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Call for Participants: Critical War Studies

13 May

Advance Wars

Critical War Studies: Emerging Field, Developing Agendas
A one-day workshop to be held at the University of Sussex
11 September 2013

What is left out when critical reflection on armed conflict is conducted under the sign of ‘security’? What are the forms of contemporary militarism? How can the discourses and practices of fighting, transition to ‘peace’, war preparation and military and strategic thought be engaged reflexively? How might militaries be understood as sites of subaltern labour, resistance and critique? How can attentiveness to experiences of war generate critical resources within international relations, sociology, geography, anthropology, history and other disciplines?

Multi-disciplinary proposals are invited for a one-day workshop convened by the University of Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research. The organisers welcome contributions engaging the idea of Critical War Studies, the themes outlined above and below, or suggesting other appropriate topics. It is envisaged that this will be the first of several events leading to opportunities for peer-reviewed publication.

Draft workshop structure:

Panel 1: What is ‘Critical War Studies’?

  • What’s in a name? ‘War’, ‘security’ and the analytical status of fighting
  • Critical approaches within strategic theory: who is strategy ‘for’?
  • Theory and the experience of war
  • War in/and society

Panel 2: Political Sociologies of Fighting

  • Technologies, transformations of war, transformations of self
  • Subaltern military labour and military history in Europe and beyond
  • Battle narrative and identity
  • Gendering war
  • ‘Normality’ and ‘extremity’ in fighting and dying

Panel 3: Contemporary Militarisms, Contemporary Militaries

  • Ideology contra experience: reflections on the policy/ practice disconnect in the war on terror
  • Beyond the strategic studies/ peace studies divide: continuity and change in militarism after the Cold War
  • The social construction of weapons
  • Military orientalisms and the representation of violence

Deadline for Proposals: 7 June

Proposals and any queries should be directed to: Joanna Wood (scsr [at] sussex.ac.uk)

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Call for Papers: Subjects and Practices of Resistance

27 Apr

french-resistance-1944

For two inter-linked, consecutive workshops under the theme of Subjects and Practices of Resistance to be held 9-11 September 2013 at University of Sussex.

The first workshop (9-10 Sept) is on Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession and the second on Counter-Conduct in Global Politics (10-11 Sept).  The workshop convenors encourage attendance at both workshops.  However, paper proposals should specify the intended workshop and which days participants would be able to attend.

The workshops are generously sponsored and supported by the BISA Poststructuralist Politics Working Group (PPWG) and the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) at the University of Sussex  Continue reading →

Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies: A Shout-Out!

12 Mar

Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies Covers

Our friends and colleagues over at the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies (which, you will recall, is a fully open access, student-and-junior-faculty-run critical IR journal) have just issued two calls: one for new members of the Editorial Team, and another for papers to fill Issue 7 on the theme of ‘Modelling Capitalism’.

Prospective Editorial Team members can find full details here. The positions are suitable for early-career lecturers, postdoctoral researchers, or PhD candidates currently in the first two years of their study and will be considered on a rolling basis. Meanwhile, the blurb for Issue 7 (deadline for submissions: 1 August 2013) is as follows:

Frequently held in suspicion by critical thinkers, modelling and simulation technologies are nonetheless more and more integral to how the world works, utilised by international bodies, governments, financial firms, and large corporations. This special issue wishes to approach in a synoptic fashion some of big themes raised by this development. Questions we are  concerned with include fundamental philosophical issues: Can economic models ever be realistic? Can they model complexity? Pragmatic questions: Is their use responsible for the depression initiated with the 2008 crash? To what extent are they changing the nature of capitalism? Political debate: Do models merely dress up dominant ideologies in technical drapery? Can models be used for critical purposes, or for proposing economic alternatives? With this issue we thus aim to bring into dialogue scholars working in diverse fields including the philosophy of science, economic modelling, the social studies of finance, and political theory.

Issue 6, on ‘Democracy and Law’, is now out and available in full.

