Section Chairs

Anna Danielsson & Caroline Holmqvist

Critical Military Studies provides an inclusive and interdisciplinary space for the interrogation of violence, war-making, militaries and militarisms, and their attendant structures, inequalities, legacies and pains. Indicative concerns include but are not limited to: analysis of military lives, institutions and occupations; martial epistemes and constructions of enmity; the entanglement of martial desires and rationalities with domains from health and tourism to architecture and algorithmics; the imbrication of military power and violence with regimes of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability and anthropocentrism; the preparation, prosecution and aftermaths of war.

CMS thus engages with the myriad actors, discourses, materials, technologies, media, data, bodies, affects, practices, logistics and flows that constitute the broad capillaries of military power, as well as exploring how these become assembled and transformed in various crucibles of conflict. We welcome theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions that engage with military and ‘everyday’ spaces and settings, across a range of temporalities, and that deploy and develop analytics ranging from the intimate and emotional to the infrastructural and geopolitical.

We would particularly welcome contributions that foreground the ecological, that explore militarism and war-making as planetary forces, and that examine the very ‘natures of war’ (Gregory 2016) – the environments and atmospheres through and on which war is fought. How are forms of martial thinking and power entangled with the violences of extraction, contamination, fallout, toxicity and extinction, reshaping the very material possibilities and conditions of living and dying? How might resistance to militarism resonate with environmental and decolonial ontologies and practices?

Section Chairs

Ann Towns & Katarzyna Jezierska

Diplomacy is constantly changing. Over the last decades, the diplomatic profession has opened up to new social groups and is no longer exclusively the reserve of men of aristocratic descent. What is more, diplomatic functions are being performed by new social actors (e.g., civil society, celebrities) and diplomacy is practiced in new ways (e.g., use of social media). Understanding these changes may require new theoretical and methodological approaches. Indeed, following these changes, diplomatic studies has become a vibrant and innovative area of research.

Our section taps into this innovative research by focusing on the changing practices of diplomacy in a historical perspective. We imagine our section to ask a range of different questions about continuity and change covering anything from short time frames to the long durée. How do new developments reconstitute diplomats and diplomacy? What dimensions of diplomacy have stayed the same over time, as reified practices, and how? With decolonization, as a growing number of new states were diplomatically recognized with resident embassies, how was diplomacy transformed? Has diplomacy adapted to the recent entry of large numbers of women, and if so, in what ways? In addition to the huge impact of the recent “practice turn” on diplomatic studies, what are other theoretically innovative strategies to analyze diplomacy? What might the centering of non-Western agency imply for the study of diplomacy?

We welcome papers and sections interested in exploring these transformations.

Theoretically, methodologically and empirically innovative contributions are all encouraged, including feminist, postcolonial/decolonial and critical race approaches.

Section Chairs

Jef Huysmans & Joao Nogueira

This section aims at offering a space in EISA conferences for the engagement with agendas of research that gravitate around international political sociology as a site of critical explorations of the ‘problem of the international’. In the past fifteen years IPS sought to expand critical investigations at the intersection of different disciplinary fields in the social sciences in a move to expand and diversify scholarship in IR. The efforts to continuously push the limits of this intellectual movement, IPS has produced a variety of initiatives that have, for the most part, contributed to consolidate its transdisciplinary and transversal agenda, connecting scholars and researchers who share a disposition to transgress institutionalized repertoires of analysis and displace questions, methods and styles considered acceptable in the field. Following the exploration of the in-between, the contingent and the multiple in world politics that defines IPS, the section will stimulate debates that further its innovative research programme focusing on the importance of boundary traversing phenomena in world politics and on dynamics of fracturing social and political orders. Despite an intensified interest in the situated, the everyday, the event, and the local in IPS, gaining IR credentials still often requires that these little or momentary analyses have something to say about big orders, transformations and world histories. IPS is a site of exploring concepts and approaches that problematises these pulls towards the ‘big’. It does so by inviting conceptual and methodological inventing that challenges sociologies of order and explores sociologies of transversal connecting

Section Chairs

Nicholas Thomas & Catherine Lo

Health sits at the centre of power politics in nature. Humanity’s impact on nature has seen nature impact on humanity. Novel diseases now cross borders and populations with ease. Diseases proliferate in animal species, threatening not just the animals but the humans whose fates are intertwined with those animals. As the impact of the Anthropocene becomes more evident, it is necessary to understand how the politics of this relationship functions if we are to manage the health challenges that will only become more prevalent in the future.

