect of consideration will be whether ‘lunar heritage protection’ will serve a similar function as ‘environmental protection’ served in Antarctica in diffusing the geopolitical value of Antarctic resources or whether the nature of the present geopolitical competition will see the establishment of lunar ‘forts’ to protect claims to future, and largely imaginary, resource potentials.
Author: Thomas Cheney (Northumbria University) -
The article aims to analyse the duration of the intervals between signature and ratification of international treaties by Mercosur countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela) between 1991 and 2026. It compares the incorporation of three organisations: United Nations (systemic level); Organisation of American States (continental level); and Mercosur (regional level). Guided by the research puzzle to test if this group of countries has complied with multilateral rules and international organisations, testing if the ratification of treaties was faster in periods of disputes or domestic instabilities, which might have fostered the turn to the multilateral system. The study employs exploratory data analysis to describe and find patterns that contribute to understanding the research puzzle. Data was collected from publicly available datasets and organised into the current dataset. This article’s innovative contribution is an empirical approach to understanding longitudinal patterns of the participation of Mercosur countries in the international system.
Author: Andre Araujo (Federal University of Sao Paulo) -
Global order is undoubtedly in flux with global governance severely challenged. It seems to be fracturing greatly in areas that it pledged to serve foremost i.e. restricting the use of force, ensuring territorial integrity, and securing humankind’s fundamental freedoms. Irrespective of being a horizontal legal system, International Law managed to keep power and authority within legitimate bounds for ensuring efficient governance. But for now, both International Law and global institutions stand trumped by power politics.
In an otherwise anarchic world, global governance is where power and authority intersect with legitimacy. Contrarily, global governance gets incapacitated where multiple contestations (driven by actors’ divergent interests) choke the rulemaking in areas of evident concern. The return of devastating full-blown interstate wars (Russia-Ukraine, Pakistan-India, and Iran-US/Israel), uncapped human catastrophe facing Kashmiris, Rohingyas, Sudanese, and Congolese, audaciously ascendent war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon, and unaccounted casualties in protracted civil wars in Syria and Yemen, all manifest a governance failure.
It is argued that such unbridled, unabashed, and unpunished use of force is facilitated when strong/big actors turn their back on the rules they consensually created. Governance frameworks are repeatedly violated when powerful fail to thrust their authority towards what is right and just and become complicit in norm substitution via inaction. Resultantly, the power-authority nexus loses legitimacy, and the dwindling credibility of governance frameworks creates space for call/action towards a reconfiguration, either towards an alternative order or dis-order.Author: Afsah Qazi (National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad)
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TU12 Panel / New Innovations in Understanding Armed GroupsSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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In the earlier 2000’s, it appeared to have been a truism among most analysts that the basic rule for success as a terrorist or armed group was to shift from ‘old’ hierarchical structures to a network structure. At the same time, however, groups based on a purely network structure faced one critical problem. This was to translate short term into a larger and longer-term strategic outcome. In more recent years, however, armed groups increasingly have displayed a more formalized hierarchical structure. This conversion has resulted in much greater strategic success, with a an admixture of networks and hierarchies likely providing the greatest challenge to restoring security in threatened areas. New models likely will be critical in developing effective responses to these armed groups.
Author: Lawrence E. Cline (Colorado State University Global) -
The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan has significantly reshaped the regional security architecture of South and Central Asia, compelling neighbouring and extra-regional actors to recalibrate their strategic priorities. This article examines the regional security implications of Taliban rule with specific focus on the converging and diverging interests of Pakistan and Russia. It argues that while Islamabad and Moscow share common concerns over terrorism, border instability, narcotics trafficking, the expansion of ISIS-K, and the possibility of renewed Western strategic penetration in Afghanistan, their approaches toward the Taliban regime remain shaped by different threat perceptions and geopolitical calculations. For Pakistan, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan presents an immediate and direct security challenge, particularly through the resurgence of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, cross-border militancy, refugee pressures, and tensions along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. For Russia, Afghanistan is primarily viewed through the prism of Central Asian security, counterterrorism, regional influence, and the prevention of extremist spillover into the post-Soviet space. The article further analyzes Russia’s cautious engagement with the Taliban, including recent military-technical contacts, as a form of pragmatic normalization rather than a full strategic alignment. It contends that this engagement creates both opportunities and anxieties for Pakistan: opportunities in terms of possible regional coordination, and anxieties regarding the Taliban’s diplomatic leverage and potential military confidence. By situating the discussion within the broader regional security complex, the article demonstrates that Pakistan–Russia interaction over Afghanistan is neither purely cooperative nor inherently competitive; rather, it reflects a pattern of limited convergence and managed divergence. The study concludes that Afghanistan’s stability will depend not only on Taliban governance but also on whether regional actors, particularly Pakistan and Russia, can institutionalize counterterrorism coordination, reduce strategic mistrust, and manage their competing interests through multilateral platforms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Keywords:Taliban’s Return to Power, Regional Security, Pakistan-Russia Relations, Afghanistan, ISIS-K, Strategic Interests
Author: Gul Ayesha (National university of science and technology NUST, Islamabad) -
How does everyday gendered labour transform under conditions of political instability, and who benefits from its rearticulation? Conflict studies have extensively examined rebel feasibility through macro-level dimensions rather than the mundane processes that reproduce notions of control, resistance and legitimacy. Simultaneously, feminist and Marxist scholarship has long emphasised the centrality of social reproduction to political and economic life, but has rarely examined how these processes are transformed during armed conflict. Drawing on comparative analysis of truth commission archives in Peru and Colombia, this paper conceptualises social reproduction as a key site of political contestation wherein armed actors seek to establish legitimacy and social control. Rebel groups across conflicts intervene in systems of social reproduction through extraction of domestic labour, regulation of women’s everyday lives and the disruption of communities’ capacities to sustain themselves during violent constraints. These are often insidious social processes that destabilise social fabrics without resisting traditional gendered norms. At the same time, analysis reveals how women are often truncated as victims and negotiators of anticipatory harms and ongoing depletion, while also mobilising collective forms of care and mutual aid to reproduce life under epochs of strife. Ultimately, I argue that social reproduction constitutes a critical but overlooked dimension of armed group social control. By shifting attention from extant theories of territoriality and external structures towards the organisation of everyday life-making and destroying, it contributes to emerging research on rebel governance, gendered violence and political violence more broadly.
Author: Carina Uchida (University of Oxford) -
How do the stages of peace negotiations impact insurgent group's targeting of civilians during armed conflict? I argue that different forms of conciliatory measures affect violence by altering the strategic calculus of armed groups in different ways, creating incentives to escalate or de-escalate violence. Negotiations succeed in de-escalating violence only when two enabling conditions are jointly satisfied: armed groups believe the state will honour its commitments, and the strategic gains from de-escalation outweigh the organizational costs of abandoning violence. Where those conditions are absent, specific stages in the negotiation can actively incentivize spoiler groups to increase rather than reduce violence. To test this theory, I employ a quantitative research design that leverages time-series panel data of attacks on civilians during armed conflict. The results attest to the difficulty in reaching the two enabling conditions. As a result, no agreement stage is robustly associated with reduced targeting of civilians. Partial agreements, the most common stage, are associated with about 13% more violence, and renewal of pre-negotiation agreements are linked to an increase of roughly 28% in the targeting of civilians. The findings provide quantitative evidence that supports theorizing and recommendations on spoiler dynamics during earlier stages in peace negotiations.
Author: Gabriela Gómez Mantilla (American University)
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TU12 Panel / Peacebuilding from the Bottom Up: Youth Agency, Everyday Justice, and Global–Local ConnectionsSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: Dr Chloë McRae Gilgan (University of Lincoln (Law School))Chair: Yulia Nesterova (University of Glasgow)
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This paper explores how young people in Scotland conceptualise and enact peace in contexts characterised by social division, inequality, and everyday tensions rather than overt conflict. Drawing on arts-based and participatory research with 59 young participants aged 12–18, it demonstrates how youth articulate peace through values of human rights, equality, and relational responsibility. The paper highlights both the potential and tensions of youth-led peacebuilding, particularly around solidarity and collective responsibility, and argues for rethinking peacebuilding as a relational and locally grounded process supported by innovative methodologies.
Author: Yulia Nesterova (University of Glasgow) -
This contribution examines how youth engagement in the UK can reshape atrocity prevention through bottom-up approaches rooted in human connection and arts-based practices. Challenging the assumption that atrocity prevention is primarily a foreign policy concern, it positions everyday human rights violations in liberal democracies as potential precursors to broader violence. By engaging youth as active agents, the paper offers a novel framework for linking peacebuilding, human rights, and social cohesion within Western contexts.
Author: Chloë McRae Gilgan (University of Lincoln) -
This paper examines the disjuncture between macro-level failures of international justice, particularly in cases such as Palestine and Sudan. and the potential of bottom-up peacebuilding practices. Drawing on global ethics and international law, it critiques selective institutional responses while highlighting how local communities and grassroots actors can foster alternative forms of justice and peace. The contribution situates youth and community agency as critical in responding to and resisting global inequalities, offering a bridge between international structures and everyday peacebuilding.
Author: Umamah Saleem (University of Leicester) -
This contribution examines the role of faith-based and community-driven approaches in advancing peacebuilding and reconciliation, drawing on expertise in religion and international relations and interfaith dialogue. It explores how religious and ethical frameworks—particularly within Islamic traditions and Sufi thought—can support alternative narratives to division, while fostering dialogue, trust, and shared understanding across communities. The paper highlights the importance of grassroots initiatives and faith actors in shaping bottom-up peacebuilding. By integrating perspectives from jurisprudence, human rights, and religious ethics, it demonstrates how faith-informed approaches complement secular peacebuilding efforts and contribute to everyday forms of reconciliation and relational peace within diverse societies.
Author: Kaleem Hussain (University of Birmingham)
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TU12 Panel / Technological changes to war and peaceSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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The rapid development of artificial intelligence has transformed AI from an open scientific project into a strategic arena involving states, corporations, and transnational actors. OpenAI provides a significant example of this transition. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit organisation committed to developing artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity, OpenAI later adopted commercial structures and became one of the world’s most influential AI organisations.
This paper examines the conflict between Elon Musk and Sam Altman as a case study in the politics of AI governance rather than a purely personal or corporate dispute. Recent legal and public confrontations surrounding OpenAI have raised questions concerning institutional legitimacy, commercialization, transparency, and control over frontier AI systems.
Drawing on debates in International Relations concerning technological sovereignty, private authority, and global governance, the paper argues that leading AI firms increasingly function as geopolitical actors whose influence extends beyond traditional state structures. The OpenAI case demonstrates how private control of advanced AI technologies may reshape future international power relations.
Author: Ioana Dorhoi (Dorhoi International Research Center) -
Advances in intelligence are commonly expected to reduce the risk of conflict by improving information about adversaries. If states possess more accurate information about an opponent’s resolve, they should be better able to avoid bargaining failures that lead to war. This paper shows that the argument is incomplete. We develop a formal model of crisis bargaining in a nuclear dyad in which one state receives a noisy signal about its opponent’s resolve and capabilities. Improvements in intelligence increase the precision of this signal and therefore improve estimates of adversary’s willingness to fight. Better information, however, does more than reduce uncertainty. It also changes bargaining incentives. As states become better able to identify weakly resolved opponents, they can condition their demands more closely on these assessments. Under some conditions, this induces more coercive bargaining behavior and increases the risk of bargaining failure. The paper identifies a mechanism through which improvements in intelligence may increase rather than reduce the risk of conflict. More broadly, it suggests that technological advances in intelligence can change strategic behavior in ways that are not explained by conventional theories linking better information to greater stability. We apply the framework on Iraq 2003 war as the case study.
