Conveners: Hillary Briffa (King's College London) and Christopher Featherstone (University of York)

In an era marked by deepening inequalities in access to education and digital literacy, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education presents both opportunities and challenges for educators and students alike. This workshop will critically examine the role of AI in teaching and scholarship within the disciplines of Politics and International Relations (IR), exploring how AI is reshaping pedagogy, assessment, and the inclusivity of higher education.

This topic aligns with the broader conference theme of Transforming the International: Scholarship and Solidarity in a World of Inequalities by interrogating how AI technologies, while offering significant potential for educational innovation, may also reinforce existing disparities or create new forms of exclusion. AI has the potential to improve learning experiences through personalised education, adaptive learning environments, and enhanced feedback mechanisms. However, the increasing reliance on AI-generated materials also raises critical concerns about ethics, bias, academic integrity, and digital divides among students from different socio-economic backgrounds.

This workshop, hosted by the ASPIRE Network (Academic Scholarship in Politics and International Relations Education - https://www.aspirenetwork.uk/), will bring together scholars and practitioners to discuss how AI is transforming educational practices and shaping the future of teaching and learning in Political Science and IR. It will provide an interactive space for participants to share best practices, highlight emerging risks, and develop strategies for ethical and inclusive AI implementation in education.

Conveners: Babatunde Obamamoye (University of Birmingham) and Jonathan Fisher (University of Birmingham)

The civilian protest against international peacekeepers has become one of the major changes facing international peace missions today. This type of local hostility to international peace interventions is increasingly frequent, and it has demonstrated, in varying degrees, the capacity to hinder peace missions from accomplishing their peacekeeping and/or peacebuilding goals in conflict-affected societies. Yet little is known about civilian protests in the broad discourse of local resistance in international peacekeeping and peacebuilding literature. What do we know about civilian protests against international peacekeepers? Why should international policymakers and peace interveners take the issue of civilian protest seriously? In what ways do international peace practitioners negotiate, resist, or reproduce civilian protests during peace operations? What are the perspectives of local actors about why their protests against peace missions are justifiable? How should the United Nations (UN) address civilian protests whenever they spring up in its peace operations?

This workshop seeks papers that offer theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and/or empirical insight into civilian demonstrations during peacekeeping interventions and how different international actors – peacekeepers, peace missions, international organisations, and/or policymakers – are/should respond to it. The topics may include cases of civilian protests against peacekeepers, drivers of demonstrations during international peacekeeping, international responses to civilian protests during peace operations, and the future of peacekeeping in the context of emerging civilian protests. Overall, the theme of this workshop will contribute to the broad scholarly effort to critically unpack the global challenge/practice of (new) resistance in the context of international peacekeeping/peacebuilding. We anticipate the workshop will lead to a special issue in a leading IR journal.

Conveners: Tara Korti (Christian Aid) and Cathy Bollaert (Christian Aid)

The workshop’s topic is co-creation as a tool for transformative development research and this falls within the remit of decolonizing knowledge. We believe that knowledge and evidence can play a significant role in furthering the social justice agenda. We believe that to re-examine the power imbalances in the process of knowledge production, we need to engage with four key questions: who owns the process? whose knowledge dominates the process? Whose language is used as a medium in the process? How is the knowledge produced and used to benefit whom? These questions call for critical reflexivity amongst research and evidence teams striving to decolonise knowledge.

A critical space which makes decolonizing knowledge possible is co-creation. Our intention for this workshop is to create a reflective and interactive space for researchers and practitioners committed to decolonising knowledge. The convenors will include learning questions on co-creation in the sessions so as to allow for meaningful contemplation. The workshops will be open to accepting diverse forms of submissions: tools used for co-creation, knowledge products developed from co-creation process etc. The sessions will focus on: co-creation principles, practice and impact; research ethics and reflexivity; co-creation in conflict prone areas; the transformatory potential of co-creation.

Conveners: Moriel Ram (Newcastle University) and Victor Matthew Kattan (University of Nottingham School of Law)

This workshop aims to further debates on the use of ‘apartheid’ to describe current political conditions. It is concerned with the power-laden processes of division, domination, separation, oppression and fragmentation, whether on the urban, national, or global scale. Jacques Derrida’s often-cited text on apartheid deems the term ‘racism’s last word’ (Derrida & Kamuf, 1985). The final word on apartheid, however, is far from being written. Historically associated with South Africa’s regime of white supremacy between 1948 and 1994 (Dubow, 2014), apartheid has also been codified as a crime in international law that is globally applicable and has reached the docket of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in multiple cases (in South Africa v Israel, Nicaragua v Germany; see also the ICJ’s 19 July 2024 advisory opinion). The crime of apartheid has also been raised in submissions to the International Criminal Court. Apartheid has entered the world’s political and legal vocabulary and become an analytical concept for investigating and prosecuting various forms of domination and oppression (HRW 2021; Amnesty, 2022).

It is thus apparent that the notion of apartheid has acquired global currency and reach, and needs to be investigated with attention to its international and global dimensions. On the one hand, practices complicit in maintaining apartheid conditions have circulated between countries. On the other, apartheid is becoming a notion that can connect various emancipatory struggles across diverse contexts and build alliances against repressive forms of governance.

