The Critical Military Studies (CMS) section provides an inclusive and interdisciplinary space for the interrogation of violence, war, warfare, 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 algorithms; the imbrication of military power and violence with regimes of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, age 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 war, 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.

In the last 20 years, there has been a boom in the research on emotions and affect in IR. From being neglected and invisible in mainstream IR, it has become a growing subject of research about foreign policy, conflict, diplomacy, and institutions. Initially, scholars explored the role of emotions in political decision-making, especially in contexts framed as crisis, as well as its centrality in diplomacy. The literature also investigated how political leaders, and the general public emotionally react to political events, prompting constructivists to incorporate emotions into their analyses. More recently, studies have investigated how emotions structure and shape global identities and communities, conflicts, and everyday practices. This scholarship focuses on the norms governing emotional expressions in rituals, symbolic performances, and social practices, as well as its interplay with ontological (in)security. It also examines how emotion and affect mobilize security narratives, memories, myths and securitization practices to legitimize security policies, as well as its interaction with visual images and representations.

Today, as the field acknowledges its ‘Emotional Turn’, many gaps remain. This Standing Group wishes to push forward this scholarship, by encouraging the following questions: How does one define emotion and affect? Are they universal? How to best observe and study them? Are new methods needed? How do people and collectives affectively invest in – and contest – emotional discourses? How do emotions contribute (or not) to social change? What is the role of history and historical change in emotion research? How are emotions governed and how can they be historicized?

The rationale for the section evolves from the call to broaden, diversify, and globalise the study of IR. The academic initiatives to globalise IR have been taken up by scholars from both the Global North and South. Although there are many labels used to describe the fragmented attempts to enrich Global IR, many recent studies go beyond the critique of the predominant Western-centrism while excavating insights from the hitherto underexplored indigenous knowledge traditions to enhance the understandings of contemporary global politics. This standing section on Globalising IR will offer an intellectual space to all scholars working on any aspects of IR who want to make the academic discipline more “Global” by making efforts to de-center IR knowledge and reconcile the West/non-West binaries. EISA offers a perfect multi-disciplinary platform to advance the “de-centering agenda” of Global IR across multiple strands of scholarship – established and burgeoning alike. To this effect, this section seeks to encourage all kinds of theoretical, applied, and pedagogical explorations which reveal the territorial fluidity of IR knowledge, and which challenge, while also attempting to transcend, the provincialized notions of the West and the non-West. As such, this section aims to sponsor a multicultural intellectual conversation which is concerned with not only where we (as learners of IR) hail, or whether we can learn relationally irrespective of our American, European, Asian, African, or Australian origins, but also with forging a fresh IR consciousness as inhabitants of a “Global world” constituted by long overlooked forms of connectivity for a field of study and practice that is far richer than traditional IR has imagined.

The politics of the polar regions and global oceans showcase evolving relationships between societies, questions over resource extraction, ownership, and the changing impact of technologies. Polar and ocean spaces are sometimes subject to spatial disputes, complicating responses to contemporary challenges like biodiversity protection, Indigenous rights, and transboundary issues such as plastic pollution. Balancing states’ needs and security concerns with ecological and social crises requires reimagining governance frameworks. International collaborations, such as the Arctic Council and the Antarctic Treaty System but also the major ocean treaties (UNCLOS, BBNJ), aim to coordinate responses to these pressures, involving state and non-state actors. Yet, challenges persist. These challenges not only involve questions over access, ownership and belonging, but also the securities of maritime (and deep-sea) infrastructures and resources, as well as human interaction with oceans and coastal areas more broadly. This section seeks to expand on global ocean and polar politics by exploring social and political responses to the unfolding ecological and geopolitical crises, providing the opportunity for raising questions of justice, such as colonial or intergenerational, and theoretically advanced understandings of global politics.

Health sits at the center of politics and international relations. Humanity’s impact on nature has seen nature impact on humanity. Novel diseases cross borders and populations with ease threatening relations between countries. The impact of there diseases represents an existential challenge to state and economic viability as well as social stability. 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. EISA Global Health draws together participants across the natural and social sciences. These different disciplines bring 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 and international relations of global health. Our global health panels encourage the cross-disciplinary fertilization of theories and approaches that helps to identify opportunities for the mitigation of the health crises facing all life. We encourage and welcome all participants with an interest in this topic to present their research and join in our discussions.

