Section List

Section Chairs

Maja Greenwood & Nina Krickel-Choi

Interest in existentialism and its implications for politics has been growing in recent years, leading to the formation of an emerging research agenda in IR whose insights warrant deeper exploration. Specifically, IR scholars have paid increasing attention to how existentialist concepts such as anxiety, freedom, subjectivity, time, and mortality impact on the study of international politics.

In this section, we seek to host panels which can further the development of an existentialist framework and research agenda. Such contributions could, for example, investigate how insights from existentialism suggest ways of finding meaning in crises, how they help us to understand an age of anxiety, how to think about responsibility and care in a time of pandemics and environmental catastrophes, or how to act authentically in a post-truth society. Beyond providing diagnoses for our current situation, existentialism thus also offers guidance for resistance and using creativity as a form of authentic politics that is worth exploring.

We invite panel and paper proposals that engage with the question of how existentialism may be developed as a research agenda for IR specifically as well as political science more broadly. As the existentialist canon includes foundational feminist and post-colonial work such as that of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, we see great potential in existentialism as a resource for challenging and diversifying the field and would be particularly interested in contributions highlighting the work and influence of non-Western, feminist, and queer existentialist thinkers.

Section Chairs

Dovilė Jakniūnaitė & Ieva Giedraitytė

Most discussions on changing structures of the global system and challenges to the modern global order come from disciplinary and political centers. Lately, despite being aware of many imperfections of the so-called 'international liberal order' (LIO), the authors at 'the center' worry about its potential break up and a threat of insecurity. Yet, the full-scale Russian aggression on Ukraine not only provided space for debates on the role of the West but also demonstrated the relative (non)importance of this war for the Global South. Differing approaches to the war reconfirm the relevance of grasping the multitude of perspectives emanating from non-dominant geopolitical spaces of the global structure, such as Latin America, Eastern Europe, Southeast or Northeast Asia, or Africa. Multiple actors there take varied positions on the LIO and propose different ways to reform the international structures dominating the second part of the twentieth century. This section responds to the invitations to de-center the West and proposes taking stock of debates on the future of the LIO emanating from 'the periphery.' We invite panels and proposals analyzing the perspectives of non-centrally located regions and states and discussing:  the future of global/international order,  possible trajectories of change,  causes explaining the current situation,  causes of competition & discontent with the current global order. The section seeks to find patterns of thinking across geographical/geopolitical spaces. It also aims at reflecting on the impact of particular locations and self-perceptions on the conceptualizations of the globality and the construction of global orders

Section Chair

Lisa Marie Borrelli

Borders are central to the production and reproduction of some of the major crises brought about by colonialism, racial capitalism, and the current nation-state system: if, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2020) has suggested, ‘capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it’, borders are central mechanisms through which racism is enforced, sustained and normalized across states and regions. It follows that people who migrate for various reasons are key global actors whose conditions shed light on the racialised, classed and gendered inequalities produced through these global processes. This session invites panels and paper contributions that explore, empirically and theoretically, the role of bordering practices in producing racialised, classed, and gendered global inequalities and exploitation on a local and global scale. Yet even as border controls are reinforced, migration and social policies more restrictive, and solidarity with migrants criminalized, we see how migrant struggles, local grassroot movements, mutual aid groups, trade unions, and transnational solidarity networks continue forging alternative support structures. Accordingly, the session explores how the struggles and demands for the right to move and to stay pave way for a more participatory and emancipatory politics that challenges the migrant-citizen divide and articulates a vision for a new world order. Finally, we wish to make space for a critical conversation on the role of university in reproducing current crises, on the one hand; and of how - and which - ‘dissident knowledges’ (Spooner and McNinch 2018) can be used in the service of transformative change, on the other.

Section Chairs

Matthias Kranke & Andrea Liese

We live in an age of intersecting crises and intensifying contestation. As highly influential global governors, international organisations (IOs) – understood here as intergovernmental organisations with states as members – are not immune to these dynamics. The proposed section takes stock of the current conjecture by addressing both the institutional undercurrents and specific manifestations of the global ‘polycrisis’ with which IOs are confronted today. To this end, five of the ten panels on this section focus specifically on IOs as actors and the environments in which they operate. The key themes here concern: representation and diversity (within IOs); mandate and authority overlap (between IOs); and stakeholder relations, institutional embeddedness, and expertise and trust vis-à-vis key audiences (all beyond IOs). The insights developed through engagement with these themes lay the foundation for discussing the various facets of what has been called ‘the new normal’ in contemporary global politics. Specifically, the final five panels examine what the new normal entails for the growing share of autocracies and populist governments among IO members, the rule of law, policies to foster economic growth, sustainability challenges, and advocacy and agenda-setting in global politics. The section’s panels complement each other to nurture fresh thinking about the important but contested role of IOs.