Therefore, whether conceived of as a historical period, a legal category, a system of oppressive and discriminatory governance, or a contemporary global regime (Alexander, 1996; Besteman, 2020), we need to examine the connective elements through which we can unpack apartheid’s multiple meanings. Accordingly, the workshop focuses on how “apartheid” serves as a node that connects a plethora of various policies, claims, discourses, actors, means to deploy power, and ways to challenge it. It seeks to address the analytical possibilities stemming from the different conceptual meanings of apartheid and to explore methodological frameworks to approach apartheid’s varied applications. In other words, the workshop aims to explore apartheid as a multifaceted concept that requires close examination and a reality that must be critically challenged.

1. Contemporary meanings and comparative formulations for studying apartheid
2. When and how does apartheid begin and end?
3. Apartheid as a violation of human rights law and as an international crime
4.  
5. Apartheid and social and demographic engineering
6. Reading apartheid from the Global South
7. Conceptual relevance of apartheid to current planetary challenges from the climate crisis to mass migration and artificial intelligence
8. The relationship between apartheid, forced labour, and modern forms of slavery
9. Apartheid, asylum, and refugee law
10. Apartheid, self-determination and the right to development

The workshop is intended as a first step in developing a research network dedicated to studying apartheid in its various iterations and understandings. We further envision a special issue or edited volume emerging from this cooperation.

Conveners: Alice Finden (Durham University) and Christina Riggs (Durham University)

This workshop casts a critical eye on the role of colonial history and the engagement with archival sources in the production of alternative stories of global politics. Researchers and educators are increasingly turning to archival engagements as part of critical, decolonial, antiracist and feminist methodologies that seek to uncover and interrogate the colonial and imperial shape of global politics (Ghaddar and Caswell 2019). Yet, colonial archives produce a certain truth through the silencing of marginalised voices (Arondekar 2005; Bastani and Brandimarte 2024). When colonised subjects are represented, ‘the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives’ (Hartman 2008, 2). In seeking to excavate colonial archives for practices of violence, therefore, researchers and educators must be aware of the risks of reaffirming colonial truths, and further of privileging colonial governance as a totalising form of power.

This workshop, then, in keeping with the broader theme of this conference, asks about the possibilities of interrogating and reimagining global structures through an engagement with archives. We ask, how do we as researchers and educators make use of archival texts without exalting colonial truths? What is the purpose and relevance of colonial documents in our current world? How does our interpretation of colonial archives change with social and political context?

This workshop is inspired by critical engagements that demonstrate the clinginess and pervasiveness of archival encounters (Nassar 2017). We look to engage conversations about how the material and epistemic structure of imperial and postcolonial forms of nationalism and belonging have been shaped by colonial dispossession and relationships of dependency (Guha 1997; Salem 2020). We follow decolonial and feminist approaches to archives that, instead of seeking a flattened, linear story of global history, pay attention to moments where truths clash and the colonial narrative is rendered a fiction (Hartman 2008; Stoler 2010). We ask about readings of the colonial archive that seek to redress the erased stories of those subject to colonial violence by producing counter-histories, rewriting global hierarchies and imagining other possible futures by engaging communities and students. Finally, this workshop asks about the production of alternative archives, via processes such as oral histories and memory work.

We seek to bring together academic and community researchers, archivists and educators to address these questions. In so doing we seek to interrogate colonial hierarchies and boundaries that shape access to and engagement with knowledge production. Resulting from this workshop we seek to build a regional network across the North-East of England and Scotland that links academic and community based researchers and educators. This network will equip the 'UK Sudanese Community Researchers for Reparations' project with academic expertise & relationships. We plan that this will establish a Sudanese Community Partnership at Durham University (which is where a prominent Archive on Sudan is based).

Conveners: Selver Sahin (Boğaziçi University) and Betul Dogan Akkas (Ankara University)

The workshop proposed in this application aims to stimulate a cooperative and constructive discussion of alternative conceptual and pedagogical approaches that have the potential to challenge the prevailing narratives and frameworks in the field of international development studies. It does this by initiating a participatory interdisciplinary dialogue to untangle the dynamics of historical injustices, present-day socio-economic disparities, and emerging forms of resistance. The key research questions that shape this exploration effort are not limited to, but include the following: In what ways do the dominant discursive frameworks (such as rights-based approaches that show little-to-no-interest and commitment to the transformation of underlying class-based, gender-based, and other material and non-material forms of power structures among and within nations) in international development studies perpetuate inequality in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens? What does the development cooperation experience of “new” donors such as Türkiye and China tell us about emergent patterns and paradigms of development? What alternative research methodologies and pedagogies might contribute towards a fairer global order? How can pedagogy serve as an instrument for the processes of decolonisation and empowerment in development studies?

The findings will be used as a resource to produce a special issue publication on the following subjects:

1. Diversification of the Curricula: This includes the expression of perspectives from scholars coming from diverse backgrounds and traditions that have been marginalised from the mainstream academic spaces of discussion.
2. Re-evaluation of Research Methods: This entails the prioritisation of research methodologies that are truly participatory and real world problems-based.
3. Challenging Hegemonic Knowledge Production: This involves the critical interrogation of dominant theoretical and practical frameworks, and the identification of alternative perspectives and approaches to the international development sector.
4. Reconfiguration of Unequal Power Dynamics in Academia: Discussion of institutional and ideological barriers that limit knowledge production and dissemination from marginalised regions and researchers in international conferences.
5. Construction of Transnational Research Networks: Discussion of ways in which co-production of knowledge about global inequalities might be possible.

