Section list

Section Chairs: Marco Vieira & Ali Bilgic

Ontological Security Studies (OSS) has been flourishing in the discipline of International Relations (IR). From different ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives, OSS scholars have been exploring and re-defining key concepts of IR such as security, identity, anxiety, self-other relations in areas from foreign policy analysis, the impact of migration and nationalism to the rise of authoritarian populism. However, OSS has also been criticised for fixing identities, closing down political possibilities, and prioritising security/stability over contingency of subjectivities and identities as well as on the account of suitability of using ontological security for collective actors such as states. Recently psychoanalytical approaches, mainly using Lacan’s theory of subject and subjectivity, but also drawing on the work of others, such as, for example, Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva, have addressed many of these criticisms by embracing un-fixability and contingency of identities and instability of subjects. These perspectives offer insights on emotional dimensions of ontological (in)security, how individual and collective subjectivities conflate, multiplicities of selves and others, and politically contested nature of subjectivity. This section invites panels and individual papers that advance the existing psychoanalytical studies in areas including, yet not exclusive to, emotions/affects, the self-other constitution of postcolonial and decolonial subjectivities, politics of gender and sexuality, historical memories and memorialisation in ontological (in)security in addition to new methodological interventions.

Section Chairs: Luise Bendfeldt & Louise Ridden

Protection is arguably the central concept within International Relations (IR), as the state system is legitimised by the promise of protection. Ideas of protection litter both the academic literature and the daily practice of IR, yet protection itself – what is means, what it does, what it is, eludes specific and rigorous interrogation. The field of IR rests instead upon the central tenets of state, power and security, while protection remains only implicit within these concepts. So, what is protection? Who can name, promise, and give it? How is protection instrumentalised, lived, and experienced? We invite empirically varied work on the protection of civilians, space / place, the environment, health, culture, states and more, aiming for 10 panels organised around these overarching foci: protection throughout history, narratives of protection, promises of protection, practices of protection, temporality and futures of protection. In so doing, this section explicitly engages the three themes of this year’s conference. Space is addressed conceptually as we seek to name and engage the conceptual space between key IR concepts, in which protection lies. Style, in that we seek to assess the myriad of ways through which protection is instrumentalised; academically, aesthetically, through film, curation, popular culture, and more. Finally, the struggle over narratives, practices, and promises of protection are not only under-theorised, but also uphold unjust hierarchies by placing value only on particular kinds of life in particular kinds of ways.

Section Chairs: Anna Grzywacz & Guangyu Qiao-Franco

Asia, now increasingly referred to as the Indo-Pacific, has emerged as a central hub of global economic growth, political dynamism, and cultural diversity. The geostrategic importance of the region has grown exponentially in recent years, exemplified by the US’s policy of ‘pivot to Asia’ since 2011 and the European leadership’s announcement to play a ‘more active role’ in and around Asia in 2022. The increasing interconnectivity between regions implies that the major geopolitical shifts, economic realignments, and security challenges currently unfolding in Asia and the Indo-Pacific will have significant implications beyond the region. The “Politics of Asia and the Indo-Pacific section” section is dedicated to research on this critical region with growing importance. It aims to provide an opportunity for the European academic community to extend discussions beyond China’s politics and actively contribute to the scholarly dialogue on other important state and non-state actors in the region.  
 
We particularly welcome contributions that engage with the following themes and questions:  
 
1) The Rise of Indo-Pacific: How has the emergence of a new region reshaped regional and transregional politics? How does the international community respond to the concept of Indo-Pacific?  
2) China and beyond: What strategies do countries employ to address geopolitical challenges and opportunities beyond the predominant focus on China? How do middle and minor powers engage with other regions and regional organisations? 
3) ASEAN and the evolving regional order: What are the key features of regionalisation and regionalism in Asia? How is the security community forming in Asia and the Indo-Pacific?  
4) Non-western theorisation of international relations: What are the Asian approaches to global and regional politics? How does the region understand important concepts in IR, such as sovereignty or liberal international order? 

Section Chairs: Anahita Arian & Stephan Engelkamp

This section aims to explore various aspects of pedagogy for teaching International Relations (IR) in the Twenty-First Century. It encourages discussions of the challenges that students face when learning about International Relations (IR) theories, concepts, (intellectual) histories, and day-to-day experiences of international relations in IR classrooms and the challenges lecturers encounter teaching these subjects in and across different geographies in an age of polycrisis. How do, for example, racialized, neo-colonial, imperial, classist, gendered and/or patriarchal discourses and practices in global politics, shifts in global power, the curtailing of academic freedom next to the vicissitudes of neoliberal capitalism, global climate change, ecological and environmental crises, technological changes (e.g., rise of artificial intelligence), and students’ ever-growing needs for intellectual integrity and safe spaces affect teaching and learning about IR and global politics? How and with what critical, reflexive, inclusive, resilient, relational, reciprocal and/or student-centered pedagogies can we effectively address these challenges for teaching and learning about International Relations in a world that is characterized by pluriversality? We welcome papers, panels and roundtable submissions that address these and other related topics such as different modalities of active learning, questions pertaining to equality diversity and inclusion in teaching International Relations, teaching about controversial topics and the question of freedom of academic speech, next to decolonial methodologies of (un)learning IR, and more.