Section Chairs

Berit Bliesemann de Guevara & Sukanya Podder

According to the UN Refugee Agency, there are now an estimated record high of 103 million people forcibly displaced by violent conflict, and most deaths in conflicts are among civilians. This makes the protection of civilians a pressing issue of our time, which in both international politics and the discipline of IR is imagined predominantly as a task of armed actors (UN blue helmets, national police or militaries, armed self-defence groups, etc.). Yet, this focus obscures the myriad ways in which civilians act upon the violent situations they find themselves in. Communities experiencing armed conflict make choices between violence and peace depending on their perceptions of risks and returns. Whether creating weapons-free zones, setting up alternatives to state-led emergency responses, interrupting violent attacks through nonviolent strategies, or promoting norms and cultures of peace and nonviolence – communities living amidst violence demonstrate daily their capacity to influence conflict. Yet, while there is a growing body of scholarship on civilian interactions with formal and informal armed actors (state military, rebel groups, vigilantes, gangs etc.), little is known about how armed actors can be protective or at least support and coalesce to civilian-led self-protection initiatives. This 5-panel section zooms in on civilian agency and nonviolent strategies, and explores how they challenge IR theorising about conflict, security and protection. Specifically, we ask: (1) In how far can civilians influence the behaviour of armed actors through their own agency to self-protect? (2) How can civilians encourage armed actors to adopt more protective behaviours towards them?

Section Chair

Magdalena Kozub-Karkut

The issue of emotions in international relations has been taken up in the literature for at least a dozen years (since we have been talking about the second wave of studies in this area or the 'emotional turn' in International Relations). Nevertheless, although researchers have addressed the topics of how to conceptualize emotions in IR or how to move from the individual to the collective level of analysis, there are still many unanswered questions regarding the meaning and significance of emotions. Following this idea, in this section, we would like to focus on the role and importance of emotions in world politics, especially in ways of (de)legitimising values-based international liberal order through the use of the emotional factor. Therefore, we would like to invite all scholars focusing on questions regarding: (1) contestation of multilateralism and liberal values (who, why, and how is questioning, what is the role of emotional factors, what are contesting strategies and roots); (2) emotionally based arguments and communication strategies in international relations; (3) intersections between emotions and populism; (4) utilizing emotions and political identities in strategies maintaining the liberal order. We invite researchers with diverse theoretical perspectives (including constructivist, critical and discursive approaches) addressing the importance of emotions in IR and using distinct research methods.

Section Chairs

Sarah Becklake & Lata Narayanaswamy

While some define development as a global project that aims to create a better world for all (Peet and Hartwick 2015, United Nations 2015), others argue that it is a political project that (re)produces inequalities (McMichael 2004, Escobar 1995, Ziai 2016). Following the latter, there have long been calls to break with dominant patterns of thinking and doing ‘development’, giving rise to searches and suggestions for alternatives (Escobar 2020). Contributing to these efforts, this section focuses on ‘Decolonising Development Practices’. Drawing upon de/coloniality and post-colonial scholars (e.g.: Krishnaswamy and Hawley 2008, Lewis and Mills 2003, Mignolo and Walsh 2018, Said 1995, Quijano 2007), it centres the relationship between intersecting geo- and body-political inequalities and development. In taking a practice approach (Bourdieu 1990), it understands development to be something that is routinely performed and performative of the socio-spatial world and the subjects that populate it. Following, there is no ‘one’ development practice, but a multiplicity of development practices undertaken by, and (re)productive of, different actors in and across diverse geopolitical spaces. The section invites papers that creatively (re)theorise the relationship between past/present coloniality and diverse development practices, highlighting not only continuities, but also how - or indeed if - development can be reimagined and transformed in ways that are actually conducive to creating a ‘better world for all’. Potential questions include: What does ‘decolonising development practices’ look like from different social and epistemic locations? What are some of the challenges to decolonising development practices? Are there existing examples of decolonised development practices? And can development practices ever be fully decolonised? In addressing these and similar questions, the five panels will help to envision new ways of thinking and doing ‘development’.