Global health is an ideal lens from which to explore the threats facing humanity. It draws together participants from the natural as well as social sciences, from law and from economics. These different disciplines bring inter alia their own methodological concerns and priorities, ranging from equality of access to mechanisms of governance to the epistemologies of health and disease underlying the politics of global health, or the political determinants of health Whilst this list is non-exhaustive, a consensus in all global health study is the prominent role that politics plays in decisions about the provision of health. The inclusion of a series of global health panels in the 2020 PEC will encourage the type of cross-disciplinary fertilization of theories and approaches that helps to identify opportunities for the mitigation of the crises facing all life. As such global health is the embodiment of Glissant’s idea of the écho-monde where all things resonate with the other, and where solutions spillover beyond their intended targets.

Section Chair

Beatrix Futak-Campbell

The rationale for the section evolves from the call for broadening, diversifying, and globalising the study of IR. The need for globalising IR has been anticipated by Hoffmann 1977, Bull 1985, Cox 1981, Alker 1984, Holsti 1985, Ashley 1987 and has been taken up by scholars from both the Global North and South. Although there are many labels used to describe the fragmented attempts at globalising IR, most share the critique of the dominance of American IR, persistent Eurocentrism, and the existence of the discipline as a subfield of political science. Globalising IR will offer an intellectual space for all scholars working on any aspect of IR want to make the discipline more global even if their focus is one specific region.

EISA offers a perfect platform to advance the process of globalising IR. Even though there have been many attempts to globalise IR, they have remained within a specific disciplinary space. This EISA Section aims to build on these previous efforts but also go beyond, and to globalise IR also in the sense of bringing in its concerns (Eurocentrism etc.) into different sub-fields e.g. comparative regionalism and European Studies. Globalising the sub-field of European Studies alongside IR is to advance Chakrabarty’s (2000:3) claim that the “European age” in modern history began to yield place to other regions and global configurations”. In order for European Studies to remain relevant, it is a must to move away from provincialization to locating the study of ‘Europe’ in the study of globalised IR.

Section Chairs

Benjamin de Carvalho & Zeynep Gulsah Capan

Historical International Relations has gained traction over the past decades, as reflected in a growing presence of papers and panels at major conferences in the field of International Relations (IR). Strong in its experience in fostering such engagements beyond sub-disciplinary boundaries, the HIST section aims at engaging with works ranging from more theoretical reflections on history and international relations to more specific empirical discussions. The HIST section offers a timely platform for reflections on historical knowledge in IR, now that a longitudinal perspective on our present has become an ever more pressing matter to understand and explain current international affairs. A main aim of this section is thus to focus on specific historical trajectories and transitions and to question the idea that often dominates in IR that the making of the international rests on historical, clear-cut ruptures. The HIST section invites scholars interested in all types of historical inquiry: from micro-histories of the international to particular historical event or phenomenon, or in historiographic explorations of international relations and/or the academic field of IR.

Section Chairs

Valeria Bello & Christian Kaunert

International migration has several key implications for International Relations. Human mobility can actually affect bilateral and multilateral relations; is often connected with the upsurge of tensions between states and ethnic groups; influences the way the international system and the role of the nation within it are regarded; and is a central topic of discussion in the field of national, international and human security. Moreover, from the early 1990ies, further understandings of why international migration have increasingly been socially constructed as an issue that, from social, cultural and economic concerns, has entered the security domain have developed what is known as “the securitization of migration” literature.