Conveners: Marco Nicola Binetti (Bremen University) and Marius Mehrl (University of Leeds)

This workshop is designed with a threefold aim. First, it seeks to define and clarify the concepts of solidarity and international solidarity. Second, it will investigate the factors that explain the occurrence of varying instances of solidarity across different countries, economic systems, geographical areas, societies, and historical periods. Third, the workshop aims to explore the determinants that allow for the prediction of national, international, and global responses to severe challenges such as conflict, climate change, natural disasters, and financial distress.

Aligned with the conference’s commitment to transformative research in an era of widening inequalities, this workshop reimagines the concept of solidarity and the international system through the lens of solidarity. By challenging paradigms and integrating critical debates on social and climate justice along with transnational solidarities, the session offers innovative perspectives on how international relations and national socio-economic dynamics can evolve to address pressing global challenges.

Embracing an interdisciplinary approach, the workshop will bring together researchers utilizing diverse methodologies—from empirical case studies and qualitative analyses to advanced predictive techniques like machine learning. Participants will examine whether solidarity is a singular concept or a multifaceted phenomenon, focusing on its emergence in contexts marked by fiscal distress, environmental crises, and conflict. The discussions will address themes such as relief aid, resource allocation, burden sharing, and peacebuilding processes.

We welcome a variety of submissions, including standard research papers, research notes, presentations of new datasets, partial paper drafts, and policy papers or reports. Contributions should provide theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights that deepen our understanding of international and global solidarity and its implications for predicting responses to contemporary crises.

The workshop is expected to catalyze the formation of an international network of scholars dedicated to exploring both the conceptual and practical dimensions of solidarity.

Conveners: Andrew Dorman (King's College London) and Joyce P. Kaufman (Institute of World Affairs and Whittier College)

In just over a month from taking office as the US 47th President Donald Trump appears to have reversed Americas traditional position of seeking to maintain the international system in its’ present form and instead advancing changes towards a return to some form of great power politics. Whether Donald Trump represents some form of temporary blip in traditional US foreign policy or something far more substantial is open to debate.

What is already clear, the globalised unipolar moment, if it ever really existed, is being challenged on multiple fronts. The reasons for these challenges and our understanding of such changes is subject to debate. Whether Ikenberry is right that we are moving towards a world in which the Global West and Global East are in competition with each other and for the Global South collectively and as independent states, a Multiplex world, as advanced by Amitav Acharya et.al, or something else possibly resembling a return to great power politics remains to be seen. Turning points in history only really become apparent after they have happened and there have been far too many turning points that saw little or no movement.

What, perhaps, is clear is that states and institutions are being forced to consider how to adapt and change to try and best position themselves for the future.

This proposed workshop is looking to make a number of contributions:

1. To bring together a series of comparative case studies of how states, their leaders and their societies are responding with the aim of cross-comparison within the Global West, Global East and Global South and between these groupings.
2. To bring together a series of comparative case studies how international organizations are also changing.
3. Developing new and revisiting existing conceptual and theoretical explanations for these changes to see what new insights and understanding can be developed.
4. Addressing the ways in which the American turn away from the liberal order under President Donald Trump will have ramifications for the international political system.

The workshop aims to draw on perspectives from across the profession in line with the goals of both ISA and BISA. It will particularly look to emphasize a diverse range of perspectives drawing on early career scholars alongside the more established.

Amongst its outputs the workshop will aim to produce an edited volume.

Conveners: Moira Faul (Geneva Graduate Institute) and Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni (University of Cambridge)

“Global governors” (Avant et al., 2010) produce knowledge, expertise and experts with the expectation that “the governed” will use them. And yet, governors’ knowledge, expertise and experts have been seen to be poorly matched to the needs and demands of the governed, at the same time as governors tend to overlook the supply of knowledge, expertise and experts from the governed themselves (Escobar, 2007; Mbembe, 2019). Underpinning global governance are knowledge regimes (Bueger, 2015; Sending, 2015), the “organizational and institutional machinery that generates data, research, policy recommendations, and other ideas” (Campbell & Pedersen, 2014, p. 3), and methods regimes that govern “the production and validation of knowledge” (Littoz-Monnet & Uribe, 2023, p.1). Researchers in IR study knowledge and methods regimes of both global governors and the governed, nevertheless scholars of each tend to form distinct research communities.

This workshop aims to bring those communities into dialogue with each other, enriching the discipline’s understanding of the knowledge and methods regimes of global governors and the governed, as well as the authority and legitimacy claims, challenges, exclusions, flows, interactions, and struggles between and within each group. The papers we convene engage with knowledge and/or methods regimes either among the governors or governed or between governors and governed, addressing one or more of the following questions:

1. How is knowledge made? How are knowledge professionals made?
2. What types of knowledge are made, and allowed to be made? (Western science, indigenous knowledge, evidence pyramid)
3. What type of interventions enable and exclude different forms of expertise and knowledge
4. Who is allowed to be/count as an expert?
5. What are experts’ professional backgrounds and trajectories? Their institutional logics?
6. What are the changing claims to legitimacy and authority in issue areas or knowledge regimes?
7. How do these changing claims play out in individuals’ professional practices or identities? In organisational orientations and resource use?
8. What are the flows of resources (material, ideational, organizational, discursive, human) that undergird these knowledge regimes?
9. What resources are controlled within them and how are they shared or distributed?
10. What are the flows of knowledge production and use, of expertise and experts? What are the flows in and out of knowledge regimes, and within the same knowledge regime?
11. Which actors (if any) have control over the issue area, knowledge, expertise, and experts? How do they maintain that control? What are the challenges to this control, and how are they made?
12. What are the mechanisms, structures and processes through which experts and expertise are made in the knowledge regimes studied?
13. In all of these questions, how is power wielded and yielded?