Section Chairs: Eric Sangar & Sabine Dini

Section Chairs: Catarina Kinnvall & Erica Resende

Emotions have long been viewed in IR as self-evident and irrational by-products of cognitive processes and have, until recently, remained largely implicit and undertheorized. However, in the past 20 years, the discipline has witnessed the steady growth of research on emotions, to the extent of authors recognizing the emergence of an Emotional Turn in IR; based on the notion that emotions matter for international and global politics. As a result, a large literature has now explored both how emotions can shape political perceptions and behavior, and how international actors may seek to manipulate, harness, or deploy emotions and emotional displays for political ends. In a conversation with the conference theme, this section will welcome proposals that look into how emotions construct, inform, shape, and constrain the spaces, styles, and struggles that make the ‘stuff’ of global politics today. More specifically, how do emotions, affect, and feelings direct our gaze from certain sites and places to others; what are the political, ethical, and epistemological consequences of prioritizing certain actors, geographies, and dynamics and not others? How could a better understanding of the role of emotions help us break away from long-held appropriate styles of knowledge-making in our discipline, and thus liberating us to new modes of doing, presenting, and criticizing science? Finally, how do emotions fuel the recognition and contestation of injustices, inequalities, precarisation, and ruinations in global politics?

Section Chairs: Tasniem Anwar & Keri van Douwen

All materials, photos, buildings and other objects of international law and politics form an aesthetic of thoughts and practices. Studying aesthetics in world politics has led to new insights related to questions of representation, the location of politics, and methodology. The so-called ‘aesthetic turn’ (Bleiker, 2001) promised not only to decentralize International Relations’ Western gaze but also opened new research avenues. International legal scholars have responded and contributed to this aesthetic turn by studying, for example, the design of international courts and the presentation of legal texts. A shared focus on aesthetic matters and critical sensibilities has aided scholars to move beyond the limits of -and deadlocks in- mainstream interdisciplinary International Law/International Relations debates and contributed towards critical interdisciplinary research and methodologies (Kratochwil 2014, Aalberts 2018). This section follows the aesthetic turn by focusing on the interaction of law and politics through material artefacts and design politics. We aim to advance an interdisciplinary conversation by connecting to socio-legal literature, science-and-technology studies, and post-colonial and feminist theory. In line with the themes of Spaces, Styles and Struggles, we are specifically interested in submissions that relate to questions of law and security, temporality, expertise and authority, secrecy and invisibility, as well as those exploring novel aesthetic methodologies such as (not) seeing, listening, writing, and hearing.

All materials, photos, buildings and other objects of international law and politics form an aesthetic of thoughts and practices. Studying aesthetics in world politics has led to new insights related to questions of representation, the location of politics, and methodology. The so-called ‘aesthetic turn’ (Bleiker, 2001) promised not only to decentralize International Relations’ Western gaze but also opened new research avenues. International legal scholars have responded and contributed to this aesthetic turn by studying, for example, the design of international courts and the presentation of legal texts. A shared focus on aesthetic matters and critical sensibilities has aided scholars to move beyond the limits of -and deadlocks in- mainstream interdisciplinary International Law/International Relations debates and contributed towards critical interdisciplinary research and methodologies (Kratochwil 2014, Aalberts 2018). This section follows the aesthetic turn by focusing on the interaction of law and politics through material artefacts and design politics. We aim to advance an interdisciplinary conversation by connecting to socio-legal literature, science-and-technology studies, and post-colonial and feminist theory. In line with the themes of Spaces, Styles and Struggles, we are specifically interested in submissions that relate to questions of law and security, temporality, expertise and authority, secrecy and invisibility, as well as those exploring novel aesthetic methodologies such as (not) seeing, listening, writing, and hearing.

Section Chairs: Léonard Colomba-Petteng & Katherine Pye

The ‘decentering agenda’ in International Relations has called on scholars of European foreign policy to stop ‘navel gazing’ and explore its external implementation, local perception, and effects in third countries. While there have been repeated calls to ‘provincialize Europe’ and interrogate Eurocentrism within the discipline of International Relations, the debate has still not advanced far enough beyond a (much-needed) normative and epistemological discussion. How does the ‘decentering agenda’ translate into empirical research? What are the methodological implications of a ‘decentered’ framework? This section seeks to push the ‘decentering agenda’ one step further by stressing its empirical contribution and heuristic value. The section chairs will therefore highly value empirically rich analyses from researchers doing fieldwork in different areas of the world (Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eurasia). We welcome contributions that cover five topics, broadly defined, covering trade and development; security and defence; geopolitics and diplomacy; migration and border control; norm diffusion and European identity. The purpose of this section is to bring together various scholars that examine Europe’s engagement with the Global South from an ‘outside-in’ perspective. By doing so, panelists will show the importance of re-assessing the agency of non-European actors in International Relations.