Nonetheless, migration is also the focus of non-security studies in IR, such as the analysis of the governance and the management of human mobility, or the influence of phenomenon such as transnationalism and diasporas in IR. Furthermore, crucial are the consequences that international migration involves for regionalism and cosmopolitanism, or for interstate cooperation, sustainable development and inequalities. Newly studied is instead the nexus between migration and climate change. For all of the intersections that exist between migration, nationalism, inequalities and interethnic relations, human mobility has often entailed a relevant bulk of action by part of both state and non-state actors. The role of civil society, NGOs and social movements, along with the policies, practices, techniques, speech acts and performances of state actors, have often been at the core of innovative analysis that have contributed to further expanding the understanding and perspectives of international studies.

Section Chairs

Ingvild Bode & Frank Gadinger

International Practice Theory (IPT) has proven to be one of the most innovative research programs in International Relations. Outlining and developing novel concepts and frameworks and a renewed interest in methodology, it has led to new kinds of empirical material on world political phenomena. This section invites scholars interested in international practices and IPT to take stock, to review ongoing research projects and reflect on conceptual vocabularies, but also to discuss the frontiers of international practice research. Several themes are in focus of the section. Firstly, how IPT enables productive cross-disciplinary discussions with other social sciences, the humanities and even the natural sciences. Secondly, how the attention of practice-oriented scholars to concrete and observable practices that shape everyday world politics allows for integrating into IR research methodologies, such as abduction, participant observation, or ethnography. Thirdly, how such research methodologies provide an empirical ground for new forms of theorizing world politics as spatially and temporally situated phenomenon. Fourthly, addressing ontological challenges such as the relation of practices to power, reflexivity, critique, visuality, technology, or normativity. We particularly welcome contributions that focus on methods or discuss the relationship between IPT and related frameworks and disciplines such as pragmatism, anthropology, assemblage theory, actor-network theory, science and technology studies, or narrative and visual approaches.

Section Chairs

David Chandler & Delf Rothe

The Anthropocene has become a major concern for scholars of international politics and one that, for many authors, fundamentally destabilizes much of the traditional disciplinary concerns and assumptions. The crisis brought about by rising temperatures and sea levels goes well beyond the physical impacts of climate change and other anthropogenic environmental changes. The Anthropocene is a crisis of government – as established modes of governance seem increasingly inappropriate to deal with the complex and unbounded political problems we see emerging. Furthermore, the Anthropocene is a crisis of Western ethics and political theory – as established anthropocentric norms, institutions and values appear increasingly problematic and outdated. Finally, the Anthropocene is a crisis of imagination, as Amitav Gosh crucially reminds us, since it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine any alternative to the current path of fossil-fuels based consumption and destruction.

The proposed section is devoted to the multiple engagements of IR scholars with the notion of the Anthropocene. It provides a space to think through the new forms of political agency and governance that we see emerging in the Anthropocene. It fosters critical discussions of the concept – for example from decolonial, feminist, and/or poststructuralist perspectives – and invites proposals for thinking the Anthropocene differently. It reflects upon the technological dimension of the Anthropocene and engages with the implications of posthumanism beyond the realm of ecology (for example in the realm of AI and other emerging technologies). Finally, it includes methodological discussions and fosters new and creative approaches to studying international politics.

Section Chairs

Charlotta Friedner Parrat & Jonathan Gilmore

This section brings together researchers who are interested in the analysis of the international realm as a society, bound together by shared institutions, norms and practices.  The section seeks to encourage debates about the historical development and contemporary character of international society and the international order, how its norms and institutions emerged, how they have evolved, and the challenges international society currently faces.

We are interested in both analytical and normative approaches. For instance, empirical analyses of how different types of institutions relate to each other and how they affect the behaviour of states and other actors, as well as normative and critical engagement with the ethics of contemporary international society and its potential transformations.

Whilst the international society concept is closely connected to the English School of international relations, the section conceives the study of international society as a bridge between many IR approaches and we encourage a pluralism of methodologies and theoretical standpoints.  The section is also likely to be of particular interest to those working on constructivism, global ethics, systems theory, institutionalism, foreign policy analysis, practice theory and the variety of critical approaches to world politics.