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Prizes Will Be Had!: The 2013 Sussex International Theory Award

24 Jan
Idea stolen from here.

Idea stolen from here.

Prize Call
Sussex International Theory Prize

The Centre for Advanced International Theory invites nominations for the 2013 Sussex International Theory Prize for the best piece of research in International Relations published in book or article form in 2012. The recipient will be invited to present their research in a Public Lecture at the University of Sussex and will also receive £150 worth of books from Cambridge University Press and a two-year print and online subscription to International Theory.

In 2011, the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) was established by the Department of International Relations within the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. The core mission of the Centre is to support and disseminate innovative fundamental research in international theory.

To this end, the Sussex International Theory Prize is awarded annually for the best piece of innovative theoretical research in International Relations. Last year’s Prize was awarded to Helen M. Kinsella (University of Madison-Wisconsin) for her book, The Image Before the Weapon: a Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press, 2011).

In the autumn of 2013, the prize will be awarded for the best piece of research published in book or article form in 2012.

Prize Details

Eligibility:

  • The work should be in International Relations, broadly conceived – including sub-fields
  • The work must have been published in 2012: judged by copyright date

Submission/Nomination:

  • The award is made annually on the basis of nominations by individuals, publishers and peers.
  • Nominations should take the form of a statement of less than 200 words on why the work could be considered the best piece of innovative theoretical research in International Relations, from the previous year.
  • Nominators (including publishers) are limited to one submission.
  • If the nomination is for an article, the published version should be attached as a PDF document to the email nomination
  • If the nomination is for a book, it is the nominator’s responsibility to contact the publisher and request that five copies of the title be sent by the nomination deadline to Centre for Advanced International Theory, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Falmer, East Sussex, BN1 9SJ, UK.
  • Nominations can be made by email submission through to 2nd April 2013 to the CAIT Administrator, Joanna Wood (cait@sussex.ac.uk). Nominated books must also arrive by this date.
  • The recipient will be notified in June 2013.

Prize:

  • The recipient will be invited to present his/her research in the public Prize Lecture at the University of Sussex.
  • The winner receives £150 worth of books from Cambridge University Press and a two-year print and online subscription to International Theory.

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Call for Papers: The Power of Rights and/or the Rights of Power in Global Politics

23 Nov

Call for Papers for the 1st European Workshops for International Studies (EWIS), 5th – 8th June 2013, Tartu (http://www.sgir.eu/upcoming.php)

Workshop 12: The Power of Rights and/or the Rights of Power in Global Politics

Conveners: Louiza Odysseos and Anna Selmeczi

While detractors of human rights have long argued that they form the moral and intellectual keystone of a liberal hegemony, their proponents have countered that ‘human rights are meant to be good news for the underprivileged, the downtrodden, and the dispossessed’ (Dallmayr), historically demarcating the growing power of the king and, later, the state and today enabling the politics of resistance in symbolic, discursive and legal terms. This proposed workshop seeks to combine theoretical discussions and empirical examinations to explore how human rights are essential to both the sustenance of hegemony and to the politics of resistance in global politics. The workshop will examine how human rights instruments and discourses aim to curtail power while often legitimating and reinforcing its operations in distinct political and ethical ways. It will facilitate discussions exploring how rights ’enable disciplinary projects’ (Golder) by channeling practices of resistance into legal frameworks that delimit campaigns for justice. Central to its objectives is to assess how human rights also provide opportunities for challenging such projects of power, opportunities that are grounded on a rethinking of humanity as the ‘community of the governed’ understood within the history of colonialism.