Section Chairs

Melinda Rankin & Charles Hunt

Despite significant progress since the London Charter and the establishment of the Nuremberg Tribunal in the aftermath of WWII, atrocity crimes continue to be a feature of contemporary global society. From Ukraine to Eritrea to Myanmar, civilians are subjected to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide (including ethnic cleansing). Notwithstanding the emergence of normative frames like the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and the establishment of international criminal tribunals, efforts to prevent and hold those most responsible for humanity’s greatest crimes often appear hindered by a lack of political will. Moreover, the evolving international legal order seems ill equipped to effectively enforce international criminal and humanitarian law. This section is designed to challenge these views but also to identify opportunities to enhance atrocity prevention and accountability globally. Moreover, it attempts to bridge the gap between the normative concepts that allocate duties and expectations for responses to atrocity crimes and the complex legal frameworks that exist to identify and prosecute such crimes, including the Genocide Convention and the pursuit of justice in foreign courts excising universal jurisdiction, respectively. A key innovation of this section will be to bring together IR and legal scholars to deepen conversations around atrocity crimes and international law (including customary international law) and encourage productive collaboration to support a social and political order without atrocities – whereby prevention and accountability is increasingly the ‘new normal.’ Drawing on collaborations focusing on atrocity prevention between proposed panel chairs and participants (eg Hunt & Zimmerman, 2020; Bellamy & Hunt, 2021; Hale & Rankin, 2019), roundtable collaborations focusing on atrocity accountability (eg Han & Rankin, 2021; Rankin & Han, 2022), and the growing interest in international criminal accountability in IR more broadly (eg Rankin & Hale, 2019; Rankin, 2022; Han, 2022), this section aims to explore debates at the intersection of international atrocity prevention and accountability at both the conceptual and practical levels. In doing so, our preference is to organize a section of 5 panels on these themes.

The section proposal is sponsored by the quarterly journal, Global Responsibility to Protect whose editors-in-chief have agreed to publish a double special issue containing papers from this section.

Section Chairs

Erica Simone Almeida Resende & Sandra Destradi

One characteristic of the New Normal seems to be the emergence of populism as a global phenomenon that erodes democracy everywhere, even in established Western democracies. Be it from the right or the left, populism is on rise, casting a long shadow over the ruins of familiar political, social, and economic orders destroyed or severely challenged by multiple crises. At the same time, populists have been voted out of power in several countries, but they continue to shape the political discourse, with all the consequences this has for international politics. In a way, the emergence of populism as the New Normal challenges the discipline of International Relations by forcing it to better acknowledge the short-and longer-term implications of populism. By disentangling the deep links between the domestic and the international in populism, IR has the potential to contribute to better ‘come to terms with the phenomenon of populism’. This 5-panel section is an attempt to respond to this call by posing the following questions: What are the characteristics of the populist new normal? How do international actors react to it? What are the consequences for international cooperation and international institutions? What is the role of emotions, affect and ideologies – including racism, nativism, colonialism, antisemitism, and misogyny – in constructing populism as the new normal? How has the pandemic impacted populist projects worldwide and more generally, how have populists capitalized on the multiple crises in world politics? What should academics and practitioners do to address populism as a new normal?

Section Chairs

Lara Montesinos Coleman & David Jason Karp

Rationalist approaches to global ethics (Hutchings, 2018) such as consequentialism and deontology treat harm as an objective foundation: as something that can be measured, or as the content of a moral imperative guiding global ethics. Yet, harm, as Linklater and others have insisted, is an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie, 1956; see Linklater, 2006, Hoseason 2018, Karp 2020). Feminist, decolonial and historical materialist scholarship has also emphasized the extent to which dominant understandings of harm in global ethics and international law are shaped by structural power relations in ways that occlude the experiences of harm of historically marginalised peoples (e.g., Rojas-Paez, 2018, Coleman et al. 2019, Furtado 2021, Dolan 2022). These contested understandings of harm have enormous implications for making sense of responsibility, liability, redress and reparation at a juncture marked by ever-intensifying capitalist extraction, conflicting imperial ambitions, public health crises and the increased visibility of the climate emergency. The conceptualisation of harm likewise has high stakes for the crafting of social relations more enabling of human and non-human flourishing, or even of our collective survival. This five-panel section would build on a successful roundtable at the British International Studies Association 2022 conference. It would bring together leading and emerging voices on these themes from an array of countries and across diverse traditions of thought, connecting the critical interrogation of “harm” to substantive areas including climate crisis, business and human rights, migration policy, international criminal justice, racial/colonial capitalism, and hate speech.