Authors: Petra Nikoleta Raguz (ELTE) , Mehrdad Khakparaghi (Eötvös Loránd University)* -
Security's contemporary condition is legible in the collapse of the dichotomies structuring international politics, predominantly in their Western articulations: war and peace, civilian and military, inside and outside. Both Walt's classical definition and the Copenhagen School's widened notion assume civilian and military can, in principle, be divided. Dual-use technologies and operations conducted short of war dissolve that assumption, rendering securitization indistinguishable from desecuritization and leaving the civilian sphere undecidably Arendtian or, as Foucault argued, already the continuation of war by other means. This collapse extends to the competition/cooperation distinction structuring existing international frameworks.
Large language models radicalise this condition. Embedded within security fields, they fuse framing — Butler's apparatus determining what becomes recognisable as threat — and practice — Bourdieu's and Bigo's routinised work through which professionals produce insecurity — into a single computational pass. Their apparent predictive superiority breeds structural deference, producing "moral crumple zones" where humans nominally retain oversight while no longer exercising judgement.
International relations theory's inherited vocabulary, built for separable domains, cannot adequately grasp a condition of security that technology has rendered total. The paper proposes to treat this impossibility as the condition for rethinking conflict and cooperation in the age of AI.Author: Fausto Matteo Cereti (Sapienza University) -
This paper examines artificial intelligence (AI) as an expeditor of changing conflict opportunity structures. While there is debate on AI and international security regarding military purpose and autonomous weapons, this paper concerns the role of AI in the diffusion of disruptive capability. The technology can potentially lower barriers of expertise, expenses, scale, and speed that have historically constrained participation in cyber, informational, and influence operations as state only activities. This opens a possibility of the democratisation of conflict opportunity. It does not create parity between states and non-state actors, nor does it independently cause conflict. AI has the potential to expand the range of actors capable of generating politically and socially significant disruption.
Through conceptual framework, the paper understands AI-enabled disruption as a symptom of changing accessibility of conflict. Enabling actors with fewer resources to produce malicious code, automated propaganda, and targeted manipulation at a greater pace and lower cost, AI can expedite conditions for hostile activity. Capability diffusion can create opportunities for non-state actors, proxy groups, criminal networks, and smaller states to exploit vulnerabilities and destabilise political environments. In a changing world, this has significant implications for how International Relations understands the relationship between technological developments and conflict.Author: Megan Ryan (Keele University) -
Nuclear coercion theory was built to explain how states bargain under the shadow of the bomb. It has little to say about the anti-colonial wars that nuclear-armed states fought against the movements that sought to displace them. Measured by compliance, these wars appear as failures, recorded and set aside, which leaves unasked what the bomb did in them short of producing compliance. This paper takes coercive engagement as its object: how a nuclear capability entered the reasoning of the actors in these wars and what it did there, whether or not behavior changed. A typology sorts engagement by target, mode, and the signaling environment in which the capability is read. The framework makes three claims. First, the coercion apparatus is state-scoped, its premises presupposing a state. Second, reverse coercion runs the other way: a movement converts the coercer's bomb into a charge against it and into diplomatic capital of its own. Third, constitutive resolve resists material coercion: where a movement's existence is its resistance, a threat denominated in casualties can harden it. Two probe cases show the framework organizing behavior that the published record documents: South Africa during the Angolan and Namibian wars, and France during the Algerian War. The framework’s propositions specify observable implications that primary sources would bear out. Throughout, the paper treats the movements as strategic agents reasoning about the bomb on their own account, against a Cold War historiography that reduces them to instruments of their sponsors.
Author: Daniel Rio Tinto (Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV))
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WE13 Roundtable / Climate security discourses, cooperation and conflict. Do climate security discourses matter?
The changing global order and rising geopolitical competition intersect with the need to address climate change. This leads to a mix of competition and limited cooperation. Climate change creates destabilising conditions but also offers opportunities for dialogue and cooperation. Climate-induced impacts—like resource scarcity, extreme weather, and supply chain disruptions—can increase mistrust and geopolitical rivalry. These tensions can expand into areas such as clean-energy technologies, critical minerals, and green industrial policy. Securitisation processes can further amplify these tensions. Yet, climate change can drive cooperation, especially where countries share vulnerabilities, threats, and narratives. Conflict or cooperation depends largely on how we discuss the link between climate change and security.
This roundtable brings together senior and junior scholars to discuss Chinese and European perspectives and discourses on ecological security and the securitisation of climate change. It debates their relevance for promoting cooperation or increasing geopolitical competition.
Sponsor: Environmental degradation, development and transformationChair: Maria Julia Trombetta (University of Nottingham Ningbo China)Participants: Xiang Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) , Bianca Marabini (Autonomous University of Madrid) , Shiming Yang (Leiden University) , Yifei Shao (Tsinghua University) -
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WE13 Panel / Diplomatic relations past and present: cooperation and conflict within and between regionsSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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This article examines the height of the socialist rupture between the Soviet Union and China in 1962 as a liminal moment in the Cold War international order, characterized by ambivalence in both nuclear deterrence and alliance politics. As Soviet nuclear anxieties pushed Moscow toward rapprochement with the United States, China's perception of the emerging nuclear non-proliferation regime as a mechanism of nuclear monopolization deepened the Sino-Soviet split. Alliance realignments also occurred during this period. To explore this, the article focuses on three representative socialist weak states as third actors: North Vietnam, North Korea, and Mongolia.
The article employs the concept of liminality to explain how ambivalence came to dominate this period, generating an order within the broader Cold War order. At the same time, liminality created opportunities for these third states to exercise sovereign agency and pursue their own interests.
Empirically, the study draws on materials from the Wilson Center Digital Archive as well as offline archival sources. Using process tracing, it examines both third-state perceptions and the evolution of the Sino-Soviet split between 1962 and 1964, with particular attention to 1962 as a critical juncture.Author: Khaliun Enkhbaatar (Fudan University) -
This paper examines the historical foundations of relations between Iran and Latin America to explain their contemporary policy significance. Existing literature often situates Iran’s engagement with Latin America through the lens of post-1979 ideology and strategic signaling toward the United States. This paper explores the overlooked relations between Iran and Latin American countries that began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which aided in shaping post-revolutionary engagement. Drawing on archival materials, such as diplomatic records and trade initiatives, the paper aims to reconstruct a longer narrative on how Iran developed diplomatic awareness, interests, and engagements with Latin America early on. While these early encounters were limited in nature, they created precedents and expectations that later informed Iranian post-revolutionary foreign policymaking. By placing contemporary Iran–Latin America relations within this historical genealogical context, the paper can demonstrate how current policies draw on a history of understandings and partnership rather than a new strategic plan. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions by highlighting the implications of transregional engagements, rethinking foundations of Iranian foreign policy, and underscoring the importance of documenting South–South relations.
Author: Melanie Perez (Florida International University) -
Why did Germany, once a champion of Eastern enlargement, become a more reserved supporter over time? This paper examines the discursive and policy shift in German preferences concerning the EU’s 2004 and 2007 enlargement rounds. Drawing on historical institutionalism, it develops a qualitative case study through process tracing of German and EU primary sources – official policy documents, key political speeches, and European Council conclusions – and secondary literature. The paper argues that Brandt’s Ostpolitik and the EC’s exceptional incorporation of the GDR in 1990 helped institutionalise a path-dependent German commitment to eastward enlargement, framed around the themes of ‘return to Europe’ and ‘European unification’. Yet this commitment later evolved into a more cautious position because of the deepening-widening dilemma, itself shaped by competing West and East German legacies, as well as post-reunification challenges, and migration and security concerns. The paper suggests this shift helps explain the roots of Germany’s current conditional support for future EU enlargement to the Western Balkans, Ukraine, and Moldova. Linking Cold War détente, post-1990 enlargement and contemporary accession politics, the paper contributes to International Studies by showing that today’s enlargement debates are shaped not only by current geopolitics but also by historical memory and institutional sequencing.
Author: Ugur Tekiner (Ankara University) -
This paper examines the intellectual and political significance of Ali Shariati and Gustavo Gutiérrez as two influential Global South thinkers whose ideas reshaped understandings of religion, liberation, and anti-imperial solidarity across Iran and Latin America. Although emerging from distinct religious and historical traditions, both figures developed revolutionary frameworks that reimagined Islam and Christianity as ethical and political responses to oppression, inequality, and foreign domination. Their writings challenged Western imperial power and domestic systems of injustice while centering the experiences of the marginalized in political life.The paper argues that placing Shariati and Gutiérrez in conversation recovers an intellectual dimension for understanding the ideological foundations of Iran–Latin America relations. Rather than approaching these relations solely through diplomacy or geopolitics, this project situates them within broader intellectual and geosocial currents circulating across the Global South during the 1960s and 1970s. Shariati’s revolutionary Shi‘ism and Gutiérrez’s liberation theology articulated parallel critiques of colonialism, capitalism, and dependency that resonated across anti-imperial movements in both regions. By tracing these shared trajectories, the paper reconceptualizes Iran–Latin America relations as part of a broader history of Third Worldism, liberationist thought, and Global South political imagination.
Author: Melanie Perez (Florida International University)
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WE13 Panel / Insights on War from Ukraine and BeyondSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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The study of armed and revolutionary movements still leans on single-case narratives that travel poorly across regions. This paper sets out the Revolutionary Configuration Matrix (RCM), a comparative framework developed in my doctoral research, and applies it to three movements now passing through decisive transitions: the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its political wing in the current PKK–DEM process in Turkey, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria.
The RCM compares movements along several linked dimensions: strategic doctrine, internal organisation, the handling of coercion and governance, ideological adaptation, and external alignment. Rather than asking whether a movement is moderate or radical, it asks how these elements fit together, and which configurations let a movement move from armed struggle towards holding territory and exercising rule.
On that basis the paper offers testable propositions. It reads the PKK–DEM process as a managed shift in configuration rather than a simple peace settlement, and sets out the conditions under which the Taliban and HTS are likely to consolidate, fragment, or revert. The argument is that conflict and cooperation are not opposite states but points on a single trajectory the framework can track.
The paper speaks to the conference theme by treating cooperation as a strategic phase of conflict, and by offering a structured way to compare that phase across very different cases.
Author: Guney Yildiz (The University of Cambridge) -
Combat experience is commonly regarded as an important source of military effectiveness and successful deterrence. Consequently, the absence of recent combat experience is often viewed as a strategic disadvantage. Yet strong but untested military powers continue to deter potential challengers. This paper asks why deterrence persists despite the absence of peer combat experience.
The paper identifies performance uncertainty—uncertainty over how an acknowledged strong military would perform against a peer adversary—as a distinct source of deterrence. Such uncertainty generates a deterrent premium by increasing challengers’ caution toward military escalation. This premium is inherently temporary: once peer combat reveals actual performance, uncertainty disappears. If performance falls short of expectations, deterrence weakens; even when expectations are met, the uncertainty-based premium is exhausted, making deterrence more costly to sustain through demonstrated capability alone.
The paper develops sustaining and collapsing mechanisms and examines them through process tracing of Russia before and after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine alongside contemporary China. It contributes to deterrence theory by incorporating performance uncertainty into existing accounts of deterrence and suggests that misreading the lessons of Russia may encourage overcorrection in assessing China’s largely untested military, thereby increasing the risk of strategic miscalculation under conditions of persistent strategic insecurity in East Asia.