Section Chairs: Aine Bennett & Laura Sjoberg

Queer work in global politics and international relations is on the upswing, as more scholars analyze queer spaces, deploy queer concepts and methodologies, study queer struggles, and queer struggles. With this upswing, though, is a critical lens on queer scholarship: it is necessary to think beyond promoting queer work to examining, evaluating, and engaging its spaces and styles. This section, then, will have the goals of presenting and discussing work on queer internationals and analyzing what it means to research those queer internationals. When we say that the section will solicit work on queer internationals, we mean spaces where various forms of queer lives and living intersect with the global: from migration practices to security assemblages, from pinkwashing to hate crimes, from homonationalisms to homocolonialisms. When we say that the section will analyze what it means to research queer internationals, we refer to recent debates and discussions about whether ‘queerness’ can or should be instrumentalized in studying global politics, what appropriate methods are for doing critical queer global scholarship, how to deal with ethical questions that come from othering the queer for study and/or forcing classification from ‘outside’ various queer communities, and how work on queer internationals fits in to disciplinary inquiries in International Relations or international social sciences. Across these discussions and debates, we look for our panels to explore questions of where ‘queer’ global politics, ‘queering’ global politics, and ‘queer’ global politics research is right now, is going, or could go.

Section Chairs: Annabelle Littoz-Monnet & Juanita Uribe

In recent years, substantial political and economic transformations have reshaped processes of knowledge production in global governance. Sites of knowledge generation have increasingly shifted towards private sites, or embraced business logics,- sustaining the commodification of knowledge. Additionally, the materiality of knowledge production has transformed, towards greater digitalization and datafication of the tools and technologies used to know, measure, and govern objects. Contemporary forms of knowledge-making thus take place within and through concrete kinds of political orderings, whether conceived as ‘dispositifs’, technologies, infrastructures, or yet structures of economic production, which are embedded in and sustain novel power dynamics and asymmetries. Expertise, in turn, produces its own political effects, regarding the way objects are known, apprehended, and resources allocated. These transformations raise important questions for IR scholarship, which has mainly focused on immediate processes and practices of knowledge-making and assembling. This section contends that this new landscape of knowledge production calls for inquiries into the political economy dimensions of expertise. How is the political-economic shaping the contours of expertise and its socio-material inscriptions? What are the implications of the increasing privatization and digitalization of expertise, where scientific studies, technoscientific instruments, data, or policy advice of sort are increasingly produced in private sites? What knowledges and epistemologies do these political-economic processes silence? 

We welcome all contributions that focus on the politics of technology and expertise, and cover dimensions such as, for instance: 1) the increasing financialization and commodification of knowledge and technologies  2) the ubiquity of private actors and sites in global governance, including philanthropies, consultancies and corporations, and their involvement in the production of data-generation methods 3) the emergence of hybrid spaces of knowledge production 4) the spreading out of market logics and their associated infrastructures, knowledge instruments and artifacts, including in governmental spheres 5) the politics of evidence valuation and assembling 6) knowledge asymmetries between North and South and centre-periphery.  

Section Chairs: Andrew Neal & Anselm Vogler

Texts and documents have long served as foundational elements in social scientific research, and recent advancements in methods, approaches, and the accessibility of diverse textual materials offer new research horizons. This section calls for the exploration of text and documents produced by states, government departments, and non-state actors within the spaces, styles, and struggles of international politics. It aims to foster dialogue between IR sub-fields, encouraging researchers to explore innovative avenues for understanding international politics through advanced text and document analysis, including computational text analysis. By integrating diverse perspectives and methodologies, we strive to contribute to the evolving landscape of knowledge in this dynamic field.
The section invites innovative contributions on:

• Understanding how texts and documents are produced and function within and between the spaces of international politics.
• Leveraging computational text analysis, AI, and machine learning, including natural language processing, in the analysis and production of textual materials related to international politics.
• Investigating policy documents - such as national strategies, white papers, risk registers, cyber strategies, treaties, and diplomatic communiqués – in isolation, in context, as practices, and as political phenomena.
• Exploring the impact and significance of text and documents in shaping international policies.
• Scrutinizing the role of document classification, declassification, and archival practices, encompassing state and non-state actors.

Section Chairs: Sara Dezalay & Shoshana Fine

Legality is hailed as the cornerstone of democracies, late capitalism and the liberal international order. In International Relations law is often considered as a resource to pacify an anarchical international environment – a means to ending war, eliminating migrant deaths, fighting ‘bad’ governance, or preventing global warming. In this section, we inverse the supposed relation between legality and injustices in asking to what extent law enables violence: from migrant deaths and the lives lost at the expense of “freeing” populations in the name of a “global” rule of law, to the less visible albeit pernicious violence of the market for disenfranchised or climate-change affected societies of the Global South and the Global North. While critical scholars have emphasized how law can produce violence, they seem mostly concerned with discriminatory practices or the instrumentalization of law without conceptualizing how these practices are often sustained through reference to the formal structure of law and how this produces legitimacy. We welcome papers exploring how legality – both in terms of its structure and practice - is used to justify and enable violence in international politics. Original empirical and/or theoretical contributions are encouraged, drawing on critical perspectives on law, postcolonialism, international political sociology, history and international political economy. 