The workshop addresses three “worlds of inequalities:” the first in global governance between the governors and the governed; the second between scholarship of the governors as compared to the governed; and the third between scholars from the “governed” regions and those from the regions of the “governors”. Our intended outcome is a Special Issue or edited volume.

Conveners: Hartmut Behr (Newcastle University) and Felix Roesch (University of Sussex)

In contrast to rationalist action models, assumptions of stability, and their massive influences in the sciences and policy making (e.g., in Rawlsian and Habermasian legacies), there are only sporadic attempts in political and social sciences to conceptualise political action under conditions of uncertainty, contingency, and fluidity (such as foremost from Hannah Arendt, Hans Joas, Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Baumann, Bruno Latour). This workshop shall focus on forms of creativity under conditions of uncertainty and shall reflect on notions of improvisation as rituals and practices for example in music and dance. Contributions shall also have in mind theory-practice relationships and aim at formulating lessons to be learned for, but not restricted to, policy-making in a world of political crisis and to political leadership. Management theory has already adopted improvisation in music, especially the work of US Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, as new form of creativity. Political sciences and International Relations seem to lack behind. The workshop aims at contributing to fill this gap through interdisciplinary discussions between politics, musicology, economy, and practitioners from the creative industries (as music and dance).

Part of possible lessons from improvisation (loosely understood as non-pre-scribed acting together into an unforeseeable future) relate to the problem of cross-cutting temporalities and how they affect political practices. Theoretical reflections and empirical examples of on the relationship between political practice and temporality(ies) enrich the analogy to improvisation, the latter providing a possible practical example of navigating and coping creatively with intersecting (temporal) structures.

Conveners: Andrea Charron (University of Manitoba) and Clara Portela (University of Valencia)

International sanctions constitute an object of study for scholars of Law, Political Science and International Relations, among others. However, these disciplines have established scarce interconnection and lack a common vocabulary for their analyses. In view of the growing importance of sanctions as a foreign policy tool, which consequently makes the need for a better understanding of their nature, operation and effects more urgent and acute, this workshop attempts to address the needs of social sciences scholars writ large and encourage an understanding of the sanctions world from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

In order to provide researchers with the tools to explore sanctions to the full, adopting an inclusive, comprehensive approach emerges as a necessity. The growing prominence of sanctions measures, and the prolific and often creative practice of senders, both traditional powers and newcomers - not to mention the concerted efforts of targets to evade sanctions - have increased the diversity of restrictions and the challenges associated to their categorisation, measurement, comparison, monitoring and assessment. There is also a built-in inequity to sanctions in that targets are often countries in Africa or South America with weak and fragile economies. This inequity is often dismissed as necessity given that the conflicts sanctions seek to address stem from these developing states.

In keeping with the theme of this year’s conference, this workshop will attract an interdisciplinary group of scholars (at various stages of their career) and practitioners who study different aspects, types and issues associated with international sanctions.

The workshop calls for authors to present encyclopedia or longer paper entries on the following five themes: The first theme focuses on individual states, groups of states, and international organisations as senders of sanctions. Section two delves into the specific content of these measures, focusing on sanctions design and the various typologies of measures used. The third section highlights key sanctions episodes, covering both UN and non-UN regimes. Section four will be devoted to cross-cutting issues such as the legitimacy, implementation, and effectiveness of international sanctions, including evasion and circumvention, and judicial reviews, among others. Finally, section five explores the objectives of sanctioning measures, analysing the rise of thematic sanctions alongside geographically focused ones.

The anticipated outcome is an encyclopedia of sanctions and a series of dedicated papers on sanctions that encourage an interdisciplinary focus on the topic.

Conveners: Teresa Almeida Cravo (FEUC-CES, University of Coimbra) and Sandra Pogodda (University of Manchester)

How well does peace research during the Cold War travel to today’s times of geopolitical tensions? Is it temporally bounded to that time frame or can we learn from what those wishing to prevent a new world war were focusing on? Alongside anti-nuclear activism and protests, peace researchers spent some time looking into diffusing bipolar tension and the spiral characteristic of the so-called security dilemma, coming up with non-offensive defence theories and strategies. Having lost the window of opportunity provided by the 1990s, tensions have placed us again in a context of escalation and uncertainty.