Author: Zhengzhe Yu (Sciences Po Paris) -
How can academic systematically understand the relationship between state demands and citizen's compliance during wartime or approaching wartime? Whilst social contract theory helps us understand a broader concept behind the demands and obligations of citizenry, it often remains difficult to operationalise empiracally. This paper develops a structure qualitative framework to understand how democratic states can generate and sustain military and strategic labour mobilisation under conditions of insecurity.
The paper proposes a three-dimensional approach to operationalise the social contract through the lenses of obligations, protections, and fairness as three dimensions that shape mobilisation outcomes. To capture the dynamics, the paper will outline a comparative reserach design combining elite interviews with structured document analysis across three contracting cases, relating to the UK, Ukraine, and Finland in comtemporary wartime discussions.
Methodologically, the paper contributes by trying to translate abstract political theory into a replicable analytical template for such qualitative research. It draws upon existing doctoral work by the researcher and designed for broader comparative application.
Author: Philippe Lefevre (University of Surrey) -
War is commonly understood in its physical manifestations as the politically organized use of violence. This research, however, advances a different claim: war is discourse. Drawing on the intellectual tradition of critical theory and its influence on International Relations, it argues that war is a social phenomenon constituted through systems of meaning that produce regimes of truth, subjects, and objects.
The paper begins by establishing working definitions of discourse and war, and then develops a war-as-discourse framework based on five discursive practices: ordering, legitimation, othering, warfare, and transformation.
This analytical framework is presented in each of its components from a theoretical perspective and then operationalized through a case-study analysis. The case study serves as an illustration of the value of war-as-discourse as an analytical perspective focussing on the 2025-2026 US-Israel war against Iran. By analysing texts and military operations, it reconstructs the production of discourse that made the war possible, sustained it, and brought it to what, currently, is presented as the end of this episode of violence.
Building on these reflections and the analysis of the case study, this essay contributes to the contemporary critical debates on the ontological reconceptualization of war, providing both a preliminary theoretical framework and a practical illustration of its analytical potential.Author: Filippo Dionigi (University of Bristol) -
This paper interrogates the idealised and depoliticised use of “honour” in IR theory in relation to the trajectory of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Existing accounts view Russia’s foreign policy through honour as a civilisational or status-seeking motive, overlooking its hierarchical, affective and gendered dimensions.
I propose a differentiated honour-conflict framework, distinguishing between equal/equal, superior/subordinate, and masculinised/feminised interactions, each with distinct injuries, emotions and modes of restoration. Within Russia’s symbolic order, political legitimacy and national pride have long been tied to performances of strength, control and paternal protection, while Ukraine has been devalorised and discursively feminised through familial metaphors: a dependent “younger sister,” “wayward daughter,” or “disloyal bride” seduced by the West.
Drawing on ongoing discourse analysis of elite speeches, ideological essays and media commentary from 2021–2023, this study traces the rhetorical evolution from fraternal rescue to an annihilatory struggle to restore wounded masculine honour. The paper theorises Russia’s genocidal turn as an affective response to perceived dishonour, where restoration takes the form of punishment, degradation and erasure.
Author: Regina Lazarenko (UCL)
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WE13 Panel / Navigating Change in Global PoliticsSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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This paper investigates the conditions under which vernacular domains can be identified in relation to liberal institutions in post-industrial Britain. Kantian models of liberal peace within International Relations often emphasise democracy, institutional governance, and market integration as foundations of political order, while giving less attention to the everyday practices through which communities organise social life. Drawing on Ivan Illich, the paper develops the concept of vernacular domains as a way of understanding forms of social organisation negotiated within communities. The research focuses on post-industrial regions affected by deindustrialisation, austerity, and neoliberal reform, including communities in South London, Cornwall, and Nottinghamshire. Through ethnographic fieldwork and narrative analysis, the study explores how practices of cooperation, memory, and everyday life are negotiated in relation to institutional structures under conditions of economic and political fragmentation. In doing so, the paper considers how vernacular domains may be identified across different social registers within contemporary Britain.
Author: Tom Richardson (Brookes University) -
Despite being Africa’s second most populous state, Ethiopia remains trapped in a 'geographical prison'. Relying on Djibouti’s Port of Doraleh for 95% of its trade incurs an annual financial hemorrhage exceeding $1 billion, severely constraining its economic growth. While traditional analyses frame Ethiopia's quest for Red Sea access, particularly regarding Eritrea’s Assab port, through the lens of military strategy and territorial disputes, this paper adopts an International Political Economy (IPE) approach. It argues that Ethiopia’s maritime strategy is fundamentally driven by the geoeconomic necessity to break logistical bottlenecks, rather than classical military expansionism. By examining the political economy of port dependence, UAE-backed modernisation efforts in Assab, and the structural costs of landlockedness, this study conceptualises sovereign access to maritime infrastructure as a critical form of state power. Ultimately, this research makes an empirical and conceptual contribution to IPE literature by illustrating how the commodification of port access and the financial burdens of geography are reshaping alliances, exacerbating economic fragilities, and redefining the security architecture of the Horn of Africa.
Authors: Mehmet Hanifi Kaya (Beykent University) , Abdullah Ozcelik (Sakarya University) -
Throughout history, non-state forces have armed themselves through alternative means to fight oppressive regimes. This paper investigates how additive manufacturing/3D-printing due to its cost, simplicity, anonymity, and accessibility reshapes non-state resistance by weakening state control over the means of violence. It seeks to address a critical gap in literature by analysing how the offensive adoption of 3D-printing technology affects the power dynamics between state and non-state actors within regimes of political suppression and arms control. The argument utilises a primary case study which examines Myanmar’s local militia, the People’s Defence Forces’ (PDFs) reliance on 3D-printed military hardware in their fight against the military junta (Tatmadaw). It also adopts a contrasting/boundary case of Syria’s HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) and their technological innovation in producing 3D-printed drones in their conflict against the Assad regime. While Myanmar illustrates decentralised additive production amongst materially-constrained grassroot insurgent actors, Syria illustrates scaling and institutionalisation of additive manufacturing within more organised insurgent ecosystems. Through these two cases, the paper illustrates the strategic and symbolic significance of additive manufacturing in these distinct conflicts. Ultimately, the paper argues that the strategic, offensive use of this technology by non-state actors reconfigures their possibilities of resistance against the state.
Author: Ananya Senger (Shiv Nadar University) -
Kashmir, the world’s largest militarised zone, lies in India, the world’s largest democracy. Due to militarisation, students from Kashmir are migrating to various Indian states for higher education. Literature
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on Kashmir essentially investigates the Kashmiri experiences within Kashmir but has recently shifted towards discussing the Kashmiri diaspora in India.
The need to understand diaspora within a nation-state and link it with identity formation and the tensions that arise due to ethnic, religious, and national lines is also important, especially from a postcolonial lens. Based on this argument, my study intends to explore peripheral and Centre identities based on the socio-political history of Kashmir and postcolonial India. Utilizing qualitative methods, the proposed study understands how Kashmiri students based on their lived experiences in Kashmir and Indian states, along with mainstream Indian media enabling stereotypes of Kashmiri youth impact their sense of identity, identification, and sense of belonging. Such an understanding of identities and belonging would present how complex identities can be when contextualizing diaspora within postcolonial nations, and the relationship with internal states, especially those states with a history of militarization.Author: Madiha Khan (Azad Jammu and Kashmir University)
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WE13 Panel / Rethinking Strategic Autonomy, Cooperation and RivalrySponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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French and British policy-makers have framed their defence partnership as exceptional and as a driver for Europe’ defence. The cornerstone of their partnership, the Treaties of Lancaster House, were designed to build progressive and controlled interdependence that would serve as a blueprint, in effect, for the convergence of European defence policy while preserving national sovereignty within the EU. Yet the two allies responded to the conflict in Ukraine in markedly different ways in 2014, and what followed was a decade of competition and political turbulence that left much of the Treaties’ promise unrealised. The Coalition of the Willing has since brought Franco-British leadership back to the fore, but that leadership now has to find its footing in a geopolitical landscape that is both new and deeply uncertain.
Competition arising from global shifts, including among allies, lies at the heart of this project, which examines how states seek to become the most influential actors within alliance systems. Previous research showed that competition and leadership play out in aggressive export strategies around defence industry and capability, in competing visions of what European defence architecture should look like and where the EU fits within it, and in the ability to shape thinking in Washington regarding the salience of the transatlantic alliance. This thesis argues that the long-standing forms of competition between European states, and between France and Britain in particular, have taken on a new dimension, because the geostrategic questions raised by the war in Ukraine cut to the heart of European country’s identity, interests and strategic culture. These include European/EU strategic autonomy, interstate defence integration, the growth of Europe’s defence industries, the EU’s role within the broader defence architecture, Germany’s growing weight on defence issues, interdependencies both within and beyond Europe, transatlantic solidarity, and the inclusion of third countries in the EU’s defence-industrial frameworks.
Methodologically, this thesis adopts an interpretivist, historical and multi-layered process-tracing approach grounded in constructivist foreign policy analysis. It draws on data from semi-structured interviews with foreign policy, industrial and military elites conducted in Brussels, Paris and London. Results show that deep-seated historical mistrust and competition, rooted primarily in disagreements over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a longer history of enmity, had a far-reaching effect on British and French cooperation on Ukraine. French policymakers did not trust Anglo-Saxon (Five Eyes) intelligence on Ukraine, while British policymakers had little appetite for involving a competitor nation given the Britain’s own engagement on the Ukrainian file well before 2014. These tensions undermined attempts at European coordination after 2022 despite EU efforts. Similarly, it emerges that the drive for European leadership through the Coalition of the Willing is as much about the pragmatic pooling of resources as it is about protecting each country’s influence and leadership on the continent. Finally, the research shows that, despite mutual fascination, French and British policymakers still hold a fairly crude understanding of what the other seeks to achieve for Europe’ defence. These findings suggest that what matters, for both research and policymaking, is understanding how competition between two allies shapes the way they promote a broader regional defence architecture, how that architecture evolves as a result, and how such competition still permeates cooperation when regional leadership becomes urgently needed.Author: Augustin Mari (University of Edinburgh) -
This article engages with arguments made increasingly vocally in two adjacent areas of literature: multilateralism and plurilateralism. Both agree on the problem: that the current international system of cooperation is challenged to the point of failure by geopolitical rivalry and selective manipulation. This is where discussions part. Discussions on multilateralism, supported by evidence from a range of issue areas, either suggest accommodation with or challenge to the recent onslaught against multilateralism. For some, plurilateralism is suggested to be the answer, offering the rationale that it enables aligned groups to achieve shared objectives without being hampered by unworkable situations in multilateral fora, thus rescuing in principle the current order by sidelining the bigger problem. The problem that is posed here is cooperation. The instinct for pragmatic workarounds when particular kinds of cooperation are not wanted is understandable. Yet, the article argues that this will entrench inequality and exploitative conditions that have led to the failures of multilateralism in the first place. The article draws on literature on legal heterarchy and pluralist constitutional politics to make a case for renegotiating multilateralism and staying with the challenges of navigating dissent.
Author: Christina Oelgemoller (Loughborough University) -
European governments are expanding defence commitments, but greater national defence effort need not strengthen public support for a common defence and security policy. Existing research shows how threat, costs, and elite cues shape cooperation attitudes, but leaves unclear why similar pressures yield different degrees of ideological divergence. I develop the mechanism of security-sacrifice politicization. When political actors frame defence commitments as requiring domestic sacrifice and connect them to welfare provision, fiscal burdens, sovereignty, or institutional distrust, security policy can align with left–right conflict and widen gaps in support for European defence cooperation. Credible threat, protection framing, and convergence among political actors should instead limit divergence.