The section welcomes all paper and panel proposals that make a substantive engagement with international society in some way, empirically and/or theoretically.  However, we are particularly interested in contributions that might speak to broad themes of:

• Fragmentation and transformation of international society in the face of contemporary threats and challenges.
• The influence of power asymmetries on the development of international society and its intersections with gender, race, class and/or the legacies of colonialism.
• The shared ethical understandings (or the lack of them) that underpin the norms, institutions and practices of international society.
• Whether one or many international societies exist and how they might relate to one another.
• Whether the current order provided by international society’s norms and institutions can accommodate diverse and competing demands for justice.

Section Chairs

Burak Tansel & Lisa Tilley

The section aims to develop a sustained research network of scholars working in and beyond International Studies to promote critical research on the global political economy. Grounded in recent calls to diversify the disciplinary focus of (International) Political Economy, the section will offer a home for scholars to study contemporary capitalism and its gendered and racialised operation at the global, local and household levels. The section aims to advance an explicitly “global” outlook for political economy research in contrast to the existing Eurocentric framework of IPE. To this end, we will prioritise, and feature knowledge produced in and for the global South and utilise the section as a means to design meaningful collaborations between scholars in the global South and North.

Section Chairs

David Mutimer & Simon Philpott

Over the past decade there has been a growing community of scholars concerned with the ‘popular culture and world politics continuum’.  Framing the research agenda as a continuum implies popular culture and world politics are mutually implicated.  Some argue popular culture reflects world politics and so provides a novel entry point to research and teaching where, for example, Hollywood cinema is used to illustrate theoretical or conceptual arguments. Approaching popular culture as a continuum facilitates a far richer research agenda because it recognises popular culture constitutes world politics: popular culture is world politics.  However, world politics also conditions and constrains popular culture.  A surprisingly diverse community of scholars has built a foundational, transformative research programme that is complex, multifaceted, and which cuts across traditional divisions within International Studies. The Section would continue to focus on the emerging research programme of Popular Culture and World Politics, which continues to be one of the most innovative new research programmes in critical international studies. Many ECRs have invested in PCWP related sections and we will strive to continue to be an inclusive environment for ECRs, building on the diversity that characterizes the PCWP research community. In addition, it would invite panels with an explicitly pedagogical focus, as popular culture and world politics is entering the curriculum of universities across Europe and around the world, and so there is an appetite for a collective consideration of PCWP pedagogy.

Section Chairs

Linda Monsees & Rocco Bellanova

Security policy and security practices can hardly be imagined without science and technology. Political programs foster the development of technoscientific security tools, and science and technology are often presented as drivers for behavioral and institutional change, as they enhance or curb actor capacities. Thinking about the science, technology, and security is however complicated by the political work and ambiguity of innovations. Science and technology can be conceived as threats just as well as means for security production – and sometimes even as both at the same time (think for instance of drones and how they can be used by different actors for physical attacks, reconnaissance, or rescue).

IR scholars have more recently explored novel ways to conceptualize and study science, technology and security within the international, including – but not limited to – approaches from STS, sociology, anthropology, assemblage theory, and new materialist philosophy. The aim of this section is to encourage conceptual, methodological and empirical work informed by critical thinking and creative theorizing along these lines. We thus invite contributions that explore the interplay of science, technology and security across different domains such as warfare and the military, counterterrorism and intelligence cooperation, the regulation of global mobility and borders, science diplomacy, dual-use research, and others.

Section Chairs

Anders Wivel & Revecca Pedi

The aim of this section is to address the big questions in world politics from the perspective of small states. It seeks to gain in-depth knowledge about small states security in war and peace, their approaches in cooperation and conflict, their strategies of survival and influence, the interplay between the domestic and the external environment in the international relations of small states, their norms and practices in international politics. Its mission is to provide a forum for a growing but fragmented field of study in the International Relations discipline and stimulate a research agenda in a field that despite recent steps forward remains largely repetitive and parochial. We invite papers and panels on any topic concerning the international relations of small states in Europe and beyond. We consider of particular interest studies exploring the strategies small states employ to respond to the changing nature of world politics and examining the vulnerabilities and opportunities small states are facing due to rising uncertainty in the international system. We welcome scholarship investigating the particularities of the international relations of small states and the lessons that can be learnt from the efforts of small states to successfully navigate a competitive world despite their limited resources. We encourage contributions by both senior and emerging scholars providing innovative theoretical and/or empirical insights. The section advances academic pluralism in theories and methodologies but also in terms of gender and geographical representation