This workshop wishes to gather scholars investigating the possibilities for peace promotion in today's world, taking as a starting point the potential and limitation of Cold War peace research and initiatives, aiming to learn from the lessons of that period. While the specific historical context—dominated by the bipolar rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union—has evolved, many of the theoretical and strategic insights developed by peace researchers remain relevant. On the other hand, however, by the 2000s, as conflicts became increasingly asymmetric, involving non-state actors, hybrid warfare, and cyber threats, some of the frameworks developed during the Cold War lost traction, even as the core problems they addressed—arms races, deterrence failures, and militarised international relations—persisted. Today’s international environment is marked by a renewed sense of insecurity and high levels of violence, with escalating tensions between multiple competing powers, increasing militarisation, and numerous local and regional conflicts. In this more complex, fragmented and violent global system, which insights from Cold War peace research remain instructive?

This workshop focuses on those intellectual inquiries to explore a view which acknowledges the dangers of the current environment but breaks through the othering process underlying present incitement to militarisation and antagonism.

Conveners: Baris Kesgin (Elon University) and Consuelo Thiers Huerta (The University of Edinburgh)

The Personality in Foreign Policy workshop will offer a venue for conversation among multiple generations of scholars to assess the state of our understanding of political leaders’ in foreign policymaking processes and to chart course for new, cutting-edge scholarship impacting the field of international relations. The workshop will be international and will include researchers at all career stages, from doctoral students and early career researchers to the pioneers in the field. The workshop will have a catalytic effect in that it will bring scholars currently working independently on political leaders in foreign policy into a dialogue to generate better research and future research capacity. This workshop will be pluralist, including participants from diverse epistemological and methodological orientations. This collaborative and international scholarship has both theoretical and applied value. One direct product of the network will be a special issue of a journal or an edited volume, which will coherently present this scholarship in a single publication.

Political leaders, their personalities and psychology have generated more interest from the public, policymakers, and scholars in the past decade due to the emergence of major figures around the world such as Brazil’s Bolsonaro, France’s LePen, New Zealand’s Ardern, Turkey’s Erdogan, and the United States’ Trump, among others. Newspapers and magazines regularly offered insights into these individuals, and the policymaking world sought after analyses of how they made policy. This episode also coincided with a broader interest on political leaders in the international relations scholarship. In contrast, the Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) subfield, based on psychology, has had various systematic inquiries into the political elite.

This workshop will be a sorely needed moment for taking stock and charting course conversation for “one of the hallmarks of foreign policy analysis” (Brummer et.al 2020). Most specifically, we will focus on the two most prominent analytical tools in leadership profiling: leadership trait analysis (LTA) (Hermann 1980, 2005) and operational code analysis (OCA) (George 1969; Walker, Schafer, and Young 2005). These approaches to political leaders are “at-a-distance” assessment techniques (Schafer 2000) and use leaders’ words to assess their personality. Our workshop will benefit from the pioneers of the two approaches, respectively, Peg Hermann and Steve Walker. In addition to offering their input and guidance on the brand conversation, both will contribute a manuscript.

Personality in foreign policy has a long record of systematized inquiry starting in the late 1960s into the 1970s (George 1969, Hermann 1976, 1980). The introduction of automated coding schemes in the late 1990s into the early 2000s (Levine and Young 2014) represented its next important milestone; since then, “FPA research using LTA and OCA has made great advances with an increasing volume of research from seven publications in 1998 to eighty-five in 2018” (Brummer et al 2020). Following the automation of coding procedures, this research has recently entered a phase where the multi-lingual automated coding (i.e. non-English) is possible. Notwithstanding the advances in automated coding in this field, there has not been an overarching conversation to take stock of existing scholarship and chart course going forward in Personality in Foreign Policy research.

Conveners: Ritu Vij (University of Aberdeen) and Matt Davies (Newcastle University and Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)

The trans-disciplinary discourse around informal settlements has shifted radically in recent years. Beginning with Mike Davis’s eponymous ‘Planet of Slums,’ which located the production of shanty towns in the vicissitudes of global capitalism, considerations of the abjection of life at these sites have given way in critical registers of thought to the romanticization of the ‘slum’ as a promising site of speculative theoretical retrieval. From Rem Koolhaas’ celebration of informal settlements as a model for urban design and futurity, and Ananya Roy’s provocation of the ‘Slum as Theory,’ the more recent turn to the ‘slum as event,’ the site for developing new forms of political imagination in Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek’s formulations has drawn curiosity but, thus far, little engagement.

Drawing on the diversity of informal settlements across geographical contexts and on diverse theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approaches, the papers for this workshop will interrogate the politics of slums. Taking our lead from Ashis Nandy’s wry comment that ‘political theory comes also from the slum,’ contributions to this workshop will examine forms of life, ‘Slum Acts,’ (Veena Das), and ‘improvised lives’ (AbdouMaliq Simone), to address the following concerns:

1. Following in the insights from critical IR theory that politics is a spatial problem, this workshop poses the question: where are slums? If they are sites of possibility, what are the spatial relations that situate slums?
2. Are ‘slums’ constitutive ‘outsides’ for modern urbanisation, for modern sovereign power, or for contemporary horizons of the political?
3. How does the built environment of the slum – buildings in relation to light, sound, smell, or touch; existence or denial of green spaces; experiences of safety and danger – relate to political imaginaries? How do slums as building sites relate to spaces that exclude or deny slums?
4. How do strategies of transformation proposed by urban planners, ‘slum dwellers,’ activists, and scholars re-imagine the ‘slum’ in relation to normative social and political landscapes?
5. What vulnerabilities in modern identity or in forms of state power do slums expose, occasioning such extraordinary investments in economic, militarized, cultural, and social forms of violence? What itineraries of violence attend political re-imaginings of the slum?
6. How do speculative readings of informal settlements open understandings of a politics otherwise?
7. How to do narratives in literary/cinematic archives about life in shanty towns reinscribe/contest geo-political imaginaries under conditions of post-liberal capitalism?