The analysis combines official defence-expenditure data and repeated Standard Eurobarometer cross-sections across the EU, comparing average support and left–right gaps. A focused comparison of post-2022 parliamentary debate and party framing in Italy and Poland examines how shared rearmament pressures are interpreted under contrasting conditions: fiscal constraint in Italy and greater threat proximity and the political salience of territorial defence in Poland. Distinguishing defence effort, average support, and ideological divergence clarifies when rearmament widens political divisions over European defence cooperation rather than generating broadly shared support.
Author: Mersedeh Hosseini (Independent Researcher) -
The interdependence between Japan and the Arab Gulf states offers a compelling case for examining how asymmetrical interdependence generates power in the politics of interdependence. While IR literature on interdependence identified the asymmetry of interdependence as a source of power, discussions of how this asymmetry generates power and how power is exercised between these state actors remain limited. This paper therefore aims to examine the nexus between asymmetrical interdependence and power politics by conducting a qualitative case study of specific moments of their interstate conflict and cooperation, namely the 1973-74 oil shock and the 2000 Khafji shock. It asks: How did the asymmetry of interdependence generate power, and how was that power exercised among these state actors during the aforementioned events in the late twentieth century? It argues that the Arab Gulf states’ control over the key nodes on their oil export networks, on which Japan’s economy heavily depends, generated power which they used as a bargaining tool to attain strategic objectives, inviting enhanced cooperation and, at times, conflict between them. The paper contributes to the IR study of interdependence by offering empirical evidence on the power politics of interdependence in the often-overlooked context of Japan-Arab Gulf states relations.
Author: Kazuto Matsuda (University of Edinburgh) -
The study analyses the role of Paraguay and Uruguay in three Mercosur extra-regional trade agreements: EU, EFTA, and Singapore. It traces how Small States used the external agenda of the bloc as an amplifying strategy to secure their preferences, and compares the different strategies for each agreement. The research question is “Are regional organisations an efficient negotiation mechanism for their smaller member-states?” and the hypothesis is that their smallness is presented as an advantage to obtain compensatory conditions. The study observes if the agreement had exclusive measures for Paraguay and Uruguay, which were demanded by them at the negotiations stage. The hypothesis was tested by comparing whether Paraguay and Uruguay preferences were obtained in the final agreements exclusively for them, and not for Mercosur's larger member states. Employing Qualitative Content Analysis, data were coded via MaxQDA to identify preferences and exclusive measures conceded. The study brings a twofold contribution: empirically, with an analysis of the new generation of trade agreements and the role of two still understudied countries; theoretically, it refines the small states framework to understand that they can use trade negotiations to secure economic benefits, develop stable and predictable external relations, and cope with the changing international system.
Authors: Guilherme Ferreira (Federal University of São Paulo) , Andre Araujo (Federal University of Sao Paulo)
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WE13 Panel / Women’s Wellbeing, Care and Digital Culture in a Changing China: Everyday Negotiations of Social TransformationSponsor: Justice, inequality and exclusionConvener: Hua Ma (University of Stirling)Chair: Chalisa Chintrakarn (University of Birmingham)
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Abstract:
In post-socialist China, beauty has emerged as a key site where gender, identity, and power are negotiated within intimate and family life. While dominant discourses continue to promote female beauty ideals such as ‘pale, young, and slim’, Confucian expectations of moral femininity persist, positioning women as virtuous wives and good mothers. This article draws on in-depth interviews with 13 urban married women in Beijing to explore how beauty is negotiated within intimate and familial relationships. Rather than viewing beauty as either oppressive or empowering, the study conceptualises it as a dynamic and embodied practice shaped by social expectations, life course transitions, shifting power relations, and familial obligations. Participants variously engaged in, complied with, or resisted what has been termed ‘serving beauty duty’ (服美役). This study contributes to feminist sociology foregrounding beauty as a lived negotiation, entangled with identity, recognition, and power in contemporary Chinese family life.Authors: Hua Ma (University of Stirling)* , Shuang Qiu (University of Leeds) -
Abstract:
Lifestyle influencers often construct aspirational online identities through aestheticised self-branding, entrepreneurial femininity, and narratives of personal agency (Duffy and Hund, 2015; Guo, 2024). Yet these identities are not fixed; they evolve alongside influencers’ life trajectories and remain subject to continuous audience evaluation and negotiation. This paper examines audience responses to influencer identity transformation through the case of Danggui, a Chinese lifestyle influencer whose content shifted from an aesthetically curated portrayal of independent urban living to a family-oriented representation centred on marriage and motherhood. Drawing on the concepts of postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2007) and girlfriend gaze (Winch, 2013), the paper examines how female audiences engage with influencers as aspirational peers and evaluate changes in their online identities.This research adopts a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2019) of audience comments alongside observations of Danggui’s content production to explore how audience evaluations of influencer transformation reveal broader gender politics in China’s digital culture. The findings show that when influencers deviate from the feminine identities audiences have come to value, followers engage in various forms of policing through comment practices.
The analysis identifies three dimensions through which audiences police postfeminist femininity: aestheticised lifestyles, gendered selfhood, and aspirational mobility. Audience criticism focused on the perceived erosion of a feminine subjectivity grounded in autonomy, self-development, and individual aspiration. In this sense, followers were less concerned with Danggui’s changing life circumstances than with whether her online persona continued to embody the values that had made her aspirational in the first place.
These responses demonstrate how audiences actively participate in defining the boundaries of legitimate femininity in contemporary digital culture. By foregrounding audience reactions, this paper demonstrates how aspirational identification between women can become a mechanism of gendered regulation, through which audiences police the boundaries of desirable female subjectivity in Chinese influencer culture. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on influencer culture, fan practices, and postfeminist media by showing how the girlfriend gaze operates not only as a mode of identification and aspiration, but also as a site of discipline and negotiation.
References:
Braun, V. and Clarke, V. 2019. Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. 11(4), pp.589–597.
Duffy, B.E. and Hund, E. 2015. “Having it All” on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers. Social Media + Society. 1(2), p.2056305115604337.
Gill, R. 2007. Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 10(2), pp.147–166.
Guo, J. 2024. ‘Living-alone’ wanghong: Women’s singleness as a wanghong genre and the configuration of Chinese postfeminist wanghong culture. Global Media and China., p.20594364241278101.
Winch, A. 2013. Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood. Springer.Author: Woonie (Qianyu) Wang (University of Leeds) -
Abstract:
In contemporary urban China, the state’s shift toward pronatalist governance, exemplified by the Three-Child Policy, has transformed the reproductive body into a highly politicised vessel for nationalist anxieties. Against a backdrop of deep welfare retrenchment, the state has outsourced social reproduction to the family and market, leading middle-class women to navigate a hyper-commercialised postnatal care landscape. While urban mothers purchasing luxury postpartum care (sitting the month) services appear on the surface to be “empowered consumers”, this paper problematises this assumed privilege. By focusing on the embodiment of femininity, power, and agency, I investigate how structural abandonment operates directly on and through the postpartum body within the private and commercial spheres. I explore how the maternal body is fragmented, monitored, and disciplined by a regime of motherhood metrics and beauty norms. Mothers constantly negotiate a somatic double-bind: fulfilling Confucian kinship obligations of maternal self-sacrifice while simultaneously satisfying the neoliberal mandate of the autonomous, self-improving subject who undergoes rigorous body-contouring, abdominal binding, and lactation optimisation. However, I also demonstrate how consumption functions as an embodied, tactical responsiveness to structural constraints.
This paper rejects the reductionist framework that reads luxury beauty and comfort practices solely as vectors of patriarchal or neoliberal discipline, instead illuminating the friction and nuance of maternal agency. I argue that the commercial beauty regimes frequently double as hard-won “me-time”, a vital spatial and temporal refuge from the exhausting demands of intensive mothering and conflicted intergenerational family dynamics. Rather than representing passive ingestion or neat resistance, these bodily practices constitute an active negotiation of power. The women are also reflexive, critically recognising how these aesthetic standards reinforce oppressive gender norms, yet they selectively deploy them to reclaim bodily ownership and mental boundaries. By mapping these micro-politics, this paper expands feminist conceptualisations of agency beyond the linear, “action-oriented chooser”. I demonstrate that reproductive agency is fluid and multidimensional: practised not only through overt resistance and consumption, but through calculated domestic strategising, a conscious surrendering to physical incapacity, and the radical act of doing nothing reclaiming the right to rest.Author: Xiao Ge (Durham University) -
Abstract:
This article reconceptualises the gaze as a relational, reflected, and negated process embedded in everyday life. Drawing on 13 in-depth interviews with married women in urban China, this study examines how women navigate dominant beauty norms associated with straight male aesthetics, a culturally specific articulation of heteronormative ideals that emphasise youth, fairness, and slimness. While existing feminist scholarship has theorised the gaze as either externally imposed (male gaze) or internally regulated (disciplinary gaze), these frameworks often overlook how women actively engage with multiple, overlapping expectations of evaluation in intimate contexts. We introduce the concept of the negotiated gaze to capture how women interpret, accommodate, and contest expectations from partners, digital media and broader beauty culture. Findings show that beauty operates simultaneously as aesthetic and emotional labour, shaping women’s sense of visibility, desirability, and relational stability. Women’s practices are neither reducible to compliance nor resistance but reflect ongoing negotiation within unequal gendered power relations. By extending gaze theory into the domain of heterosexual intimacy, this article demonstrates how agency emerges as relational, situated, and ambivalent. The concept of the negotiated gaze offers a framework for understanding how beauty, power, and subjectivity are co-constructed in contemporary gender relations.Authors: Hua Ma (University of Stirling) , Shaung Qiu (University of Leeds)* -
Abstract:
In the context of regulatory governance over Chinese television adaptations featuring male same-sex romantic narratives, online interactions within related fan communities are shaped by both platform governance and internal community norms. Existing studies recognise the tension between fans and censorship, while paying less attention to internal fan hierarchies, the agency of different types of fans, and their power relations within fandom communities. This article draws on the fandom of The Untamed as a case study and employs online ethnography to examine how different fan types are positioned and expressed within Weibo-based fan spaces.The findings suggest that The Untamed fan community on Weibo is heterogeneous and structured through a visibility-based hierarchy. Within this structure, female fans who interpret male actors’ relationships as having real-life same-sex romantic implications are regarded as requiring regulation or restriction. This positioning is reinforced through gendered discourse, including accusations of misogyny. However, such marginalisation does not eliminate participation. Instead, it enables marginalised fans to develop diverse tactical practices to maintain presence and expressive capacity within existing constraints. The article argues that power relations within The Untamed fandom are continuously negotiated among platform governance, community norms, and fan practices. This further contributes to an understanding of spatial hierarchies and fan agency in contemporary Chinese fan cultures.
Author: Leidong Wang (University of East Anglia.)
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WE13 Panel / Environmental Security and InsecuritySponsor: Environmental degradation, development and transformationConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Where are emotions in processes of securitization and desecuritization? How do they operate in establishing “truth effect” in complex, uncertain contexts like the ones that characterise the Anthropocene? Fear is often associated with securitization but it is often unexplored in International Relations and it is not the only emotion to be considered in processes of securitization (Ganz 2023 ). At the same time re-considering emotions can help overcome several divides that characterize the debate, like those between material and ideational factors that are so relevant in discussions about securitization in the Anthropocene and justify the relevance of exploring the material and emotional precondition for “latent securitizations” (Le Billon, Debert and Trombetta 2025) that can be activated.
Building on previous research on ontological security and climate change (Trombetta forthcoming), and analysing President Trump's speeches on climate change and "energy emergency", this paper explores how considering emotions can help explain why some threats are securitised while others are ignored.