Section Chairs: Raffaele Mauriello & Deina Abdelkader

The section presents Islamic contributions to international affairs and the field of International Relations. It seeks to explore theoretical approaches and empirical experiences of the Islamic civilisation by referring to classical and modern sources, the worldview of prominent thinkers, statecraft experiences, current transnational movements, and case studies on the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) phenomenon concerning Diplomacy. The section analyses both theoretical approaches of Islam in International Relations and concrete historical experience of diplomacy in Islam: theories, empirical cases in different periods, and early Islam and the practice of diplomacy, among others. It considers a picture of current and historical Islamic contributions to IR fashioned under the following themes: Theoretical Approaches of Diplomacy in Islam; Worldviews of Muslim Thinkers and Practitioners vis-á-vis Diplomacy; Diplomacy and Islamic Polity/Governance; Diplomacy of Transnational and Political Islamist Movements; The Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) Phenomenon and Diplomacy. The objective is to develop and sustain a body of knowledge that addresses the theories and practices of the Islamic civilisation and Muslim societies concerning international affairs and the discipline of International Relations. This section aims to set a model for the inclusion of Muslim contributions to the field of IR to enrich, diversify, and strengthen it. To this end, the section aims to publish the papers in an edited volume with a major international publisher.

Section Chairs: Adrian Florea & Sukanya Podder

Over the past decade, a burgeoning body of multidisciplinary research has examined the dynamics of rebel governance, the set of actions undertaken by rebel groups to regulate the social, political, and economic life of civilians during civil war. Studies written from diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives have explored the conditions under which rebels engage in extensive or limited governance activities in the areas where they operate, civilians’ reactions to rebel rule, and the effect of rebels’ governance activities on their legitimacy and, more broadly, conflict outcomes such as duration, termination, or post-conflict in/stability. However, despite these theoretical, methodological, and empirical advancements, rebel governance research has still yet to more comprehensively explore the temporal dimensions of rebel governance (the variation in rebel governance practices at various stages during an insurgency), the intricate relationship between rebel non/territorial control and legitimacy (how rebels’ non/territorial presence affects their legitimacy with domestic and international audiences), and non-Western approaches to the study of rebel rule. 
 
We invite theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to these and other aspects related to rebel governance and legitimacy. We particularly welcome contributions that advance new, inter-disciplinary, avenues for exploring rebel governance and legitimacy. 

Section Chairs: Hager Ben Jaffel & Sebastian Larsson

Intelligence has moved far beyond the conventional spaces and operations of intelligence services, beyond espionage and national security. It has become a heterogeneous practice, overlapping more and more with the broader field of security, and involving a multiplicity of professionals such as data analysts, counterterrorism agents, law enforcement, and border guards. It also involves a range of actors who interface with intelligence when they come to define or contest it such as politicians, lawyers, and whistle-blowers. Traditional intelligence services remain important, but their priorities have expanded from protecting state secrets to sharing information through transnational relations and conducting digital surveillance on citizens across the globe using advanced technologies. Intelligence gathering has as such become an inescapable dimension of everyday life, whether it is about monitoring peoples’ online communications, being tasked to report ‘suspicious’ behaviour, or capturing and sharing acts of violence in warzones. An increasing number of people are entangled with intelligence, either as agents or targets.

The established field of Intelligence Studies (IS) have largely failed to keep track of these current transformations of intelligence work, in part due to the dominance of narrow state-centric and functionalist ontologies in the discipline. Hence, this section calls for new, interdisciplinary, and critical approaches to the study of intelligence. We invite contributions from across IR that challenge orthodox understandings, bring into view the new actors, objects, targets, and sites of contemporary intelligence, or take a fresh look at intelligence services through perspectives centring on their professionals, practices, and violent effects.

Section Chairs: Shannon Brincat & Haud Gueguen-Porcher

A range of critical approaches have enriched IR theory over the last couple of decades. One of the most prominent was that influenced by The Frankfurt School, notably via the Aberystwyth School in IR, that emphasised human security and the Habermasian problematisation of communicative reason in IR. Despite the many inroads of the first generation of these ‘critical’ scholars (Cox, Linlater, Booth and others), current research in IR has tended to neglect the more radical aspects of various critical approaches, including that of The Frankfurt School, that emphasise the incompatibility of capitalism, positivism, colonialism, patriarchy, and legal rationality with human emancipation through the reification of social relations and nature via the neutralization of critique. One of the main problems facing all critical approaches remains as poignant as ever: why do oppressed social groups often act against their interests? The spirit of malaise and apathy, rather than hope and constructive development, that pervades global politics today is rooted in the limited critique of the inequalities produced by neoliberal capitalism and neo-imperialism. The five panels gathered in this stream aim to recover some of the radical insights into this tension from authors across all ‘critical’ approaches in IR, not just those working in ‘Critical International Theory’, to offer alternative analytical tools for the critique of contemporary world politics and the construction of a politics of hope.