Contributions to the workshop should draw upon diverse theoretical and methodological approaches and engage with informal settlements in both the Global North and in the Global South to open a transdisciplinary dialogue on the contemporary political challenges posed by ‘slums’ as sites and events of mobility, of accumulation, of urbanisation, of crisis, of danger and possibility, and of other ways of life. The workshop will steer a third course, not tethered to the assessments of ‘slums’ as abject spaces nor succumbing to the temptations of conceptions of slums as sites of heroic resilience, but to investigate what it means for slums to be political problems as much as problems for politics.

Conveners: Amy Lind (University of Cincinnati) and Prateek Srivastava (University of Cincinnati)

This roundtable aims to deepen a discussion on deploying critical queer approaches within the field of International Political Economy (IPE), with an important goal of transforming IPE/IR scholarship. It builds upon an ISA 2025 panel including several ISA and BISA members. Our goal is to produce a journal special issue and an edited volume or handbook on Queer IPE, which would be the first of its kind. We are open to standard research papers as well as creative interventions (e.g., film, photography, performance, poetry, autotheory).

Building on the vital interventions of feminist IPE in foregrounding gender relations, we argue for the imperative of applying distinctly queer theoretical perspectives to political-economic analysis across diverse empirical terrains - from international development and coloniality, to racial capitalism, care economies, militarization, and globalization and empire. Central to this work has been a focus on the heteropatriarchal family and racialized cisheteronormativities as central to global and trans/national processes and to scholarly understandings of IPE, rather than as “outside” them. The goal of this roundtable is to conceptualize a new IPE agenda that is explicitly attentive to the centrality of gender, sexual, and familial norms and framings - and their intersections with other markers such as race, ethnicity, class, and/or nation - in international political economy, broadly defined. We aim to map out the analytically generative insights, as well as potential tensions, in deploying queer theorizations to reexamine core IPE concepts. Collectively, we will discuss our approaches to queering IPE in the context of our own research, drawing out the connections and disconnections that thinking about IPE through a queer lens offers scholars. Central questions include:

1. Contemporary IPE scholarship has engaged extensively with feminist perspectives—what distinctive analytical tools and insights does queer theory offer that build upon but extend beyond feminist IPE? Where might tensions or productive frictions emerge between these approaches?
2. In what ways does queering IPE help us better understand the intimate connections between sexuality, gender, race, and global capitalism? How might this intersectional lens reshape our analysis of phenomena like international development, migration, or labor markets? How does this shed light on the meaning and making of capitalism itself?
3. What methodological challenges and opportunities arise when applying queer theoretical perspectives to IPE research? How can scholars effectively operationalize these frameworks while remaining attentive to the complexities of empirical investigation across diverse contexts?
4. How do we conduct research and write ethically about "queering" politics and political economy at a time when queerness itself is understood in so many conflicting, contradictory ways? How have approaches and experiences outside the West/North (as epistemic spaces) taken an antinormative stance on coloniality, whiteness, imperialism, and/or LGBTQ+ rights, and what does this tell us about the project of queering IPE?
5. In relation to #4, how do we move forward with our work on queering/querying IPE in light of the current anti-gender, anti-trans, and anti-LGBTQ+ trends, which often resignify and weaponize the very concepts that give meaning to our work, activism, and lives?

Conveners: Hyunjung Park (University of York) and Nathan Timbs (University of Iowa)

The last decade has seen a proliferation of studies on the causes and consequences of rebel governance and conflict-behaviour during civil war and internal armed conflicts. A growing body of scholarship has explored how rebel groups establish governance structure, engage with civilian populations, and navigate relationships with external actors. In particular, recent studies have examined the interplay between rebel governance practices and the potential or actual external support from state actors, diaspora communities, and transnational constituencies.

The majority of published work on this topic has primarily focused on the role of external support in shaping governance outcomes. However, more recent work challenges the assumed directionality of the external support - governance relationship, raising a critical question: Is governance simply a byproduct of external support, or does the nature of rebel governance shape the way armed groups approach external support during civil wars? The goal of this workshop is to untangle this relationship and clarify the role of rebel governance.

The workshop seeks to bring together an international group of scholars working on rebel governance and external support from a variety of empirical, theoretical and methodological perspectives. By fostering dialogue between established and early-career scholars, the workshop aims to expand international research networks and lay the groundwork for future collaborations.

Beyond contributing to ongoing academic debates, this workshop seeks to bridge scholarship with policy relevance. By analyzing the evolving dynamics of rebel governance and external support, the discussions will shed light on broader questions related to peacebuilding, state legitimacy, and international interventions in civil wars. Ultimately, the workshop aims to advance interdisciplinary conversations on how governance in conflict zones intersects with international politics and structural inequalities, offering fresh insights into the complexities of armed conflicts in a deeply interconnected worlds.