Author: Maria Julia Trombetta (University of Nottingham Ningbo China) -
As classical institutions of global governance strain under the weight of accelerating environmental crises, this paper interrogates the conceptual foundations upon which international cooperation is built. Drawing on the planetary boundaries framework established by Rockström et al. (2009) and revised by Steffen et al. (2011), it argues that extreme climate events — ocean desalination, ozone depletion, and cascading warming effects documented by the UNFCCC — render the conventional notion of sovereignty analytically insufficient. When ecological disruption transcends borders, the very category of “the international” requires reconceptualization. Theoretically grounded in Anthropocene scholarship and Vernadsky's concept of the biosphere, the paper advances a systemic understanding of Earth as a single, integrated environment in which all planetary entities are irreducibly interrelated. It traces how current climate trajectories are dissolving the boundaries not only between states, but between the political and the interconnected relationality of things. The paper proposes planetary management rather than inter-state negotiation alone, must anchor emerging forms of assertive and realistic global collaboration.
Author: Jales Caur (University of Brasília) -
Over the past two decades, China's environmental security discourses have shifted from systematic resistance to the securitisation of climate change at the international level to the progressive institutionalisation of "ecological security" across its national security architecture and foreign policy. Yet this shift does not represent straightforward convergence with Western security framings. This paper argues that China's environmental security discourses operate through a productive dual grammar: a structured coexistence of two security logics enacted simultaneously at different scales. At the international level, the language of ecological security — most legibly in the 2023 Global Security Initiative (GSI) Concept Note — functions as a norm-making instrument that insulates China's developmental sovereignty from externally imposed climate conditionality. At the domestic level, environmental governance proceeds through a disciplinary-developmental vocabulary of 'ecological civilisation' that deliberately suppresses security exceptionalism, preserving the Party-state's monopoly over the terms and pace of ecological transition. Drawing on work on climate securitisation modalities and Foucauldian governmentality, this paper extends securitisation theory by introducing scale as an explicit analytical variable. It provides the first systematic analysis of the GSI Concept Note as a site of ecological security norm-making, read alongside China's authoritative domestic corpus of Ecological Civilisation governance.
Authors: Wenbo Wu (Queensland University)* , Maria Julia Trombetta (University of Nottingham Ningbo China) , Yifei Shao (Tsinghua University, Center for Global Studies)* -
The literature on peace, climate, and conflict primarily focuses on investigating the relationship between climate factors and the risk of conflict, particularly events that undermine negative peace. Despite the importance of studying possible indirect causal links to the risk of direct violence, the impact on other forms of violence has been little explored. Therefore, we ask: how do climate factors, in the context of coloniality, affect the production of violence? Employing a security lens from the perspective of Latin America, this theoretical essay argues that climatic factors also affect positive peace by exacerbating the risks of structural violence. As a structuring element of international politics, coloniality further exacerbates the risks of structural violence in the face of climate change, generating unequal impacts on different social groups. By identifying the dimensions of structural violence and its relationship to climate vulnerability, this study aims to demonstrate that coloniality structures both the production of structural violence and climate vulnerability. As a contribution, we present a theoretical-analytical model that enables a deeper understanding of the factors linking climate change and structural violence, capable of capturing the historical and contextual nuances underlying this process, given the structuring nature of coloniality in Latin America.
Authors: Ramon Blanco (Federal University of Latin American Integration)* , Priscila Carolina Pellens (Federal University of Paraná (UFPR)) -
Climate litigation is increasingly imagined as a tool for pursuing climate justice by compelling states and corporations to reduce emissions, fund adaptation, compensate for loss and damage, or recognise climate-related rights violations. Yet this debate often assumes that climate harm results from failures to prevent, regulate, or remedy environmental damage. This paper argues that, in some contexts, environmental vulnerability is actively produced through governance.
I develop the concept of manufactured insecurity to describe how political authorities intensify environmental vulnerability through policy choices, uneven development, resource mismanagement, and coercive responses, before reframing the resulting crisis as disorder, irresponsibility, or a threat to stability. Using Iran’s water crisis, particularly the Zayandeh River crisis in Isfahan, the paper examines how environmental harm becomes difficult to contest when the state controls both the material production and public interpretation of crisis.
Affected communities then face a double injustice: exposure to ecological loss and livelihood destruction, followed by the securitisation of their demands for remedy. The paper asks whether climate litigation can deliver justice where legal institutions are embedded in the same political order that produced the harm. It argues that litigation’s potential depends on whether law can recognise state-produced vulnerability as a form of responsibility.
Author: Dilek Celebi (University of Manchester)
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WE13 Roundtable / From South to North: Global Inequities in Military Institutions
On the global stage, state power is wielded by military institutions entrenched in outdated cultures and toxic behaviours disguised as standardisation and cohesion. Inequity characterises the institution: inequity that manifests as visible and invisible harms perpetrated disproportionately against gendered and racialised bodies, manifesting itself through hierarchies. Given the race- and gender-granting nature of the military, these characteristics, in turn, influence gender and race dynamics in society and, as such, it is imperative that scholarly studies focusing on equity within military institutions pay attention not only to civil-military relations and entry into military careers but also to access to positions of power and leadership within these institutions. Scholarship on inequity in public institutions is hierarchised in itself, remaining dominated by Western ideals and thinking, with an implied assumption that the West knows best. In the context of the international rise of populist and far right governments, jeopardising the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) agenda, we ask what inequity looks like when we compare Global South and North contexts. With speakers researching the Brazilian, United Kingdom and Thai contexts, we ask the following questions:
- How do inequities in the military differ between the Global South and North contexts?
- What inequities exist between research and military communities in the Global South and North, and how can we better foster collaboration?
- How can the Global South and North exchange experiences and establish strategies to address inequities in the Armed Forces?
- What might the threat to the EDI agenda mean for studies and interventions to address inequities in the military?Sponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondChair: Gabriela Almeida Costa (Anglia Ruskin University)Participants: Chanapang Pongpiboonkiat (University of Leeds) , Mariana Janot (São Paulo State University) , Hannah West (Anglia Ruskin University) , Rafaela Guimarães dos Santos Martins (São Paulo State University) , Sabrina Celestino (Brazilian Army) -
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WE13 Panel / Geopolitics of the European UnionSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)
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This paper analyses the nexus between the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) of the European Union (EU), exploring the evolution of the narratives and practices that underpin this interconnection. The research is grounded in the conceptual framework of security governance, which emphasises the density of interactions among actors operating within spaces defined by geography, institutionalisation, and normative authority. Through a qualitative thematic analysis of official EU documents, alongside case studies of Operation Sophia and the EUAM Ukraine mission, the article identifies cooperative formats, institutional developments, and persistent challenges to coordination between the two domains. The findings reveal a tendency to subordinate CSDP missions to logics of collective internal security, particularly in relation to border control, irregular migration, and counter-terrorism. Despite progress in training, information-sharing, and the use of shared resources, political, legal, and operational barriers continue to undermine effective cooperation. The article concludes that, in a context of hybrid threats and geopolitical instability, it is imperative to strengthen coordination mechanisms and develop a dedicated strategy for the CSDP–AFSJ nexus, accompanied by action plans and progress reports, to ensure transparency, effectiveness, and democratic accountability.
Author: Ana Paula Brandao (CICP, University of MInho) -
With the EU’s increased use of the terms strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty, and the ideational construction of ’the Geopolitical Union’, there has been an increased emphasis on active state and co-regulation as a tool of shaping digital technology markets. As ‘economy’ and ’security’ have increasingly been framed not as separate and distinct policy areas, but interdependent and mutually constitutive domains, the EU has taken an increasingly assertive approach to technology governance. The contribution of this article is to consider regulation not just as a policy tool, but as a form of geostrategic infrastructure. Reconceptualising it in this way helps us to address a supposed paradox - increased ‘deregulatory’ moves internally, with increased assertiveness externally. Law as geostrategic infrastructure is intended to support capacity building and industrial policy at home, while shaping regulatory norms externally. Recent initiative such as the Data Act reforms, Industrial Accelerator Act, and the Technological Sovereignty package represent a continuation of the regulatory shift that began with the first von der Leyen Commission.
Authors: Ben Farrand (Newcastle University) , Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University) -
Arms manufacturing has become politically speakable. In the UK, ‘Defence manufacturing’ and ‘the defence industrial base’ has gone from being often obscured within political discourse (opaquely packaged as ‘advanced manufacturing’ or ‘dual use technology’) to now being explicitly named, framed, and developed as a solution not just to global and national insecurities but to local social, political and economic problems. How has this come to be and with what effect? Tracing how civilian labour is organised for defence manufacturing in South Yorkshire, UK, the paper illuminates how the possibility and the speakability of ‘rearmament’ is an outcome of the enmeshing of economic logics, relations and mechanisms with social and political imaginaries and formations. From the financial crisis in its universities, to post industrial under-investment, under-employment and perceived political alienation in locations previously defined by steel and coal industries, in South Yorkshire ‘defence manufacturing’ has emerged as a politically speakable solution to intersecting political, economic, and social problems. Placing the concept of labour regimes into conversation with understandings of the liberal state and liberal military power, the resulting analysis has implications for what we know about the politics and the political economies of contemporary liberal military power.
Author: Joanna Tidy (University of Sheffield) -
As the international order shifts and US–China rivalry intensifies, the European Union's pursuit of "digital sovereignty" is widely read as evidence of an increasingly powerful supranational actor — the "Brussels effect," the "geopolitical Commission." Yet the EU's flagship instruments for this goal, public-private partnerships in critical digital infrastructure, succeed in some sectors and stall in others. Who, then, actually drives European digital sovereignty? Applying Moravcsik's liberal intergovernmentalism through theory-guided process-tracing, this paper compares the two most similar partnerships: cloud (IPCEI-CIS) and 5G (SNS JU). It argues that member states' politico-economic interests, not EU institutions, are decisive. Where national interests converged against US hyperscalers, cooperation produced an effective, industrial-deployment partnership in the cloud; where they diverged — states torn between US security alliances and the Chinese market over Huawei — contestation left only a weaker, research-focused body in 5G. Digital sovereignty thus advances only within the limits of protected national interests, with the EU acting as facilitator rather than sovereign. Foregrounding cooperation and contestation amid rapid technological change, the paper repositions member states in a debate that has overstated supranational power.
Author: Hammad Abbasi (Northumbria University)
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48
WE13 Panel / New directions in the study of populist and authoritarian politicsSponsor: Understanding the past, present and future of global politicsConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Rethinking Personalist Authoritarian Survival: Leadership Skill and the Question of Regime Longevity
Amid global concerns about the resilience and legitimacy of authoritarian rule, this paper investigates why some personalist authoritarian leaders survive longer than others. In rethinking dominant structural approaches to authoritarian survival, I argue that the leadership skill of personalist dictators is a critical yet underexplored explanatory variable. Drawing from political theory, comparative politics, international relations, political psychology, and business literature, I develop a framework that foregrounds leadership agency within regime durability. Specifically, I define skill through four traits – charisma, acumen, intimidation, and appeasement – and contend that these traits enable leaders to navigate institutional, political, and external challenges. I test this framework by analyzing Muammar Qaddafi’s rule in Libya, decade by decade from 1969 to 2011. Using qualitative content analysis and process tracing of unclassified archival documents from the British Foreign Office, CIA, and Library of Congress, as well as interviews I conducted with individuals who interacted with Qaddafi, I assess shifting perceptions of his leadership over time. To strengthen the generalizability of the theory, I also apply the framework to the leadership trajectories of Bashar al-Assad, Suharto, and Idi Amin.