Section Chairs: Sarah Perret & Damien Simonneau

International studies have largely explored the making of ‘security’ knowledge in international politics, especially in its role in shaping power relations. From discourse analysis to security practices and careers, to use of technologies and the cyberspace, to legislation and criminalization, to the resort to armed force and weaponry, the underlying forms of violence have been understood in multiple ways. Violence is indeed a controversial notion, its qualification and knowledge about it, is always contested, trapped in-between its physical, symbolical, political, and social, or visible/hidden manifestations. More recently, critical research works on border, migration and STS have mobilised studies on agnotology and raised different kinds of entanglements of knowledge and non-knowledge with violence, demonstrating unexplored dimensions to investigate such as the privatisation of security, risk management, the exponential use of datafication technologies, postcolonialism or the blurring of military and security practices leading to new interrogations about the expression of violence in current defence and security policies.

Section Chairs: Monica Tennberg & Özlem Terzi

The (European) Arctic is perceived as an empty space, a wilderness area, a home of indigenous peoples, and a place to be developed. Amid rising geopolitical tensions, the region serves the implementation of EU’s Green Deal policies through the intensification of renewable energy and mineral production in the region. With the impacts of such policies on environmental and social sustainability, its peoples and environments, the European Arctic may, at the same time, be seen as an example of (EU’s) green colonialism in practice. In this section we aim to discuss policies and practices for sustainability transitions in the Arctic and beyond.  

This section will explore the politically complex, ethically controversial, contingent processes of sustainable development, green transition, and geopolitical rivalry as well as investigate the multiple dimensions in these processes in the (European) Arctic and beyond. The planned section foresees ten panels that correspond to (but are not limited to) the following topics: Governance of oceans and lands; the law, responsibility and ethics of green transition; rights of indigenous and local peoples; race for resources, securitisation and militarisation of the environment; onto-epistemological, normative, and methodological questions about post-human IR; emotional politics regarding land use, resources, green transition, contemporary colonialism. This section is organized by the UArctic Thematic Network on Critical Arctic Studies and aims to enable cross-issue and cross-regional comparative analyses. The panel foresees papers by established scholars and early career researchers as well as by PhD candidates. 

Section Chair: Yury Akimov

In the context of global uncertainty and turbulence of modern international relations, the nation states are often being pushed aside by non-sovereign actors who strive to play an increasingly visible and diverse role in the world arena. Initially, external activities of subnational actors were limited mainly to culture, education and tourism. Gradually they began to intervene in such spheres as immigration, natural resources, ecology, foreign trade, etc. Starting from establishing level-to level relations, they are now successfully maintaining ties with sovereign states and joining international organizations.

This section will focus on the increasing role of paradiplomacy in the modern world. We will ask and answer the following questions: What experience can be taken from the Cold War paradiplomacy and can this experience be used today to supplement diplomatic effort? Are new subnational actors currently entering the world stage? Can active paradiplomatic activity be a direction of federal center foreign policy? Are subnational units capable of solving the issues that national states are impotent to settle? Does increased foreign activity of subnational units bear a potential threat to territorial integrity of the country? Which branch of law should regulate paradiplomacy? Is aggressive foreign activity the only mean for linguistic and ethnic subnational unites to preserve their distinctness? What new technologies may add to a successful paradiplomatic activity of a subnational actor? Will paradiplomacy provide traditional diplomacy with new spaces, styles and struggles?

We welcome papers and panel proposal addressing these and similar issues. Theoretical approaches are as heartily welcomed as empirical and methodological contributions.

Section Chair: Andrew Palmer

The ‘narrative turn’ in International Relations has emphasised the constructed nature of narratives, whereby individuals and communities select, arrange and frame events to create political meanings that serve their current needs. In relation to the conference theme of ‘spaces’, we may consider the ways that such narratives create the quotidian spaces in which international relations are constituted. In relation to the theme of ‘styles’, we may ask how narratives challenge the primacy of science as the style by which knowledge is formed and shared. In relation to the theme of ‘struggles’, we may ask how shared narratives give effective expression to political struggle and conjure possible futures. 
 
Further questions to consider: how do shared narratives generate, justify and prolong international conflict? How can they be contested or reshaped? How is collective trauma, injustice or victimhood effectively narrated? How do narratives express or constitute knowledge about the international? How do influential narratives gain currency? What is the source of their power?  
 
This section, then, invites consideration of narrative in its broadest sense. We seek paper and panel proposals that engage with narrative in published works (novels, memoirs, journalism), broadcast material (speeches, documentaries, motion pictures) and the multitude of everyday exchanges in which collective narratives are implicit (conversations, letters, texts, jokes). We encourage contributions from a broad range of disciplines, including IR, history, economics, literary studies, film and television studies, and theatre studies. We also invite nonstandard proposals that may involve storytelling, performance, recital and dialogue. 