Section Chairs

Rune Saugmann & Gabi Schlag

Visual International Relations (IR) is an internationally growing field of academic research, political critique and aesthetic practice. Past work in this field has shown how our understanding of international relations, security and world politics is enhanced by paying attention to vision, visuality and visuals. We invite scholars interested in deepening our engagement with how different international and global political phenomena such as migration, climate change, human rights, gender, and war are visually mediated and constituted, and in reflecting on how different visual technologies from oil paint to computer vision intervene in the political. We encourage contributors to engage as well as employ different media such as photography, computer-generated images, film, graphic novels, video and painting.

Theoretical and methodological contributions that critically reflect the merits and challenges of Visual IR are gaining terrain in journals and edited volumes. We invite contributions that deepens this engagement by addressing vision, visuality, visibility, and visuals in IR in unexpected, theoretically informed and methodologically reflected ways. Contributions that investigate the normativity of vision and (in)visibility are particularly welcome, as are contributions to enhance our teaching practices and to think about IR in terms of creativity.

Section Chairs

Felix Anderl & Inanna Hamati-Ataya

The twenty-first century marked a profound transition in our history, as the majority of humans now inhabit urban environments and rely for their subsistence on a minority of rural labourers expected to sustain the needs of a growing world population in unsustainable conditions of life and production, governed by the economic and normative rules of an asymmetrical global food regime. Future life chances will be determined by the political ability to capture ongoing transformations in our agrarian paradigm and rectify the course that appears to be leading to societal collapse. This section invites panel and paper proposals that address major global threats, crises, and challenges facing systems of agricultural and food production, and their influence on the stability and sustainability of human society more generally. We are interested in mapping out agrarian orders and transformations: historical, current, and future patterns and processes of asymmetrical societal and economic development in agrarian life-systems. We are especially interested in the theme of disruption: How have agrarian orders been disrupted, e.g. by imperial, colonial, and neoliberal policies deployed at regional and global scales? What are the consequences of the unequal distributions of natural and technological resources, unequal protections from physical, economic, and environmental harm, and long-standing structural inequalities? How do these violently established orders disrupt traditional forms of life and sustainable agrarian solutions? And how are the agrarian orders created by these disruptions disrupted yet again by strategies of resistance and solidarity that delineate hopeful futures with alternative, non-exploitative modes of agricultural production?

This section is sponsored by the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos).

Section Chairs

Hannes Hansen-Magnusson & Anja Menzel

Covering around three quarters of the planet, oceans and polar regions are spaces of utmost international importance. As a key component of climate systems and provider of scarce resources such as oil, gas, or fish, their integrity matters globally. Meanwhile, the frequently invoked apocalyptic, but all too realistic scenarios of collapsing oceans and melting ice depict the fragility of oceans and polar regions and emphasize the uncertain future of theses spaces. Yet, until recently the politics of oceans and polar regions have received significantly less analytical attention than their land-based counterparts. Notwithstanding, the need to focus on these spaces is underlined by the variety of relevant policy fields which are affected by maritime and polar crises: Climate change threatens the ecological health of oceans and polar regions and subsequently the sustenance of coastal and indigenous people, while the fragility of maritime infrastructure became obvious not only when the Suez Canal was blocked but is also a key point of tension in the South China Sea and in relation to counter-piracy measures. Although some unique governance arrangements have been established in the realm of ocean and polar politics – such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Antarctic Treaty System or the Arctic Council – governing these spaces in a time of crises remains challenging. This section thus seeks to enhance the recent ‘blue turn’ in global politics by scrutinising social and political responses to the multitude of crises oceans and polar regions face in the 21st century.