Section Chairs

Philip Cerny & Aleksandra Spalińska

The discipline of International Relations since its beginning has been dominated by the presumption that world politics is based on a state system, and that domestic realsm is hierarchical, whereas the state system is anarchical. However, the developing ‘new normal’ that we need to understand is heterarchy: the predominance of cross-cutting sectoral mini- and meso- hierarchies above, below, and across states. These structures are interconnected, autonomous, and often captured by special interests. Building upon the forth coming volume on Heterarchy (https://www.routledge.com/Heterarchy-in-World-Politics/Cerny/p/book/9781032403410), this section explores these complexities and the world order emerging from them. In this 5-panels section, we welcome papers that explore the architecture and elements of current transformation. Therefore, we seek papers that study the dialectics of globalization and fragmentation, and their consequences in world order. In particular, it concerns mechanisms, practices and policies that undermine or transcend the anarchical logic of the state system or the hierarchical order in the domestic realm. We are thus interested in projects one.g. transnational tensions in political development, “extra-state” and imperial authorities in history and today, (post)colonial and structural entanglements, asymmetrical governance, local and domestic responses to global impacts, corporate power, private security and warfare, non-state actors, channels for foreign influence or transnational activism. Moreover, we invite papers that explore the contribution of Heterarchy or its critique in the current IR debates to enable the dialogue between Heterarchy and established approaches (like historical sociology or structural realism). We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions, including those focused on specific area issues. Three main themes for the section:

1. Heterarchy in history and theory: political development of world order and the contribution of Heterarchy to IR.
2. Heterachy in action: political power, transnational tensions, and their consequences. Mechanisms, practices and policies which undermine or transcend the anarchical logic of the state system or the hierarchical order in the domestic realm.
3. Consequences of increasing heterarchy on societal level: social anxieties, local contexts and domestic responses to global impacts.

Section Chairs

Jonna Nyman & Chenchen Zhang

This section takes as its starting point a recent call to analyze China as part of the world (Franceschini and Loubere, 2022). Existing debates have tended to see China as different from, and outside of, the rest of the international order. IR scholarship in particular has tended to favour grand narratives over nuanced empirically grounded research. Focus has been on how (the rise of) China will shape the global order, while the intensification of the US-China competition has prompted widespread speculations about the prospect of a “new cold war”. Debates on whether and how “China” is posing a challenge to the “liberal international order” tend to take both concepts as a political singularity rather than attending to their multiplicity, historical contingency, interconnections, and relationship of co-constitution. Inspired by recent calls to approach “global China as method” and to investigate global politics through area studies, this section invites critical and interdisciplinary scholarship on global China to gain contextualized, empirically fine-grained, and/or conceptually innovative analyses of the relationship between China and the international order. We hope in particular to bring critical security studies and critical IPE in dialogue to develop a deeper perspective on the entanglement/s of the geopolitical and the geoeconomic. The proposed section would include 5 panels.

Section Chairs

Tom Pettinger & Amna Kaleem

This section opens space for discussion around the connectedness between colonial capitalism and the ‘exceptional’ threats identified in the conference theme, from democratic backsliding to climate change. Conversations about threat to the dominant world order are structured through racial, gendered, and classed exclusions, and often forget colonial (geo)politics surrounding these ‘crises’. Regimes labelled democratic and with highly advanced economies have been produced through the exploitation of land and labour, yet this violence becomes unknown in most research on security. This section is therefore interested in theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that speak back to the identification of contemporary threats as detached from colonial/racial capitalism. Instead, it situates colonial capitalism as producing mass violence, and uncovers how most forms of mass suffering are located outside of discourses of threat and vulnerability. The section asks: what forms of violence, conflict, and suffering are overlooked in contemporary articulations of ((inter)national) security, and how, and with what implications? The section interrogates the conceptual and material continuities between dominant notions of threat – from the terrorist Other to naturalized environmental catastrophe – and colonialism/ capitalism. Moreover, discussions centre the role of the academy as systematically exclusionary and ask how complicity might be negotiated. Seeking contributions from fields including memory studies, queer studies, and anti-colonial studies, panels untangle relationships between (in)security and colonial capitalism. Themes of this section include temporality, space and borders, the politics of dangerousness and threat, vulnerability, complicity, resistance, everyday (in)security, memory, and imperialism. The section welcomes collaborations between activism and research.