Author: Mohammad Hamza Iftikhar (Lahore University of Management Sciences) -
As Moore has pointed out, the search for “alternative knowledge claims” prompted by the aesthetic turn in IR theory has often looked to the form and production of literature as an example of the kind of works which approach familiar topics with unique methodological or epistemological frameworks. Despite this interest in narrative fiction, one author remains curiously understudied in IR aesthetic inquiries, namely horror author Howard Philip Lovecraft (1890-1937). Besides having written an enduringly popular and influential corpus of short stories, Lovecraft’s life and work mirror much of the context surrounding the origin of IR as a discipline during the early 20th century. A curious mix of 19th century romanticism, a fascination with the implications of modern science, New England settings at a high tide of immigration and inveterate xenophobic racism, Lovecraft’s work offers a rich vein of cultural commentary both on and as a product of enduring theoretical questions surrounding reason, race and politics. Framed by Fischer’s notion of the weird and Shapiro’s arguments about textual approaches to politics, this paper will attempt to cohere these themes in one of Lovecraft’s more famous works, “The Call of Cthulhu,” into a concrete IR analysis.
Author: Guillaume Lacombe-Kishibe (University of Ottowa) -
Populist governments are generally expected to reduce foreign direct investment (FDI), yet existing research fails to explain why some sectors are more affected than others. This limitation reflects the assumption in current scholarship that the effects of populism are uniform across economic sectors. I argue that populism generates sector-specific political uncertainty and risk, producing larger declines in politically salient sectors that are more exposed to state intervention, such as agriculture, energy, and water and waste management. Globally integrated sectors such as finance, services, and manufacturing are more resilient because interventions in these sectors may generate immediate macroeconomic costs, threatening the economic performance on which populist governments and their winning coalitions depend. I test these expectations using country-year panel data from 2000 to 2023, fixed-effects models, and cross-national OECD sectoral data. Results indicate that populism is associated with lower aggregate FDI inflows and sectoral reallocation of investment. Sectoral heterogeneity depends on exposure to political intervention: highly exposed sectors lose investment, while globally integrated sectors are relatively insulated. Transnational capital responds asymmetrically to political uncertainty and risk, and exposure to state intervention may unintentionally redirect investment away from the very sectors populism claims to protect.
Author: Cassio Furtado (Texas Tech University) -
Digital economies play an increasingly salient role in shaping the epistemic structures of political authority. From techno-evangelist paradigms to ‘anti-woke’ discourses endorsed by Silicon Valley oligarchs, the tech industry’s influence over knowledge and truth ranges from top-down political leverage to everyday online practices. Yet we still lack a conceptual framing that links this influence with concrete political and redistributive outcomes. Existing work on epistemic politics has remained elite-centric and biased toward macro-economic registers, neglecting issues outside technocratic settings and formal economics. To address these gaps, this paper develops the concept of ‘reactionary epistemic populism’ as a mode of knowledge and truth-claiming entangled with digital capitalism, focusing on anti-feminist and anti-communist conspiracism in South Korea. The paper analyses the convergence of these two repertoires across gaming, web-cartoon and YouTube ecosystems, arguing that they function as sites of epistemic contestation fostering institutional de-legitimation. The findings highlight three major outcomes: systemic constraints on labour mobilisation and bargaining power; barriers to gender equality and progressive reforms; and the emergence of transnational epistemic coalitions aligned with global capitalist restructuring. By examining the intersection of digital epistemic conflicts with reactionary populism, the paper contributes to the integration of epistemic politics into critical IPE analysis of contemporary capitalism.
Author: Ahlem Faraoun (University of Manchester)
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WE13 Panel / Russia’s Foreign Policy Before and after UkraineSponsor: Cooperation and contestation in the Global North, South, and beyondConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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How do states with different political and economic structures negotiate economic cooperation, and how does it affect their economic relationship? This paper examines a peculiar case study from the Cold War: 4 Socialist countries (Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and Hungary) became signatories of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) between 1966 and 1973. Despite GATT being an explicitly Capitalist trade treaty, these Socialist states, which were operating under fundamentally different foreign trade mechanisms, could successfully join.
Using a structural gravity model and a new bilateral trade dataset, the results suggest that the signing of GATT is associated with a 48–56 per cent increase in export volume. However, the paper finds modest welfare gains for these countries, which can be explained by their comparatively closed economies and other barriers to trade beyond tariffs. Due to the setup, the results should be understood as a lower bound, implying that international cooperation can lead to significant benefits even for countries with profoundly different socioeconomic settings.Author: Marco Cokic (London School of Economics and Political Science) -
This paper is an empirical incursion into Russia’s white papers on defence and strategy between 2008 and 2024. The goal is to address whether Russia is a pole of the current international system, a matter of controversy in recent IR literature. I intend to demonstrate that, despite its disruptive role and efforts to advance its preferred version for ordering the international system, the latter does not reflect Russia’s priority preferences. This work relies heavily on content analysis of documents available on Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs webpage as primary sources, particularly its Foreign Policy Concepts, National Security Strategy, and Military Doctrine. Preliminarily, it is possible to state that while it increased its interests from 2008 until 2023, Russia’s proposed ordering for dealing with international challenges remained the same: a model of a “polycentric,” “multipolar” world order. Russia’s promotion of multipolarity and disregard for the norms of the international order may be a rhetorical challenge to American unipolarity, but it has not altered the structure of the international system, despite Russia’s increased military might. The rise of China (at the structural level) and the affinities between the two countries (at the unit level) are important factors in explaining Russia’s recent behaviour.
Author: Paulo Bittencourt (São Paulo State University) -
The War in Ukraine occurred as Ukraine shifted its foreign policies from hedging to balancing from 2014. Through observing this War, what foreign policy lessons have Southeast Asian states, given their similarity to Ukraine as smaller powers in a region where Great Powers compete, drawn?
To address this question, this article first classifies the existing literature about the causes of the War into three categories (Russia as an insecure Power, a greedy Power, or an insecure and greedy Power) and delineates four potential lessons deriving from these interpretations: (1) the Danger of External Balancing (corresponding to the view that Russia was insecure), (2) the Importance of Balancing (corresponding to the view that Russia was greedy), (3, 4) the Vulnerability before External Balancing is Achieved, and the Necessity of Balancing without Threatening the Adversary (corresponding to the view that Russia was simultaneously insecure and greedy). Then, as a first step to study lessons learned by Southeast Asian states, this article examines the discussions in Vietnam. It finds that, although the Danger of External Balancing is typically considered the most relevant lesson, the importance of internal balancing, which addresses the Necessity of Balancing without Threatening the Adversary, is also emphasized by some.Authors: Kentaro Fujikawa (Nagoya University) , Minh Dang Vo (Nagoya University) -
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s growing diplomatic, media, cultural, religious and security activity in Africa has frequently been described as a “pivot”, “return”, or “shift”. This paper asks whether such language captures a substantive transformation in Russian foreign policy or overstates a more uneven and performative adaptation to wartime isolation. Bridging foreign policy analysis with debates on conflict, cooperation, and Global North-South contestation, it argues that Russia’s post-2022 Africa policy is better understood as a politics of performed cooperation than as an established strategic pivot. Through Africa-facing initiatives and narratives, Moscow projects resilience, contests Western efforts at isolation, and presents itself as a partner of the Global South. Yet increased visibility and activity do not necessarily demonstrate a structural redistribution of foreign-policy priorities, resources, and capabilities. Conceptually, the paper distinguishes between rhetorical amplification, operational diversification, and structural reorientation, arguing that only the latter constitutes a genuine pivot. The Russian case consequently exposes a broader problem in the study of foreign-policy change: scholars and policy analysts frequently infer strategic transformation from intensified discourse and selective expansion. The paper offers a more demanding framework for identifying when apparent foreign-policy change amounts to durable reorientation rather than geopolitical adaptation and performance.
Author: Maxime Duchateau (Université de Montréal)
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WE13 Panel / Understanding Conflict in Israel, Lebanon, and GazaSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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This paper explores how Christian individuals in Lebanon live with, and make sense of, ongoing violence through the entanglements of memory, affect, and spatial practice. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and vignettes, I argue that violence is experienced as a continuous presence that shapes everyday life, emotions, and relationships. I examine how ordinary violence is navigated through emotions such as fear, nostalgia, and hatred, which circulate to reinforce communal identity and are made tangible through everyday spatial practices and informal border-making. I also reveal how emerging war technologies disrupt these ways of navigating violence, as shifting demographics intensify mistrust and unsettle familiar patterns of movement, safety, and belonging. Ultimately, this paper shows that navigating ordinary violence is continuously woven into an embodied handbook of survival, accumulated through memory, emotions, and space. While new forms of violence bring new uncertainty, I ask whether these shared uncertainties might also open space for alternative forms of solidarity and relationality.
Author: Karen Atallah (SOAS, University of London) -
When massive violence is not named, what does that silence do and produce? This article examines the political effects of silence in international discourse through the case of Western responses to the Israeli war on Gaza since October 2023. Rather than explaining why governments remain silent, we treat silence itself as an object of inquiry. Drawing on postcolonial scholarship, critical security studies, and emerging literature on silence in International Relations, we conceptualize a “trinity of silence”: the absence of references to violence, victims, and perpetrators. We argue that these omissions are not merely passive but performative, constituting a mechanism of discursive erasure that renders violence socially and politically indiscernible. Empirically, the article analyzes official statements issued by the United States, France, the European Union, the G7, and other Western actors between 2023 and 2025. The findings show how violence is depoliticized through abstraction, victims are symbolically annihilated through omission, and accountability is obscured through the refusal to identify perpetrators. By theorizing silence as a constitutive feature of security discourse, the article contributes to debates on discourse, violence, and postcolonial power, while offering a framework applicable beyond Gaza to other cases of neglected mass violence.
Authors: Jérémy Dieudonné (UCLouvain) , Marion Zahar (Université de Montréal)* -
Abstract
Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others argued that the photographic representation of suffering shapes, and often distorts, how distant audiences come to know and feel about war. This paper revisits Sontag's argument in the age of the smartphone, where the photograph has been displaced by the live stream, the story, and the algorithmically curated feed, and where the subjects of suffering increasingly narrate their own pain rather than being framed by an external photographer. Drawing on this updated optics of suffering, the paper undertakes a comparative analysis of how conflict-related vulnerability is rendered visible, or rendered invisible, on Instagram across three cases: the war crimes documented in Gaza and Ukraine, and the conflict-driven food insecurity experienced in Uganda. While the former two have generated an intense, globally circulated visual record, often produced by victims themselves, the latter remains comparatively absent from the same platforms and publics, despite comparable or greater levels of human insecurity. The paper asks what accounts for this asymmetry of visibility, and what it reveals about the politics of who gets to be seen as suffering. Methodologically, the study employs critical discourse analysis of a corpus of Instagram posts (images, captions, and stories) from each context, examining how personal narrative, visual testimony, and platform affordances combine to construct conflict and vulnerability for distant audiences, and how these constructions are received, amplified, or ignored. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on conflict, cooperation, and global inequality by foregrounding the unequal distribution of visibility itself as a site of insecurity.Author: Salonee Shital (University of Auckland) -
Recent escalation in the Middle East has shown how conflicts have unfolded not only through military confrontation but also through struggles over perception, information, and narrative. Focusing on the renewed war in Lebanon, this paper examines how the latest conflict has opened a discursive battlefield that remains underexplored in IR scholarship. While existing research has concentrated on Israel’s material infrastructures of domination, less attention has been given to “cognitive warfare” - the strategic use of perception management and knowledge production as tools of power. This gap is notable given growing scholarship on digital and psychological warfare, including analyses of the IDF’s “cognitive effort” doctrine (Siboni & Finkel, 2018) and perception management in the Israel-Hezbollah context (Siman-Tov et al., 2020). Drawing on relevant literature, the paper explores how contemporary warfare increasingly operates through digital and discursive infrastructures. It argues that Israel’s campaign in Lebanon seeks to reshape Lebanese public consciousness by framing resistance as futile and self-destructive. More broadly, it situates cognitive warfare within a wider hybrid strategy aimed at silencing resistance narratives, shaping international perceptions, and reconstructing the digital memory of violence and alleged war crimes. In doing so, it highlights how conflicts increasingly operate across both physical and cognitive domains and contributes to better understandings of contemporary conflicts in one of the world’s most significant conflict regions.