Section Chairs

Flavia Lucenti & Cecilia Ducci

The section aims to discuss and enhance innovative approaches to assessing contestation in International Relations (IR) in the transit towards a multipolar era. Despite the existence of a vast literature, surprisingly, important blind spots remain in IR theory when investigating contestation. There is indeed little consensus on the definition of contestation as well as on the identification of the actors who are currently disputing international institutions and practices. In this regard, this section encourages the debate over the existence of different types of contestations – discursive and behavioural contestation, but also justificatory or applicatory contestation –, and the role of the contesting actors. In addition to this, the literature is yet to share a consensus on the impact of contestation on the strength of norms, a potential source for international instability. Thus, this section focuses on how contestation affects the legitimacy of current norms and institutions and the consequences this has in terms of the stability of the liberal international order. More specifically, it aims to understand whether the contestation over the liberal international order is paving the way towards an increasingly multipolar order and, in particular, whether this may lead to greater instability. This section therefore contributes to the theme of the conference by providing an overview of the potential scenarios and “apocalyptic imaginaries” that derive from the contestation over the international liberal order. The section invites papers that push the boundaries of our knowledge on the topic from an original theoretical but also an empirical perspective, dealing with the contestation from both non-Western states – contestation from outside – and Western states – contestation from within. Empirically, promising angles for further research also include the effect of contestation carried out by non-state actors. The scope of the section is also that of developing a sustained network of researchers working on contestation in IR to collaborate on an ongoing basis.

Section Chairs

Jutta Bakonyi & Shrey Kapoor

Capitalism promotes and expands circulation, but also requires political regulation to keep disruptive mobilities in check. While investigations of movement and mobilities have gained traction in recent years, IR has often neglected the material structures and installations that make circulation possible.  This section invites papers that investigate the material, spatial and technological underpinnings of the international and how they are imbricated in imaginaries of the global order and foster or challenge existing relations of power and violence. The section aims to stimulate discussion on the implications of a material approach for the discipline and invites papers that engage with:

• The emergence of (new) spatio-technological arrangements that facilitate and regulate flows (such as cities, ports, extraction zones).
• Relations of infrastructural spaces and state power
• Practices and effects of interruptions to circulatory flows (lockdowns, border closures, technological failures, etc.)
• Materials and the international governance of mobilities and flows
• Violence and infrastructures and infrastructures of violence
• Theoretical and methodological implications of the ‘infrastructural turn’

Section Chairs

Jonathan Austin & Anna Leander

What do the majority of social scientists studying world politics do? They read. They write. Some run numbers. Some go to archives. Some head to the field. That’s what most scholars of world politics do. But what if we – instead – imagined a student of world politics standing in a factory, at the end of a production line? Or sitting at an architect’s desk, sketching? Or in a workshop, crafting objects? This is hard to imagine because, well, that’s just not what the vast majority of social scientists exploring world affairs do at the moment. This section is orientated around growing interest within International Relations (IR) to bringing these alternative forms of practice into the heart of the discipline. It asks what it would mean if non-textual and non-logocentric forms of design, craft, and making were deployed both as novel forms of research and as means of normatively and politically intervening into world politics. Drawing broadly from across science and technology studies, international political sociology, feminist theory, (critical and speculative) design, postcolonial theory, pragmatist sociology, and beyond, the ethos of the section is captured in the idea that ‘making is thinking’ and that – thus – expanding our modes of making has the potential to produce radically distinct forms of knowledge and insight into the international. We encourage submissions from all those who have deployed or are interested in exploring the (methodological, conceptual, etc.) potential of different forms of design, craft, and making, whether material, digital, computational, artistic, visual, or beyond.

Section Chairs

Filipe Dos Reis & Maj Grasten

Law and legal bodies form a key part of the structure of international relations. Yet, legal norms, concepts, jurisdictional boundaries and legal bodies are increasingly contested by various public and private actors globally. This section invites contributions that explore the intersection of law and politics in international relations, including their impact on domestic law and practice. It draws together scholars from different disciplinary fields who share an interest in the role of law in global politics and governance. This includes studies concerned with the history of the relationship between law and politics and particular legal regimes, such as sovereignty and human rights, as well as ways in which transnational, international and global law is practiced and problematized today across diverse institutional fields.