A number of scholars have expressed interest in interrogating this important dualism of human rights. The workshop therefore would generate discussions about the emergence of human rights’ subjectivities and discourses within struggles towards emancipation that have had varying success in challenging preexisting power relations, for example, in the recent waves of protest in the Middle East. Other potential contributions would analyse how neoliberal technologies of governing use the discourses of human worth to discipline human rights in cases of immigration; how the tension between human and positive rights incites resistance practices by political subjects in the case of undocumented migrants; how, in varied geographical locations such as India, South Africa, Italy and Mexico, neoliberal governmental rationalities deny the subjectivity of the rights-bearing citizen to the poor; how direct action by activists seeks to reconstruct particular rights as strategies of resistance, such as the right to housing in the midst of the global financial crisis.

Please submit your 200 words abstract online through the EWIS website:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dC05d3BnaVp4V3R3b2NCVXV3bmxoM2c6MQ.

Deadline: 15 December 2012. Applicants will be notified by 15 January 2013 about the outcome of the selection process.

Queerly Global Politics: Some Events

14 Sep

Normal blogging service soon to be resumed. In the meantime, two gender and world politics events of note. First, on Friday 2 November, a roundtable on gender, militarisation and violence at LSE, featuring Cynthia Enloe, Aaron Belkin, Kim Hutchings,and others. It will be excellent. Second, the call for papers for the 2nd International Feminist Journal of Politics is out. The conference is a way away (17-19 May 2013 at the University of Sussex), but early paper/panel submissions are encouraged. Details below the model military aesthetic.

(Im)possibly Queer International Feminisms

Feminists taught us that the personal is political. International Relations feminists taught us that the personal is international. And contemporary Queer Scholars are teaching us that the international is queer. While sometimes considered in isolation, these insights are connected in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. This conference seeks to bring together scholars and practitioners to critically consider the limits and possibilities of thinking, doing, and being in relation to various assemblages composed of queer(s), international(s), and feminism(s).

Questions we hope to consider include: Who or what is/are (im)possibly queer, (im)possibly international, (im)possibly feminist, separately and in combination? What makes assemblages of queer(s), international(s) and feminism(s) possible or impossible? Are such assemblages desirable – for whom and for what reasons? What might these assemblages make possible or impossible, especially for the theory and practice of global politics?

We are interested in papers and panels that explore these questions through theoretical and/or practical perspectives, be they interdisciplinary or located within the discipline of International Relations. Sub-themes include (Im)Possibly Queer/International/Feminist:

  • Heteronormativities/Homonormativities/Homonationalisms
  • Embodiments/Occupations/Economies/Circulations
  • Temporalities/‘Successes’/‘Failures’
  • Emotions/Desires/Psycho-socialities
  • Technologies/Methodologies/Knowledges/Epistemologies
  • Spaces/Places/Borders/(Trans)positionings
  • States/Sovereignties/Subjectivities — Crossings/Migrations/Trans(gressions)
  • (In)Securities

We invite submissions for individual papers or pre-constituted panels on any topic pertaining to the conference theme and sub-themes. We also welcome papers and panels that consider any other feminist IR-related questions. Send abstracts (250 words) to: Joanna Wood (j.c.wood [at] sussex.ac.uk)

Deadline for submissions: 31 January 2013

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Call for Contributions: The Global Political Economy of the 1%

12 Mar

Tim Di Muzio (Wollongong) is putting together an edited volume on The Global Political Economy of the 1% which Disordered readers might be interested in contributing to. The full call is here. Abstracts of 250 words or less are due by 30 April 2012 with first full drafts by 1 November 2012. Tim can be emailed with submissions or for more details here.

While the internationalized Occupy Wall Street movement faces many strategic and organizational challenges, one of its major accomplishments has been its ability to draw global attention to the massive disparity of income, wealth and privilege held by 1% of the population. Such attention comes amidst a relatively synchronized global financial crisis, a mounting first world debt crisis in parts of Europe and the United States and the intensification of neoliberal policies. While political science and sociological study has shed light on elites and the wealthy in the past, with some recent popular exceptions, there has been a dearth of research on the culture, politics, built environments and psychology of the global rich in the new gilded age.