Author: Zainab Younes (BISA member) -
This paper examines the transformation of borders in contemporary politics through the concept of de-territorialisation, arguing that globalisation has not diminished the significance of borders but has reconfigured them into flexible and dispersed mechanisms of control. By engaging critically with theories of sovereignty, territory, governmentality and colonialism, it challenges conventional understandings of borders as fixed territorial lines and highlights their evolving role in regulating mobility, security and populations.
The paper first traces the historical relationship between colonialism and the formation of the modern state, demonstrating how colonial governance and sovereign statehood emerged as mutually constitutive processes. It then explores how contemporary bordering practices extend beyond traditional territorial boundaries, producing fragmented spaces in which legal, political and territorial distinctions are increasingly blurred. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Agamben, Balibar and Walker, the analysis argues that sovereignty operates through dynamic and exceptional forms of governance that continuously reshape territory and political authority.
To illustrate these dynamics, the paper examines the Israel–Palestine case, focusing on emergency legislation, fragmented territorial governance and humanitarian spaces as mechanisms through which sovereign power is reproduced. It argues that Palestinian territories exemplify de-territorialisation as a process of displacement, control and re-territorialisation, whereby borders function as fluid yet effective instruments of governance.
The paper contends that contemporary borders are continuously reproduced through the interaction of sovereignty and governmentality within enduring colonial structures. It therefore proposes a colonial reading of de-territorialisation that demonstrates how contemporary bordering practices continue to reproduce forms of control, exclusion and violence.
Author: Yağmur Kızılay Bicer (Bingöl University)
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51
WE13 / Plenary roundtable - Conflict, Cooperation, and Change: International Politics in the Global North and South
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52
WE13 Panel / Change and Upheaval in International PoliticsSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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‘Algorithmic governance’ systems increasingly coordinate social, economic, and political life across national borders through automated decision-making, predictive analytics, and personalized interventions. This paper examines whether cosmopolitan justice, defined as transnational moral obligations toward global distributive fairness and democratic legitimacy, can survive the rise of technocratic algorithmic coordination that operates outside traditional frameworks of political accountability. Drawing on the concept of the ‘Algorithmic Leviathan,’ it argues that algorithmic systems function as apolitical coordinators that eliminate occasions for political contestation by replacing democratic deliberation with optimization-driven satisfaction of individual preferences. Unlike Hobbes’s ‘territorial Leviathan,’ contemporary algorithmic governance operates transnationally through platform infrastructures, surveillance networks, and automated decision systems that transcend state sovereignty. This creates a fundamental tension with the cosmopolitan framework, which requires ‘vertical sovereignty,’ multi-level democratic governance distributing authority from local to global institutions so as to realize duties of global justice. The paper concludes by proposing institutional reforms, namely including a ‘Global Algorithmic Oversight Board,’ regional data compacts, and redistributive mechanisms treating data as 'global commons', a step that would politicize algorithmic governance through transnational democratic participation.
Author: Abhishek Banerjee (University of Delhi) -
The year 2025 was widely described as “the year of the Gen Z uprising,” as young people mobilised across Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal, Kenya, Madagascar, Peru, and Morocco. While these movements have attracted some scholarly attention, their analysis from peace and security perspectives remains almost absent. This is a significant gap, given that Gen Z movements in many countries have been marked by high levels of violence, raising important theoretical questions about the conditions for peace and security in the contemporary Global South. The growing impact of Gen Z movements in countries such as India further enhances their wider significance. This paper aims to address this gap by offering insights into digitally mobilised Gen Z uprisings through an in-depth examination of the case of Nepal. Nepal represents a particularly significant case study because it experienced an unprecedentedly high intensity of violence that culminated in the collapse of the existing government within 48 hours. Using a qualitative single-case study approach, the paper addresses: What factors explain the emergence and success of digitally organised Gen Z uprisings in Nepal? And what have been their implications for peace and security?
Author: Shrishti Rana (University of Manchester) -
The current dynamics of escalation in international politics has been a defining characteristic of our current global order. Increased levels of investment in the defence and security sectors have been accompanied by ever-more restrictive policies on the movement of capital and people, and since 2016 the world has experienced a trend on the “closing of territories” or shifting territorial connections between either major, middle and small powers at the global arena. This context seems to favour a more deepened conversation between “outside” and “inside” politics of states through the understanding of territorial policies at the national level. These policies represent a helpful analytical tool that bridges domestic and international politics, helping to grasp important changes to the international order during the last decade. Crises on multilateralism, economic competition, as well as armed conflict and forceful (des-)integration attempts can be traced back to the idea of territory as a spatial dimension of statecraft, in which either direct dominion over territory or indirect control over how its dynamics work out can be helpful analytical tools for the understanding of escalating trends and more prone positions by states to apply exceptional measures and resort to the use of force in their foreign policies.
Author: Gustavo Glodes Blum (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) -
As sea ice retreats, the Arctic Ocean is increasingly envisioned as a frontier of digital connectivity and a new arena of competition and cooperation in the context of competing digital orders. This paper examines Polar Connect, an emerging European-led project that aims to link Europe, Asia, and North America across the Central Arctic Ocean by 2030. It asks: How a project planned to connect three continents also produces disconnection? Who is wired in and who is left out? How does cooperation among some actors come at the cost of excluding others?
The paper develops two arguments. First, cable governance is shifting away from market-led and broadly universal arrangements toward security-driven rules set within narrower alliances. This competition plays out through four mundane gateways that can equally connect or exclude, namely financing, routing, landing rights, and supply chains. Second, cable installation and maintenance depend on bathymetric mapping and ice forecasting, and Indigenous knowledge of sea-ice conditions. This raises the question of whose expertise counts when infrastructure crosses Arctic homelands. Situated at the intersection of critical infrastructure, environmental change, and knowledge production, trans-Arctic cables will significantly shape the global digital future, widening connection and hardening new lines of exclusion.Author: Liling Xu (School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University) -
Solarpunk is an unapologetically optimistic eco-movement, envisioning a future that focuses on community, upscaling, circular economy, renewable energy, and symbiosis with nature amid intensifying climate crisis and anxiety. The term was first coined in 2008 as an art movement to juxtapose it as an antithesis of the aesthetics of cyberpunk and steampunk. Cyberpunk, being a sci-fi sub-genre that includes futuristic AI technologies, societal degradation, and mega-corporations, now seems to mirror the reality of people’s anxieties in a rapidly growing technical age such as ours. Likewise, steampunk converges futuristic technology and steam powered nostalgia of the Industrial Revolution. The line between fiction and reality has blurred; cyberpunk was a warning, and the current societal and environmental trajectories are a testament of that. The solarpunk movement provides solutions for an alternative to the ensuing cyberpunk reality. Focusing on the Global South context, the abundance of solar and wind resources provides a viable starting point, but there is a need to overcome political, economic, infrastructural, and social limitations. This study will focus on how policy frameworks, indigenous practices (eg: Ubuntu, Harambee), scalable technologies, mixed financing, green architecture, and women-led and empowering projects can add up to what the solarpunks envision for our future. This study will further engage in the study of current practices that align with the solarpunk principles, and how South-South exchanges can manifest the solarpunk dream of a resilient, clean, cooperative, and inclusive Global South.
Author: Priyanjali Borgohain (South Asian University, New Delhi, India)
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53
WE13 Panel / Conflict and Contestation in the Middle EastSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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Ethnicity has long been a defining factor in shaping political dynamics across the Middle East, often cutting deeper than state boundaries or national identities. This paper examines how ethnic conflicts emerge and escalate in Arab states, with particular focus on cases where state collapse or severe institutional weakness has created conditions analogous to international anarchy — a situation in which ethnic communities are left to provide for their own security with no credible central authority to mediate their fears.
The study draws on neo-realist theory, specifically the concept of the security dilemma, to explain how groups that may harbour no inherently hostile intentions can nonetheless slide into violent confrontation. When the state can no longer guarantee protection, ethnic communities begin to read each other's defensive measures as potential threats, triggering a cycle of mutual fear and counter-mobilisation that is difficult to reverse. This dynamic, first applied to ethnic conflict by Barry Posen in his analysis of Yugoslavia's disintegration, is here examined in the context of Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon following the Arab uprisings.
The paper argues that state weakness in the Arab world does not merely fail to prevent conflict — it actively generates the structural conditions for it, turning ethnic identity into a survival strategy rather than a cultural attribute. At the same time, the study acknowledges the limitations of ethno-realism as a standalone framework, noting that elite agency, historical grievances, and external interference introduce complexities that structural theory alone cannot resolve.
The study concludes that addressing ethnic insecurity in the Arab world requires moving beyond security arrangements toward genuine political inclusion and institutional reform.Author: Hoda Ashiekh (Sabratha university) -
This paper examines how regional conflict in the Middle East exposes a distinctive vulnerability for highly globalised small states i.e. dependence on secure movement through chokepoints and infrastructures they cannot fully control. I argue that wealth does not always produce strategic autonomy. Using Qatar during the recent 2026 Iran-US war as a focused case study, I make the case that fiscal resilience can coexist with logistical vulnerability. Qatar’s immense hydrocarbon wealth, sovereign assets, and state capacity enabled it to absorb shocks, but its development model remained dependent on secure circulation through Gulf airspace, and maritime energy transit via the Strait of Hormuz. When conflict disrupted these routes, vulnerability appeared less through territorial destruction than through interrupted flows of energy, passengers, aircraft, cargo, and capital. I develop the concept of chokepoint-dependent resilience to explain this condition. Methodologically, I use a qualitative case study model via process tracing across two domains i.e. aviation and LNG sea transit, primarily relying upon publicly available data on air and marine traffic, as well as official reports. The paper contributes to international security studies literature by showing how violence imposes costs on states beyond the battlefield through delay, uncertainty, reputational damage, and route dependence.
Author: Mohammad Hamza Iftikhar (Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)) -
This paper examines how the “standard of civilisation” continues to influence the use of violence and its legitimacy in contemporary international politics. While this concept historically functioned to differentiate between “civilised” and “uncivilised” persons, this paper argues that its underlying logic continues to shape how states are judged and how their use of force is understood.
By focusing on Israel’s military acts in Lebanon, this paper highlights a consistent asymmetry: violence carried out by Israel is widely accepted as legitimate acts of self-defence even though they involve incursion into Lebanese sovereign territory. On the other hand, Lebanon is often seen as a fragile state that is incapable of enforcing its sovereignty. This discrepancy is not a mere reflection of politics but rather one of a deep hierarchy where legitimacy is conditional on conforming with dominant forms of statehood.
Drawing on postcolonial international relations theory and previous original research on the securitization and racialization of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, this paper illustrates how comparable logics function across both international and local contexts. It argues that securitization works as a mechanism through which states and people are categorized which enables the normalization of certain forms of violence and not others.Author: Hind Alhelou (The American University in Cairo) -
This paper examines how Iran’s strategic culture shapes practices of "conflict management" in the contemporary Middle East. Challenging conventional liberal approaches that privilege conflict resolution as the primary pathway to regional order, it argues that enduring instability in the region is systematically sustained through patterns of managed confrontation that remain below the threshold of large-scale interstate war. Drawing upon Alastair Iain Johnston’s third-generation framework, this study conceptualizes strategic culture not as a static mindset, but as a dynamic, bounded repertoire of ideas and practices that actively structures threat perceptions, deterrence logics, and calibrated escalation.