Section Chairs

Cerwyn Moore & Annamaria Kiss

In recent years, international politics has been marked by a sustained period of crisis, rupturing the traditional practices of politics, challenging the orthodoxy of the global, and issuing in uncertainty and altered orders in international relations. Against this backdrop of altered orders, this section will examine social movements and activism as challenges to, and manifestations of, militarism and militancy as a new normal in global politics. To this end, it will focus on different ways of knowing international politics, drawing on often neglected research areas such as studies of militancy and activism in repressive settings. It will include theoretical and empirical panels examining different movements and activism in various locations. How do transnational activists seek to challenge and co-produce new practices of IR? Do repressive systems of order produce new forms of militancy, new movements, and new patterns of transnational activism? What are the implications of assessing mobilisation and violent movements for the study of international politics? Are new visions of social and relational politics feasible, and how can we examine or co-produce novel research on global politics, given the uncertainties in international affairs? Are new methodological approaches needed to analyse altered orders?

Section Chairs

Gustav Meibauer & Alex Reichwein

Realism is often considered one of IR’s mainstream approaches. And yet, frequently, realism is criticized as out-of-date, static, incapable of a positive vision that transcends the recurrence of great power struggle and rivalry that realists assume characterizes the international. This criticism is especially relevant in times of crises and change, and as (seemingly) new challenges permeate policy and scholarly agendas. Realist responses have often been viewed as either gloomy in their pessimism or cynical in their purported scientific neutrality. In either depiction, realism has long outlived its ability to shape the discipline and our thinking about better futures. And yet, the re-emergence of great power rivalry, advances in military technology, and the continued relevance of interstate competition have triggered renewed interest in realist analyses and prescriptions.

Against this background, we invite submissions that engage with the realist tradition, including by its critics, along five themes: 1) the genesis of the realist tradition in the face of multiple changes, crises and the new; 2) different realist approaches, including classical realism, neorealism, realist constructivism, neoclassical realism, and if/how they allow theoretical innovation regarding crisis, change, and normality; 3) realist theorizing of international politics and/or foreign policy, by throwing new light at “traditionally realist” questions/concepts or specific actors’ foreign policies (including beyond the Global North); 4) realist visions/analyses of (past, present, future) IR, and/or considering how realism advances our understanding of contemporary/future challenges, 5) the place of realist thought/analysis in the discipline, as well as at the intersections of academia and outside stakeholders/practitioners.

Section Chairs

Lisanne Groen & Carola Klöck

Cross-border environmental problems abound – as do multilateral efforts to address them. We most often talk about the climate and biodiversity crises, but other equally pressing environmental problems exist, such as plastic pollution, air pollution, and chemical waste, to name but a few.

These problems are inherently transboundary and interdependent in nature, and hence require a multilateral approach. The number of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) has grown enormously over the past decades and new internationally legally binding instruments continue to be negotiated. Nevertheless, ambitious and effective outcomes are often lacking, while the state of the environment continues to degrade. How can we better study MEAs and assess their performance, given the long-term and complex nature of multilateral environmental problems? Under what circumstances and why do environmental negotiations underperform? To what extent has their success rate changed over time? Given the slow (or no) progress of several MEAs, are multilateral environmental negotiations and agreements still worth pursuing and studying? If so, how should we do so? What is the role of, and links to, non-state participants in these negotiations?

This section aims to explore these questions. We argue that precisely because many MEAs and their negotiations fail to achieve the desired results in a timely manner, it is necessary to dive deeper into MEAs to explore their functioning, participants, and performance, including through new scientific methods.