Conveners: Peter S. Henne (University of Vermont) and Jason Klocek (University of Nottingham)

Growing attention to the importance of religion in world politics since the end of the Cold War has included calls for policymakers to take seriously religion’s potential for peacebuilding. Studies have noted previously overlooked examples of religious actors’ peacebuilding roles and emphasized the conditions under which religious expression takes peaceful, rather than violent, forms. Advocates for religious peacebuilding argue it can resolve conflicts and, by embracing the religious values of people in the Global South, undermine the persistent inequalities that bedevil world politics. Alongside such celebration of religion’s role in peacebuilding, however, are concerns about the assumption that religious peacebuilding is a net positive. The efficacy of religious peacebuilding has not been systematically tested, with some arguing that their impact is overblown. Beyond that, some worry that the impetus for religious peacebuilding often comes from Western voices, and it can serve as a Trojan Horse for the imposition of Western values at the expense of local concerns. This scholarly debate raises troubling questions about whether religious peacebuilding can fulfill the promise address global challenges and undermine international inequalities, or reify them by serving Western interests?

In this workshop, a group of experts on peacebuilding, religion and conflict, and international religious advocacy, will explore the potential promises and pitfalls of religious peacebuilding. Papers will explore diverse aspects of religious peacebuilding, adopting a variety of theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. Panels will be organised around specific geographical or issue areas, inviting debate on whether religious actors in particular contexts represent local or Western interests, what impact they had on conflict resolution, and whether their involvement contributed to inclusive, sustainable peace outcomes. These panels will bridge orthodox and critical perspectives in order to identify lessons from past cases of religious peacebuilding, strengthen local peacebuilding capacity, and inspire new approaches to inclusive peacebuilding with religious actors.

There are three anticipated outcomes for the workshop. The first will be the organization of participants into teams who will apply for grants to further their work; this will be facilitated by a session at the end of the workshop. The second will be the preparation of a report providing suggestions for religious actors to improve the impact and ethicality of their peacebuilding efforts, based on the takeaways from the discussions. The third involves dissemination of each panel’s core themes and in collaboration with ISA’s Religion and International Relations. Participating authors will be invited to submit to a special feature of the section’s blog.

Conveners: Elane Westfaul (University of California at Irvine) and Julio César Díaz Calderón (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

How might writing stories help IR scholars to forget theories and undo (epistemic/bodily/harmful) practices that sustain interlocking systems of oppression in and beyond the IR classroom? Can writing stories retrieve many worlds of life and existence otherwise that IR scholars are already embedded in and help them to imagine less violent theories and practices? How might our stories disrupt the hegemony of understanding “the international” as separate from embodied knowledges experienced in, through, and across our many worlds? What can narrative and embodied methodologies offer to discussions on ethics and violence in both theory and practice within IR? This workshop explores those questions with IR scholars’ stories and embodied methodologies as part of an edited volume and special issue. Building on an extensive legacy of special issues and books inviting IR scholars to write and not just analyze stories, autobiographies, autoethnographies, ethnographies, fictions, narratives, tales, and poems, this proposal cultivates new editing, reading, and writing opportunities for the study and practice of the international and its relations.

Conveners: Leonie Fleischmann (City, University of London) and Alice Baroni (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies)

In response to the prevailing social, economic, and environmental disparities in our international system, new forms and practices of mobilization have emerged. From social movements opposing systemic racism in Western democracies to humanitarian action against increasingly violent border politics; from Indigenous movements’ renewed demands for political, social, and environmental justice to transnational mobilization against violence in Palestine, intersectional calls to redress perduring colonial and asymmetrical power relations are currently taking centre stage in global politics. In this context, the concept and practice of solidarity and allyship have become critical axes of political mobilization. Often taken as straightforward and unambiguous, these forms of solidarity are however inherently fraught by the constitutive power asymmetry of their members. This makes them key arenas where power dynamics rooted in colonial histories and hierarchical relations can be, at once, subverted and reproduced.

This workshop aims to explore the impasses and potentials created by these forms of solidarity, as they attempt to challenge not only the systemic power relations in which they operate but also the ways in which these infiltrate the very practice of solidarity. The workshops will interrogate the theory and practice of solidarity, unpacking the role of solidarity movements and allyship in shaping and transforming both local and global dynamics and exploring how they seek to reduce, yet also sometimes inadvertently reproduce, inequalities.

The workshop will bring together contributions that span different disciplinary, thematic, and geographic foci. We aim to spark a conversation that breaks the prevalent compartmentalization of solidarity research and invites cross-fertilization and mutual learning between its different practices and approaches. In this context, the workshop aims to learn from a range of in-depth case studies in order to understand the potential impact of solidarity in the current global context. This includes but is not limited to, identifying the theoretical underpinnings of solidarity and whether this changes across case studies; discussing appropriate methodologies of researching solidarity movements and the ethical considerations behind them; exploring typologies of action; considering the psychology of allyship; unpacking the micropolitics of solidarity activism and reflecting on experiences from the frontlines. We invite standard research papers, partial paper drafts (e.g., based on research designs or theoretical connections), and alternative submissions. We encourage submissions from those working on lesser-studied cases and welcome non-scholar activists to present their experiences.

The anticipated outcome of these workshops is an interdisciplinary, international network of scholars, scholar-activists and activists involved in the area of solidarity and allyship, with a view to developing a grant proposal for a project on ‘Understanding Global Solidarity’.