Section Chairs: Frédéric Ramel & Delphine Placidi-Frot

Covid-19 pandemic. War between Russia and Ukraine. Intensification of violence in the Middle-East. These events are associated to the “return” of a Geopolitical Great Game that has a strong impact on the Doomsday Clock: it ticks down to 90 seconds to midnight. In such context, the multilateral ways of live seem deeply affected. From intergovernmental organizations to informal forums, multilateral cooperation was going through a crisis unparalleled in post-Cold War history according to many IR scholars. Heterogeneity of values, opposition between democratic and authoritarian regimes, budgetary restrictions: the multilateral arena and the various styles that flourish within it were the scene of a fierce struggle between actors. The aim of this section is to examine and evaluate such weakening of multilateralism by observing it on different scales (regional or global), through the plurality of state and societal actors, but also from plural perspectives that do not exclude normative theory. Panels proposing articulation between multilateralism and current controversies concerning post-colonial critiques, relationality, planetary politics will be welcome. Some dimensions that could be dealt with: Multilateralism between traditional and non-traditional threats, Multilateralism and Peace, Emerging powers and multilateralism, Multilateralism and the War between Russia and Ukraine, Multilateralism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 10/7/2023, the Ethics of Multilateralism.

Section Chairs: Janis Grzybowski & Christian Olsson

War, insurgency, and military intervention are major forms of political violence intimately related to the political, legal, and infrastructural constellations and hierarchies of the ‘modern’ state, international system, and their colonial legacies, in ways that often appear paradoxical. They establish and uphold political orders, and yet they also disrupt and undermine them. They oppress and liberate, voice and silence, preserve and transform. As such, their meanings are contextual, positional, and open to (re-)interpretation. For instance, armed conflicts within states can be variably represented as ‘resistance’, ‘revolution’, or ‘rebellion’; the suspension of state sovereignty by other states might be justified as legitimate ‘intervention’ or condemned as ‘aggression’; and even what is inside or outside of states is challenged when speaking of ‘transnational terrorism’, ‘contested states’, and ‘internationalized civil wars’. In other words, the classification of wars, insurgencies, and military interventions is subject to symbolic struggles, with important implications for the justification, limits, and spread of political violence. The recent or ongoing armed conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Mali, Myanmar, Afghanistan, and elsewhere illustrate both the available repertoires for organizing political violence and the struggles over their meaning. This section casts a wide net to attract panels and papers on all forms of war, insurgency, and military intervention and their material, relational, and discursive features and underpinnings. It is open to (cross-)disciplinary approaches, methodologies, and modes of engagement in and beyond International Relations (IR). 

Section Chairs: Emma Cluskey & Didier Bigo

Departing from the imperative to rethink the categories under which the international is an interesting 'problem' rather than a level of analysis or specific object, this section will explore three interrelated problems that characterise politics and politicisation today. First, the relationship to temporality and the will to scientifically predict the future in order to avoid catastrophic risks in the "remaining time" has led to the orienting of current actions through knowledge of the future. This temporality of the project is at odds with the everyday understanding of the present and has generated transformations of democratic politics and tendencies towards techno-solutionism and populist prophecies. Secondly, executive power games which use the arguments of sovereignty, national security, and defence secrecy are able to create a circle of justifications that exonerate them from the decisions they have taken in the name of emergency and protecting people from these imagined future dangers. Lastly, it is crucial to diagnose how authoritarian, exceptionalist and reactionary populist practices work together to impact efforts to preserve the imperative to safeguard the material conditions of possibility for human life on planet Earth. Sponsored by the journal Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences, this section interrogates these interconnected problems through a transdisciplinary approach.

Section Chairs: Marko Lehti & Anna Kronlund

Global multilateral peace and security systems designed to mitigate violent conflicts and to build and maintain peace are in decline. This is evidenced by the failure to mediate and solve conflicts in Syria, Myanmar, and Yemen and to build peace in Afghanistan. The Russian War in Ukraine has accelerated this trend and may prove to be a game changer for global peace governance. International organisations (IOs), such as the United Nations (UN) and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), have been incapable of influencing the conflict and taking a constructive role in mediating it. There is a tangible threat that the war paralyses the remaining capacity of IOs to intervene, mediate, prevent, and sustain peace. To be sure, multilateral everyday diplomacy within these organisations continues. But as the polarisation between-especially-the liberal and authoritarian powers increase, and the legitimacy of liberal peace interventions and liberal multilateralism decrease, the question is: are the IOs becoming mere empty shells, unable to execute their founding objectives of peace, security, and stability? This section asks how multilateralism is transforming, and what kind of new complementary multilateral practices, norms, actors, and institutions are evolving. Because of disruptive and destructive authoritarian contestation, there is an even stronger need for understanding the requirements for non-hegemonic, pluralistic multilateralism that would be capable of supporting locally owned and inclusive solutions to global challenges, preventing antagonism between countries and within them, and engaging in dialogue across different value systems.

Section Chairs: Nora El Qadim & Monique Beerli

Following the sections “Leaving (No) Traces” (Beerli and El Qadim 2022) and “The Documents of Security” (Neal 2023), this section seeks to question archives and archival practices. In recent years, social scientists have (re)kindled an interest in archives. The “archival turn” has highlighted the connection between archives and power and problematized archives and archival practices as objects of study in and of themselves, while equally allowing for an expansion of the definition of the archive to integrate alternative knowledges as sources for historical analysis. Hence, it is the potential stories told by the archives as much as their silences that have been a center of attention. In this section, we would like to investigate the material realities and daily lives of archives, especially those constituted across borders. Be they paper documents, objects or in digital form, archives are determined by practices of collection, selection, destruction, conservation, communication, (de)classification, and digitization. These steps and practices, as well as the infrastructural backbone of archives, are often left unexplored. What can archival / archiving stories tell us about the international and international relations? How are international endeavors archived? How do diplomatic connections and power imbalances between states impact archival practices – and consequently, history-telling? How do international organizations articulate archiving between field and headquarters? How do internationally mobile actors – people on the move, as well as experts / consultants, missionaries etc. – archive their activities? How are archives mobilized as modes of transnational political action? How do transnational funding / research dynamics affect archives and particularly alternative archives?