Section Chair

Andrew W. Neal

Documents as source materials have long been a mainstay of social scientific research, but now new methods, approaches, and available documents offer fresh research opportunities. AI and machine-learning based techniques such as natural language processing allow new possibilities for analysing large-scale corpora, searching not just for content but for meaning. The proliferation of public security documents outputted by multiple states and government departments, together with mass leaks of classified electronic files, present rich possibilities for researching the previously closed world of security politics and policy. Building on work done in the 2022 EISA-PEC section Leaving (No) Traces: The Practices and Politics of Archiving beyond the Western State chaired by Nora El Qadim and Monique Beerli, this pluralist section invites cutting-edge work that may include:

• Practice-based approaches to how documents are produced and act within and beyond the security field.
• Technological approaches to security document analysis and production, such as natural language processing and automated text analysis.
• Research on security policy documents such as national security strategies, defence white papers, national risk registers, and cyber security strategies.
• The role of leaked documents in security research and security politics.
• The role of document classification, declassification, and archives in security research and security politics.
• Reflections on the role and function of security documents drawing on theories of communication, discourse, actor-networks, symbolic power, symbolic interactionism, and so on.

Section Chairs

Kai Oppermann & Alexander Spencer

The goal of this section is to critically discuss and enhance novel discourse analytical research in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). FPA has long been criticized for leaning towards (soft) positivist approaches and methodologies (Kaarbo 2015), but the field has more recently started to embrace more post-positivist perspectives on foreign policy, including discourse analysis (Hansen 2016; Ostermann and Sjöstedt 2023). Thus, discourse analytical work has already shed new light on a range of topics in FPA, for example EU foreign policy (Larsen 2018), security policy (Hansen 2013), UK European (Bevir et al. 2015) and post-Brexit foreign policy (Daddow 2019) as well as Russian (Crilley and Chatterje-Doody 2021), Indian (Wojczewski 2019) and French (Ostermann 2018) foreign and security policy. However, discourse analytical approaches are still underused in the FPA subfield and far less established than in International Relations (IR) more broadly. Indeed, discourse analysis remains outside the FPA mainstream, limiting the extent to which the study of foreign policy can take full advantage of methodological and theoretical advances in this area. The relative neglect of discourse analytical approaches in FPA also makes it more difficult for FPA scholarship to speak to broader research agendas in IR and reinforces the existing de-connect between the two fields of study. Against this background, the section aims to showcase original and innovative discourse analytical research in FPA. It invites papers that use discourse analytical approaches to push the boundaries of our theoretical, methodological and empirical knowledge in FPA.

Section Chairs

Raffaele Mauriello & Deina Abdelkader

The section addresses Islam as a key factor in global affairs and in the field of International Relations. It aims to offer a broad understanding of the role of Islam in world affairs by presenting case studies of the worldview of Muslim thinkers and practitioners, the Islamic polity and governance, transnational Islamist movements, Islamic approaches to International Relations Theory, global Islamic governance and institutions, the Islamic polity and governance (the Islamic State, the Umma, and the Nation-State), Islam and Foreign Policy Analysis, Islamic Diplomacy, Islam and Global Security, and Islam and geopolitics. Since its appearance on the world scene, Islam has played a major role in world affairs. However, as shown by the experience of the International Relations and Islamic Research Cohort (CoIRIS), as an intellectual and strategic phenomenon Islam has received limited sustained attention, and the role of Islamic Civilisation, Muslim-majority countries, and Muslim thinkers in the fields of IR, IRT, FPA, and Diplomacy has remained mostly unaddressed. This Section aims to fill this gap by exploring theoretical and empirical experiences of the Islamic civilization from the classical to modern and contemporary periods and by presenting the worldview of prominent Muslim thinkers, statecraft experiences, transnational movements, and Islamic states. The larger aim is to include Muslim intellectual contributions and experiences to the field of IR in order to enrich, diversify, and strengthen it by taking into account a wider possible picture of past and current case studies fashioned under the themes highlighted in the call.

Section Chairs

Cornelia Baciu & Brent Steele

The enforcement of international law is a prerequisite for normalization of relations, whether in the communal daily life or diplomatic level of states. Norms have been crucial in the stability of the international institutional, legal and organizational architecture that has been established after the Second World War, and in providing a sense of ontological security and normality. However, in the last decade, norms and international organizations have been increasingly contested. Changing state imaginaries, practices of (non-)recognition or new meanings can hinder the implementation of international norms and law, whether treaty law or customary law. The rationale of this section is as follows: Just like the end of the Second World War or the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Ukraine and the withdrawal from Afghanistan constitute tipping points in the international institutional architecture, inviting us to re-imagine the international and how ontological security as a stable mode of continuity can be established for all states. This section seeks to shed light on the intricate dynamics of norms change, ontological security and the implications for law enforcement and the international organization as a building block of order. To this end, this Section aims to discuss: 1) processes of making of legal and institutional orders, 2) the evolution of norms and norm change and 3) its reverberations on ontological security, law enforcement and new visions of order.