Conveners: Melissa Chacón (University of York) and Carlos Nicolai Lucas Gellwitzki (University of York)

Art has long been a powerful medium for rendering visible, imaginable, and experienceable both direct and structural violence, whether against women, racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+ individuals, religious groups, migrants, political dissidents, or other marginalised and minoritised communities. The sensory register is fundamental to how we encounter and experience art. It forms the foundation of the aesthetic experience, with visual, auditory, tactile, and even olfactory and gustatory elements playing essential roles. In political contexts, the sensory register helps convey the urgency, atmosphere, and immediacy of repression, resistance, and reparation. As Roland Bleiker (2017: 262) put it, “aesthetic engagements can become political and politically disruptive in the most fundamental way: by challenging the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, thinkable and unthinkable and thus of what can and cannot be debated in politics”.

The politics of art play a multidimensional role in repression, resistance, and reparation. States, governments, and media frequently utilise art, museums, and aesthetic regimes as instruments of repression, reconstructing the past through revisionist frameworks and reinforcing exclusionary national identity narratives. In response to structural inequalities, artists have used their work as resistance to challenge the status quo and expose political violence through protest, performance, and visual art. Similarly, activists and social movements have embraced art as a tool to contest hegemonic power, particularly in highly repressive political contexts. By engaging with diverse languages and emotional states, art provides alternative spaces for communication and reaches broader audiences across sectors. From the murals of political movements to powerful photographs of state violence, art captures and critiques violence, which allows it to act as a catalyst for political change. Furthermore, art plays a key role in reparation processes, helping to address structural inequalities and alternative narratives of violence and its aftermath. Public memorials, art exhibitions, and community-driven projects provide spaces for collective memory and recognition, opening opportunities to challenge traditional notions of justice and contributing to societal healing and reconciliation.

This workshop brings together scholars and practitioners interested in exploring how art engages with and contributes to the transformation of the political dimensions of repression, resistance, and reparation. It seeks to bridge academia and practice and welcomes practice-based, participatory, and socially engaged contributions and methodologically innovative, arts-based, and unconventional modes of inquiry. Through this approach, we aim to study the politics of art and aesthetics of violence as a framework for alternative and decolonised forms of knowledge production about global politics. By drawing on diverse epistemological inquiries, this workshop seeks to deepen our understanding of how art functions as a political force.

We invite a variety of formats from academics, artists, and activists, including academic papers, artworks (texts, video essays, cultural objects, etc), and hybrid submissions. Abstracts should be 250 words, summarising the contribution’s theme, methodology, and relevance to the study of art in global politics. We envision the contributions to the workshop to form a special issue that comprises traditional academic articles and more creative and practice-based contributions to be submitted to one of the BISA or ISA journals.

Conveners: Anne-Marie Houde (University of Oxford) and Indrajit Roy (University of York)

Amidst widespread uncertainties fomented by climate change, social polarisation, the pandemic, and conflicts between and within states, cynicism is increasingly prevalent in global political discourse. While emotions such as anger, anxiety, hate, and fear are widely studied, the role of more positive emotional experiences like empathy and solidarity has received far less attention. Our workshop focuses on a crucial yet often overlooked emotion in politics: hope.

We will explore hope from three interconnected angles. First, we will examine how international politics can inspire hope at the micro and meso levels. We will analyse the gap between this hope and the reality that can lead to disappointment, highlighting how individuals and communities experience the impacts of international dynamics. The experiences of individuals and communities often reveal the palpable impacts of international dynamics, where domestic and global politics can instigate feelings of optimism or despair. This section will consider case studies illustrating the interpretations and responses of grassroots movements, civil society organisations, and local actors to global political actions.

Secondly, the workshop will examine how local and national actors inspire hope at the global level through their political reimagination. We will highlight the potential of negotiations, subjectivities, and conceptualisations of the political community against the assault of democratic institutions and values across the world. This section will alert us to think about how one might understand agency beyond the binaries of oppression and resistance. It is informed by the perspective that hope arises out of attentiveness to the realities of this world, its injustices and inequalities, and from a conviction that something can be done about it.

Finally, inspired by bell hook’s idea for a ‘pedagogy of hope’, we will discuss the significance of hope in academic settings, especially for those teaching and researching global politics. Academics face the dual challenge of imparting knowledge while navigating a landscape often fraught with cynicism and despair. The workshop will explore pedagogical approaches that encourage students to engage with global issues with a sense of agency and possibility and propose reflections on how academics and teachers can remain hopeful that our actions have meaning. It will invite reflections on hope as an ethical commitment among educators.

Through these three perspectives, the workshop aims to engage critically with hope's multifaceted roles in contemporary international relations, facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations, and expand our understanding of political hope. This is not a trivial task, as hope is not a form of delusion or unrealistic dreaming; it is grounded in the present's challenges, acknowledging grief and uncertainty while remaining open to unexpected possibilities. It recognises that past structures may no longer be viable and require novel alliances to forge paths forward. Thus, ultimately, the workshop aspires to illuminate the politics of hope, encouraging a collective reimagining of our global future based on optimism and resilience amid adversity. By concentrating on hope, we can foster a more constructive dialogue about the challenges we face and potential for change, creating a more hopeful narrative in international relations.