Section Chairs: Marijn Hoijtink & Delf Rothe

Digital technologies are exerting a growing influence on global politics. Technologies such as AI, machine learning, big data, cloud and quantum computing, or sensors of various types, shape how global politics is done, by whom and where it is done, and with what effects. Following current academic debates, digital technology has the potential to produce new visions of ‘the international’ and rewrite our ways of accessing it due to the technology’s increasing ‘synthetic’ properties. At the same time, for ‘the digital’ to have any meaningful political effects, it will always need to be connected to the non-digital, the material, and the embodied. How, then, does ‘the digital’ challenge, rework, or reconfirm existing concepts or registers of power in IR? Which new concepts and methodologies can we deploy to better grasp the transformations or continuities in international relations afforded by digital technologies and synthetic media?

This section will bring together and push forward the debate on digital technology and global politics across the different subdisciplines of IR. We invite contributions that engage with the Digital IR research agenda along one or more of the following three pathways:

1. Digitalizing the international: How do digital technologies enact the international and how do they remake international relations at the level of politics and policy?
2. Connecting with the digital: How does ‘the digital’ connect with ‘the analog’ and the material roots and manifestations of the digital?
3. Doing digital IR: How can we do IR through and with digital technologies? 

Section Chairs: Karina Jędrzejowska & Anna Magdalena Wrobel

The Covid-19 pandemic and increased geopolitical tensions, together with several economic shocks of the last decades, do not cease to fuel the debate about the future of global economic order. According to the IMF study “Geoeconomic Fragmentation and the Future of Multilateralism” (2023), a significant shift in the global economy is happening. After several decades of economic integration, global economy appears on the verge of a reverse and costly process of geoeconomic fragmentation. Since the global financial crisis, cross-border flows of goods, services, and capital have slowed down. Simultaneously, global economy encountered major crisis-inducing events such as Brexit, U.S-China trade war, Covid-19 pandemic, and numerous military conflicts. As a result, the recent years have brought about an increase in trade protectionism, disruptions in global value chains, uncontrollable inflation or growing sovereign debt burdens. Therefore, it can be assumed that the global economy is currently heading for an unprecedented confluence of economic, financial and debt crises. As such, the section offers a multidisciplinary approach towards analysing current processes and challenges to global economic governance with special reference to the impact of geoeconomic fragmentation and new types of economic crises. In particular, the section attempts to address the following questions: 1) What are the costs of a policy-driven reversal of global economic integration; 2) What are the potential future scenarios for the global economic order; 3) Is multilateral governance of global economy possible; and 4) What types of economic crises could affect the global economy in the years to come. 

Section Chairs: Thomas Conzelmann & Johan Adriaensen

In the framework of the US-led liberal international order, the global economy and the nation-states integrating into it experienced a period of unprecedented liberalization of trade in goods, services and capital. As economic ties deepened, interdependence increased. It necessitated cooperation, but also created both new vulnerabilities and tools of power. This became visible especially with the rise of China as an economic superpower since the 2010s. As the centers of power began to shift and disperse, strains in the fabric of the global order emerged. Dormant tensions escalated into (trade) wars and led to the re-discovery of the tools of economic statecraft. The shift also had a profound impact on the European Union (EU). Once a bulwark of open trade, regional integration and soft power diplomacy, the EU began to reassess its role and capabilities in the shifting global order. The adoption of a “geopolitical” agenda by the European Commission is only one symptom of this change. In this section, we aim to explore questions about the novelty, origins and nature of the geo-conomic shift of the EU and its institutional implications. Moreover, we propose to discuss how this shift altered discourses, policies and politics of international (economic) relations. Older debates on conditionality and securitization were complemented (or replaced) by terms like de-coupling and de-risking, reshoring and the weaponisation of the market. International deal-making through treaties was replaced by a unilateral focus on sanctions, or domestic policies that directly aim to affect third countries. Dialogue made way for assertive action.

Section Chairs: Nicholas Michelsen & Matti Spåra

The section aims to cultivate discussion surrounding the roles and responsibilities of IR theorists within society. IR scholars are acutely aware of the global chain of crises, including wars in Europe and the Middle East, accelerating climate change and natural disasters, entrenched global inequality, and various other political, economic, environmental, and social challenges. In response, IR scholars often frame their sense of vocation in relation to these crises. However, the discipline has become fragmented into niche subcultures, each with its own jargon and specialized vocabularies. 