Section Chairs

Joana Ricarte & Ana Isabel Rodríguez Iglesias

Peace Studies (PS) is an interdisciplinary field with a strong normative component headed towards understanding the root causes of conflict and the conditions for the promotion of peace. Notwithstanding recurrent warnings over the risks of co-optation, PS has expanded the thought and practice on peace to include bottom-up perspectives and everyday political claims into the international agenda, contributing to the incorporation of emancipatory views of peacemaking and the construction of localized policies. This research-action bias places PS at the center of debates under the current crises with long-lasting global impact, namely the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the rise of extremism and exclusionary politics, the escalation of war-like narratives, the hardship of democracies, among others, which disrupt our understandings of conflict, identities, interventionism and peace(building). This rapidly changing international environment poses a need to reimagine Peace Studies in pluralistic ways beyond local/international boundaries and the north/south divide, repositioning the discipline into the forefront of events and their consequences. This section aims to establish a network of scholars interested in developing critical research about peace, its meaning(s), forms of promotion and implications for a diverse range of actors. By taking stock of the advancements of the field and promoting agenda-setting debates within its most recent trends and beyond, the PS section will gather around 10 panels yearly to discuss peace-related dimensions including feminist agendas for peace, post/decolonial peace constructions, alternative and wider transitional justice mechanisms, the evolving international peace architecture and its consequences, as well as the ethnicization of peace.

Section Chairs

Corine Wood-Donnelly & Johanna Ohlsson

The purpose of the section is to elevate the conversation between theories of justice and International Relations. While issues of justice are of growing significance in the international discourse in relation to post-colonial experiences, climate governance and globalisation, for example, this has yet to significantly infiltrate the norms of the international system, analysis of international politics or influence the explanatory frameworks of the major International Relations paradigms. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the recent COP negotiations that show states still unwilling to accept responsibility for climate reparations and adaptation-- or in another example, the information war eroding the foundations of democracy and geopolitical stability. Yet, the absence of justice threatens the foundations of the international order through the neglect of the social contract, the undermining of sovereign legitimacy and the spillover effects of legacies of injustice that cannot be contained by national borders. With justice critically needed as an envisioned part of the new normal, this section proposes to bring a number of themes into focus through the lens of justice. This includes: international environmental governance, the Arctic as critical site of climate justice, the relationship between the global and local in questions of sustainability and community resilience, historical perspectives of injustice and, finally, to ask: What can justice theory bring to International Relations?

Section Chairs

Mariam Salehi & Werner Distler

While the study of knowledge and its role in international politics has long been at the centre of IR research, we can observe a rise of interest in the topic over the last decade. The section “Knowledge in International Relations. Epistemic Struggles in a Complex World” reflects on the state-of-the-art of knowledge-focused studies for the discipline, and at a critical engagement with the possibilities and limitations of knowledge-focused frameworks for a future world. It therefore invites both theoretical and empirical contributions, those that deal with epistemic struggles as a subject of inquiry for the discipline, as well as the knowledge politics that shape the discipline itself. We invite papers, panels, and roundtables that cover a range of knowledge dimensions, e.g. 1) the role of experts and their expertise in decision-making of states, IOs, or in non-state contexts, 2) epistemic communities and the manifestations of knowledge in discourse, 3) concrete epistemic practices observable in international and transnational politics, 4) the role of knowledge in the constitution of objects of global governance, with a more material and technological focus, or 5) the knowledge politics of the discipline itself. We envision contributionsto be drawn from the following fields and topics, among others: 1) war, peace and conflict, 2) security studies, 3) political economy 3) post/decoloniality, 4) gender, and 5) norms, rules, and institutions. One key focus should thereby be on struggles over knowledge orders, the emergence of epistemic authority, and, ultimately, the relationship of knowledge and power in a future world.