Methodologically, the paper employs a qualitative interpretive analysis of Iranian policy discourse, official rhetoric, and regional security practices between 2018 and 2026—a critical period spanning from the "active resistance" strategy to recent direct and proxy military confrontations. It demonstrates how these strategic narratives facilitate a system of tacit bargaining and measured antagonism that neither resolves deep-seated conflicts nor triggers comprehensive regional war. By shifting analytical attention from conflict outcomes to conflict governance, the paper contributes to critical debates on regional order and security in the Global South, offering a robust framework for understanding Middle Eastern security as an enduring, calculated system of managed friction rather than a series of episodic failures of peace.Author: Sadra Raykan (University of Tehran) -
With the ongoing crisis around Iran and in light of the blockage of the Hormuz Strait, international trade has no other way than to readjust the main maritime routes towards the Suez. This, in its turn, highlights the issue of a dangerous passage through the Aden Gulf that is the point of entry that leads towards the Suez channel. Over 30000 vessels pass the Gulf of Aden annually, making it an important transport hub in the Indian Ocean and a gateway towards the Suez Canal. At the same time, international media present regular reports of kidnappings and attacks in this area.
The problem of maritime piracy in the Gulf of Aden presents an interdisciplinary research area for regional, global, economic, and maritime law studies. Academic interest fluctuates
around both theoretical and practical issues surrounding this issue, and yet it remains unresolved. This work questions the status of pirates as possible actors in the regional security system. At this stage, it is important to assess the question of whether maritime
piracy is now an international security trigger in light of the blockages of the Hormuz Strait, since such identification will assist decision-makers in developing appropriate response and prevention policies.Author: Natalia Piskunova (Moscow State University)
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WE13 Panel / Understanding Borders and PowerSponsor: Connections and disconnections in borders, mobility and technologyConvener: British International Studies AssociationChair: British International Studies Association
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This paper examines how algorithmic governance is reshaping state-society relations in India, China, and Vietnam, three states with markedly different regime types but converging strategies of digital control. Rather than treating predictive analytics, biometric infrastructure, and platform regulation as neutral administrative tools, the paper argues these technologies constitute a new mode of political power: continuous, largely invisible, and legitimised through the language of security and efficiency. Drawing on Foucault's theories of discipline and biopolitics, Deleuze's account of control societies, and Zuboff's concept of surveillance capitalism, the paper traces how legal architectures, such as China's Cybersecurity and Data Security Laws, Vietnam's 2018 Cybersecurity Law, and India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, institutionalise state authority over data, speech, and movement. Through a comparative, interpretive analysis of legal frameworks, policy documents, and human rights reporting, the paper shows that despite differing regime types, these states share a governing logic of automated control that erodes civil liberties while reframing surveillance as a technical, security-oriented public good. The paper argues that as these models proliferate, they pose a distinct and underexamined threat to democratic accountability across the region.
Author: Ankita Singh Gujjar (University of Nottingham) -
This paper examines the relationship between democracy, territorial sovereignty and contemporary forms of governance through the lens of de-territorialisation. It argues that while democratic legitimacy remains formally anchored in the territorial state system established by the Westphalian order, contemporary governmental practices increasingly operate through de-territorialised mechanisms such as border policing, extraterritorial camps, closure regimes, detention infrastructures and securitised mobility. Rather than signalling a decline of territoriality, these practices reveal the continuous reconfiguration of political space through security and control.
To conceptualise this dynamic, the paper introduces the notion of the de-territorial governmental machine, which describes the recursive interplay between de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation in the governance of democratic orders. De-territorialisation refers to the abstraction of governmental power from fixed territorial boundaries, whilst re-territorialisation denotes the strategic reconstitution of spatial order through techniques of surveillance, exclusion and exception. Together, these processes generate hybrid political spaces in which democratic authority is simultaneously extended, fragmented and reinforced through coercive practices.
Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality and Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, the paper argues that contemporary democracy is increasingly governed through the management of insecurity. It contends that this reveals a constitutive paradox: democratic claims to inclusion, rights and universality are sustained through practices of exclusion, containment and violence.
The paper traces this paradox to the colonial formation of modern statehood, where democratic governance in metropolitan centres was historically enabled through coercive territorial control in colonial spaces. It therefore proposes a colonial reading of the de-territorial governmental machine, demonstrating how contemporary democracy remains structured by the entanglement of territoriality, violence and governmental power across shifting spatial configurations.
Author: Yağmur Kızılay Bicer (Bingöl University, Department of Philosophy, Bingöl, Türkiye) -
This paper examines whether participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is associated with increased diplomatic engagement with China. Existing discussions often assume that deeper economic integration produces closer political ties, yet BRI participation varies substantially across countries and stages of involvement. I argue that BRI-related infrastructure should be understood not simply as economic cooperation, but as a form of visible and costly commitment that can generate diplomatic signaling. At the same time, the political effects of such participation are unlikely to be linear. Rather than expecting a smooth progression from non-participation to symbolic entry to active implementation, I develop a stage-based framework in which diplomacy may cluster around moments of formal entry, reassurance, and signaling. Empirically, the paper uses a country-year dataset on high-level diplomatic visits to China, combined with BRI MoU dates and project-level implementation evidence. The results show that countries with active BRI projects are somewhat more diplomatically engaged than MoU-only countries, but much of this difference is explained by pre-existing closeness to China. Across the broader categories of no MoU, MoU-only, and MoU plus project, the evidence does not support a linear pattern. Event-time analysis further suggests that diplomatic activity is concentrated around MoU signing rather than increasing persistently afterward.
Author: Mutlu Dilara Aydın (Bilkent University) -
The border provinces of Iran and Georgia, characterized by high ethno-religious diversity, are sites of cross-border cooperation and conflict. In managing this diversity, Iran adopted securitization (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) and opportunity framing (Hassan Rouhani) approaches, while Georgia has implemented the Civic Integration Law since 2005. Despite numerous separate studies on each country, no systematic comparative study across these three approaches has been conducted to date. This research aims to comparatively assess the impact of these approaches on indicators of "functional fragmentation" in local governance of the border provinces of Golestan and Kvemo Kartli. The theoretical framework combines five concepts: functional fragmentation, securitization, discourse shift (desecuritization), institutionalism, and borderland governance. The research methodology is based on a Most Similar Systems Design (MSSD) using comparative documentary analysis. The document timeframe is from 2005 to 2021. Data will be analyzed through qualitative content analysis. Findings indicate that in Golestan province, Ahmadinejad's securitization approach was associated with increased functional fragmentation in border control, cross-border actor influence, public service delivery, and minority trust in local institutions. Rouhani's opportunity framing approach only succeeded in increasing minority trust in local institutions. In contrast, Georgia's formal institution building approach in Kvemo Kartli reduced functional fragmentation in all areas except minority trust.
Author: Abouzar Pouradib (Independent Researcher)
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WE13 Panel / Women's Protest: Agency and Political Participation Across the WorldSponsor: Understanding conflict, insecurity and vulnerabilityConvener: Ina Friesen (Aberystwyth University)Chair: Jennifer Mathers (Aberystwyth University)Discussant: Jennifer Mathers (Aberystwyth University)
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The 2024 Gen Z protests in Kenya have been celebrated as a youth-led movement challenging economic inequality, corruption, and state violence. Drawing on interviews with feminist activists, this paper explores the intersections between feminist organizing and the Gen Z protest movement, focusing on how each shaped and transformed the other. The findings show that feminist activists contributed to digital mobilization, the documentation of state violence, and the development of care and solidarity networks that sustained protest participation. Interviewees also describe how feminist concerns—including gender-based violence, femicide, and patriarchal governance—were linked to broader demands for social and political justice. At the same time, the protests reshaped feminist activism by fostering new solidarities, expanding activist networks, and encouraging more decentralized forms of organizing. The paper argues that feminist activism and the Gen Z protests should be understood not as separate movements but as mutually constitutive forms of contemporary political resistance in Kenya.
Authors: Lena Gutheil (German Institute of Development and Sustainability) , Sheila Ronoh (Coventry University) -
The paper examines the political protest of older women in Russia who have staged single pickets against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022. While research on anti-war protest and political protest in Russia in general often focuses on younger activists and high-profile male opposition figures, older women have played a visible yet under-analysed role in protesting against the war in Ukraine. Drawing on case studies of female pensioners who have staged single pickets across Russia, the paper explores how age and gender intersect in shaping both the possibilities and constraints of protest in authoritarian Russia. It considers how older women mobilise their moral authority to criticise state violence and militarisation and addresses the specific vulnerabilities they face, including social stigma and financial difficulties. By centring older women’s protest, the paper sheds light on the political participation of a population that is considered to be apolitical and adds to the growing literature on anti-war protest in Russia.
Authors: Ina Friesen (Aberystwyth University) , Anna Mariia Filippova (Central European University) -
Feminist environmental activists, through years of coordinated and persistent advocacy, have secured a gender agenda within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), working within the institution to mainstream gender in political decisions. While recognising the important role these activists have played, as well as the challenges of working within a political system like the UNFCCC, feminist environmental scholars have criticised this advocacy for perpetuating problematic framings of women as either vulnerable to a changing climate or virtuous in their knowledge of climate solutions. However, in response to a rapidly changing political terrain which sees a worrying normalisation of climate denialism as well as a re-assertion of traditional gender roles and the gender binaries they entail, feminist activists in the UNFCCC are turning to different language. The Belem Gender Action Plan for instance, adopted in 2025, has seen the UNFCCC deploy more intersectional understandings of gender, despite broader language on human rights being removed, as well as shifting tactics to focus on mobilisation and movement-building outwith the institution. In this paper I analyse this shift, arguing that this new kind of feminist environmental activism might offer a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak political landscape.
Author: Joanna Flavell (University of Sheffield) -
This paper examines women’s protest beyond visible forms of mobilisation such as marches, sit-ins, and direct confrontation, asking how survival itself can become a political act under conditions of gendered and climate precarity. Set in rural India, the paper focuses on the body as a central site through which power is exercised and resisted: the body that is tired, hungry, menstruating, ageing, exposed to heat, denied rest, made responsible for care, or forced to continue labour under conditions of environmental stress. Rather than treating women’s bodies only as objects of vulnerability, regulation, or harm, the paper asks how embodied practices of endurance, refusal, care, and continued presence may become forms of protest against social, institutional, and environmental injustice.
Empirically, the paper draws on qualitative research with rural community women living under harsh climate conditions in India. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with women selected through purposive criterion-based sampling, and analysed through thematic analysis, the paper examines how women narrate the bodily, emotional, and social labour of surviving climate stress. Their accounts show how heat, water scarcity, food insecurity, livelihood strain, and health neglect are not experienced as isolated environmental problems, but as deeply gendered conditions that reorganise care, mobility, work, rest, and bodily autonomy.
Preliminary findings suggest that women’s everyday survival practices can become politically meaningful when they contest the structures that make their bodies overworked, disposable, unsafe, or invisible. Women described fetching and managing water, protecting family health, seeking care despite institutional neglect, continuing paid and unpaid labour through exhaustion, sustaining informal support networks, and insisting on bodily dignity as everyday acts of negotiation and refusal. The paper does not romanticise survival or collapse all coping into resistance. Instead, it asks: under what conditions does survival become protest?
Author: Faiza Ruksar Arif (The KaiTai Collective)
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