It is widely acknowledged that much of IR theoretical scholarship is not crafted for wider audiences and tends to stay within the confines of small academic subcultures, raising questions about the causes and consequences of this insularity. This section aims to invigorate and advance longstanding debates about the public role of IR scholarship within and beyond the academy. By exploring the history and sociology of IR theorising and its connection to public engagement, the section delves into the political, cultural, sociological, and economic factors influencing different styles of academic writing, public outreach and academic roles. We will investigate how these factors may vary across time and space. Understanding the historical trajectory and geographical determinants of IR theory and its relationship with public engagement is crucial for shaping the future direction of the discipline, orienting IR's societal role in a world order that is increasingly fractured and approaching breakdown. 

We welcome papers on any aspect of the public role of IR theorists and scholars today. Some key question we hope to discuss are: How can we reconceptualize the purpose of IR scholarship, moving beyond the confines of ivory towers and protest marches? How can we reignite debates about the IR scholarly vocation, which are nearly as old as the discipline itself, to promote a more constructive global role for IR scholars? What elements would constitute an international theory of public intellectuals? 

Section Chairs: Ali Riza Taskale & Kristine Samson

In the evolving landscape of International Relations (IR), characterized by increasing diversity, IR still predominantly adheres to the paradigms of liberal internationalism and political realism. This focus on command and order, rather than disruption and emancipation, leaves critical questions unanswered regarding the constraints on political action. Established IR categories such as “the state,” “order,” and “actor” prove inadequate in addressing the ontological and epistemological ruptures associated with today’s multiple crises of financial capitalism. Theoretical and practical approaches, once dependable, no longer guarantee a return to a secure space. Therefore, we advocate for “disruptive spaces”—environments fostering human and non-human entanglements. Responding to the theme “Searching for International Relations: Spaces, Styles, Struggles,” we turn to contemporary financial capitalism for radical suggestions to enrich IR theory and plurality. Embracing Speculative Fiction, Environmental Justice, and Urban Marginalization, we invite cross-disciplinary contributions, including performance lectures, dialogues, and discussions challenging academic norms. Specifically, we seek engagements with: (1) Speculative Fiction: Exploring its potential to challenge financial capitalism’s hegemony, rendering visible power structures, and uncovering suppressed contradictions and potentialities. (2) Decolonial Readings: Investigating how IR perpetuates a world order rooted in settler-colonial relations through art, activism, and research pursuing Environmental Justice. (3) New Urban Futures: Examining Urban Marginalization of Communities in global cities, envisioning postdevelopmentalist futures, and exploring resistance within marginalized communities through urban commoning, artistic activism, and food justice.

Section Chairs: Federica Bicchi & Michal Natorski

Emerging technologies are opening new sites of struggle and cooperation in Europe and across the globe. The aim of this section is to provide a discussion of the power dynamics that emerge in these new spaces, with the overall goal of analysing the transformation of international politics in the digital age. The new sites are occurring at multiple level and involve a multiplicity of actors/stakeholders. At the global level, the EU has taken upon itself the endeavour of setting regulations for the most relevant aspects of emerging technologies, but there are several other actors that jostle for influence over the same dossiers (from the United Nations to the G7 to voluntary code of conducts drafted by tech companies). The outcome of these power struggles also affects countries and actors that might not be included in their making, from local administrations to countries in the Global South, raising the issue of further complex dynamics in their implementation. Similarly, the regional European context continues to act as a powerful arena for negotiations, at the multilateral level as well as at the minilateral level, including both EU- and non-EU member states. At the level of organisations, diplomatic actors engage with emerging technologies to different levels and with different results, while all have to relate to a shifting environment. How do emerging technologies affect multilateralism in the digital age, and viceversa? Which actors have been propelled into the foreground and which instead might be on the wrong side of digital divides? Which sources of knowledge and expertise have come to matter in international politics at the time of big data and algorithms? This section aims to gather panels that will discuss these broad issues across the various levels of analysis, in order to better understand Europe’s politics in the digital age.

Section Chairs: Oliver Kessler & Lena Rethel

Protectionist policies are on the rise, supply chains re-evaluated and shortened, and infrastructures increasingly securitized. A politics of suspicion increasingly lays itself upon the world economy like dust over a coastline, making it difficult to infer the future of global economic linkages. The atmosphere it produces is grim - history tells us that these moments of intense de-coupling are also the times when wars become more likely and the boundaries between the economy, security and politics become increasingly blurred. The order that was created in the aftermath of 1989 is closing down on us, the future uncertain.

Over the last couple of years, the concept of geoeconomics gained traction in debates about the current predicament. It tries to make sense of the current decoupling, and at the same time signifies that the era of neo-liberal globalization and unfettered markets has come to an end. This section invites papers to explore the relevance of geoeconomics for the theoretical landscape of International Political Economy (IPE). To realise that the international is more than interactions between states, and that indeed politics and the economy are irremediably linked is not news to anyone in IPE. It is the very insight that gave rise to its revival in the 1970s. Moreover, it is a reality that has always mattered for countries in the Global South.

Yet, the end of globalization as we know it and the advent of geoeconomics does call for a reevaluation of theoretical debates in IPE that we invite contributors to undertake.