To redress this gap in the literature, this edited volume calls for a more focused and engaged study on what could be called the global political economy of the 1%. Such a project could help shed light on the massive chasm between this elite class of wealth holders and the rest of the global working class – the majority of whom subsist on less than US$2 a day and increasingly live in informal settlements as the dialectic of dispossession and urbanization continues its historical dance. Of course, it should be emphasized that a global political economy of the 1% does not preclude (and nor should it) the unavoidable social relations between the 1% and the 99%. However, recent literature has already enriched our understanding of how poverty, unprotected workers, and the everyday life practices of the seemingly mundane impact upon the wider global political economy. So a keen, yet nonrestrictive, focus on the political economy of 1% and the global income/wealth hierarchy is welcome.

All abstracts will be accepted and reviewed with sincerity. Selections for inclusion in the volume will be evaluated on the basis of original content, coherence and consistency with the general theme as well as the necessity of creating coherent sub-themes. Sub-themes are suggested here to organize research questions but are not necessarily the themes of the volume (contingent upon contributions).

Topics and questions that could be addressed in such a volume include but are not limited to the following: The Usual Suspects: Identifying the 1%; The Social Reproduction of the 1%; Culture, Consumption and the 1%; and Power, Resistance and the 1%.

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Affect! Biopolitics! Technology! Ecology!: A Call for Papers

16 Dec

A brief pre-holiday announcement of the next Millennium annual conference, to be convened on the theme of Materialism and World Politics. Full details below the fold. The range of suggested topics looks both fascinating and much-needed, and I am assured by well-placed sources that there will also be some stellar speakers, for those who are tempted by such things. As always, papers submitted in the wake of the conference which survive the rigours of peer review will be published in a resulting special issue (Vol. 41, No. 3). Also, don’t forget about the Northedge Essay Competition (deadline 30 January 2012).

Continue reading →

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Rewriting International Relations

15 Nov

A small cascade of Millennium-related news and IR from Elsewhere. First, our very own Nick was recently elected as Co-Editor (with Edmund H. Arghand and Maria Fotou) to oversee the journal for Volume 41 (2012-2013) on the basis of a conference proposal on ‘Materialism and World Politics’ (full CfP details forthcoming soon). Second, the Millennium blog has had a facelift (ongoing tweaks to be made to its façade), so go have a look.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Northedge Essay Competition is now open. So if you’re a post-graduate student (PhD or advanced Masters) in IR or cognate fields, and you have some exceptional work lying fallow, spruce it up and submit. The deadline is 30 January 2012, and the winning essay will appear in Millennium 41(1). Previous winners have been very good indeed.

Fifth, the journal’s social media tentacles are growing, so do the following thing on Twitter and the liking thing on Facebook, if you are of that bent. Finally, a reminder that Millennium‘s weekly Editorial Board meetings are open to all LSE postgraduates (MSc and PhD) who are engaged and interested. If you fit that description and for some reason aren’t already involved, do email the Editors for details.

Elsewhere, BISA’s Historical Sociology and IR Working Group also has a new look, and a particularly awesome and growing resources page. And there’s now an Occupy IR Theory blog and associated hashtag (#occupyirtheory, natch), which is worth both a virtual engagement and a flesh-world contribution. Similarly, if for any reason you are unaware of David Campbell’s blog on visual culture and international politics, rectify yourselves!

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Rethinking Masculinity & Violence: A Call for Papers

26 Apr

Rethinking Masculinity & Practices of Violence in Conflict Settings

Special Issue of International Feminist Journal of Politics, guest edited by Marsha Henry (Gender Institute, LSE) and Paul Kirby (International Relations Department, LSE)

Actually, it’s critical analysis of men, masculinities and practices of violence that we want. While planning the forthcoming symposium on masculinity and violence (there are still a handful of places available), we thought we might be able to turn the idea into a viable journal special issue. So we asked the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFjP for ease) and they said yes. And lo! A call for papers (also available as a pdf). Please distribute widely.

Continue reading →

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