Section Chairs

Karina Jędrzejowska & Anna Wróbel

The 2021-2022 Human Development Report indicates that “we live in the live of worry”. Two years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is difficult to make a clear assessment of the global economic situation. In addition to the ongoing pandemic and disastrous social and economic effects of the war in Ukraine, the economic situation of many countries has deteriorated due to extreme weather events, which are becoming more frequent and severe as sea and air temperatures rise. The severity of the current situation has been underlined in the 2021 and 2022 editions of the Financing for Sustainable Development Report that imply that we might have entered a lost decade for (sustainable) development with over 150 million people plunged back into extreme poverty. In this time of global uncertainty, international cooperation appears even more important than ever. Stopping the pandemic and returning to a path of sustainable development and inclusive growth are only possible with the cooperation and involvement of public and private institutions at every level: from local through national, regional, and global. Therefore, the section offers a multidisciplinary approach towards analyzing multidimensional uncertainty in global economic governance. In particular, the section intends to look at the challenges to global economic stability caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate change. It also aims to provide respective policy recommendations for a more inclusive and resilient global economic institutionsin the time of growing debt distress and rising inflation.

Section Chairs

Anna Holzscheiter & Jonathan Josefsson

Few people would deny that recent waves of youth transnational activism –– from climate strikes to protests for stricter gun control to #MeToo to protest movements in Hongkong and Iran for democratic rights – have left their mark on international cooperation. And yet, youth as political agents inside and outside of international institutions are barely addressed in International Relations (IR) scholarship. Despite the lively history of labour, peace and environmental movements driven by young people all throughout the 20th century, youth actors do not figure in our IR textbooks as shapers of international politics. Our section brings together IR scholars working on the history, dynamics and effects of youth advocacy and activism in global politics. While critical IR scholarship has thrown light on the gendered, classist, racialized and anthropocentric exclusions that underpin salient sites of global affairs, this EISA section turns attention to contested political representation of youth. A quintessential object of study in the discipline of IR, international organizations first and foremost evoke the picture of adult, professionalized high-politics. Our section therefore asks: how have youth advocates and activists been in-/excluded in international institutions? How do they interpret, resist and engage with hegemonic discourses, influential policies and international political events across fields such as global health, climate, migration, international security and economic governance? To what extent are the boundaries between youth and other age groups (children; adults) contested? What are the effects of legitimizing international rules by addressing responsibilities for future generations and the ‘not-yet’ without meaningfully engaging youth?

Section Chairs

Hager Ben Jaffel & Sebastian Larsson

In today’s unruly and unpredictable world, intelligence has moved far beyond the conventional operations of intelligence services, beyond espionage and national security. Logics of counterterrorism, surveillance, and policing have emerged as the ‘new normal’ in intelligence work. 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, law enforcement, and border guards, as well as 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 data in transnational alliances and conducting mass surveillance on citizens across the globe using advanced digital technologies.

Envisioning a new world in this context means investigating and questioning contemporary intelligence and its increasingly dispersed effects on our everyday lives and fundamental rights and freedoms. In doing so, narrow state-centric and functionalist perspectives in established Intelligence Studies (IS) – which reinforce rather than reimagine dominant world orders – must be abandoned in favour of interdisciplinary and critical perspectives that take the professionals and practices of intelligence as the immediate point of departure. Building on previous efforts at EISA and beyond to develop such a research agenda, we invite contributions from across IR that challenge orthodox understandings of intelligence, bring into view the new actors, objects, targets, and sites of contemporary intelligence, or that take a fresh look at intelligence services through perspectives centring on their professionals, practices, as well as violent effects.

Burak Tansel & Dagmar Vorlíček

This year, an online one-day pre-conference will be organized on 5 September 2023.

Authors interested in taking part should select the Online Section as the preferred thematic section in the submission process.