Historical International Relations has grown into a flourishing subfield of International Relations (IR) with strong interdisciplinary ties to neighboring fields including Global History, Imperial History, Global Historical Sociology, and the History of International Political Thought. The HIST section provides an inclusive platform for reflections on the value of historical knowledge in explaining and understanding international affairs. It seeks to foster a greater historical sensitivity in the study of international politics and to facilitate productive conversations around historical trajectories, transitions, connections, and periodisations. The section aims to engage a wide range of scholarship, spanning from more theoretical reflections on history and IR to more specific empirical discussions. It approaches Historical IR from a global perspective and welcomes studies on any region of the world and from any time period. The section is methodologically pluralist and welcomes all kinds of approaches to the study of history and IR, both quantitative and qualitative. The HIST section thus invites scholars interested in all types of historical inquiry: from micro-histories of the international to macro-historical accounts of world orders, and from historical studies of a specific event or phenomenon to historiographical explorations of the academic field of IR.

International Migration, Nationalism and Interethnic Relations are increasingly debated in both the discipline and the practice of International Relations. Physical and non-physical borders, broadly intended, constitute crucial political spaces where ideas of survival and supremacy, innovation and tradition, vulnerabilities and powers, futures and pasts, are fought. The ways to limit human mobility and diversity become both externalized and internalized in the governance of control. Patrolling those who are in and out the national and its inclusion is widely based on dynamics of exclusions and inequalities. Prejudice is converted into an extensively used and justified mechanism, performing in the self-fulfilling of threats, and spiralling processes of insecurities and exceptionalities. Logics of dominance and supremacism propagate across space. Thence, discriminations also engender in spiralling ways. Irrational rationalities often manifest, and therefore we also encourage to examine such questions through means that do not seek to resolve puzzles but present analysis of paradoxes. Without excluding a diversity of approaches, theories and perspectives, this Standing Section invites scholars to reflect upon a variety of topics, such as: the ways prejudice and inequalities perform in a spiralling process of insecurity; the intersection of body, race, gender and origin, situated in the relational space of the encounter; cognitions, mentalities and ideas permeating politics of control and patrol, either through externalization or internalization; how dynamics of dominance and supremacy propagate across spaces, including in post-colonial dimensions; analysis of paradoxes in nationalism, migration or interethnic relations. We welcome both theory-building and empirical analysis related to these issues.

Over the past 15 years, international practice theories have evolved into an innovative research programme in International Relations. This scholarship has developed novel concepts and frameworks, combining them with a renewed interest in methodology. Scholars focusing on international practices have included new kinds of empirical material on world political phenomena, including but not limited to the debates about international organisations and diplomacy, the normativity of international practices, the role of technology, and processes of knowledge production. This section invites scholars interested in international practices to take stock of how this theoretical programme develops, to review ongoing research projects, to reflect on conceptual vocabularies, and to discuss the current boundaries of international practice research and their potential expansion. The section focuses on three core themes: (1) to facilitate debates about broadening theoretical horizons by embracing and promoting a wide range of theoretical perspectives and fostering diversity in the understanding of international practices; (2) to work towards further empirical enrichment of the study of international practices in IR; and (3) to explore methodological innovations to ensure a more nuanced and in-depth study of international practices. By pursuing these themes, the section also aims to contribute to the further diversification of international practice theories beyond the established “canon” by exploring the links to related frameworks and disciplines such as pragmatism, anthropology, science and technology studies, or narrative and visual approaches. As a section, we particularly welcome contributions that drive forward theoretical, conceptual, and methodological debates, and present empirical findings of practice-based research in IR.

Focus in 2026: Stuck with the Anthropocene: Landscapes of Destruction, Collapse, and Unmaking

The Anthropocene has become a much debated concept for IR scholars and across the humanities to conceptualize the planetary challenges of ecological turmoil. Well beyond the physical impacts of climate change and their rise as issues for policy making, the Anthropocene is increasingly addressed as a challenge to our basic assumptions about how we know and what we understand the world to be - fundamentally destabilizing much of IRs traditional disciplinary concerns and assumptions.

While these debates have focused on resilience, adaptation, and anticipation, it has become increasingly clear that we already live — in radically unequal ways — amidst ongoing crises, slow violence, and cascading disasters that cannot be overcome or managed through prevention, mitigation, or techno-fixes. Whatever criticism was launched at the concept to ‘theorize our way out of the anthropocene’, the destructive processes it refers to continue to disrupt the conceptual and political worlds ‘we’ hope to conserve, protect or re-imagine as ‘adequate’ responses to the Anthropocene. While both critical and affirmative approaches have regarded the Anthropocene as a moment of intensified political activity — whether biopolitical managerialism, socio-ecological transformation or radical politics — it has become increasingly clear that politics itself is questioned and ruptured by forces beyond the human. In this sense, the Anthropocene confronts us with an impasse: a material, political and conceptual stuckness without an exit —a sense of being unable to move forward, and unable to return. We`re stuck in and with the Anthropocene. In each of the three years, we want to set different focuses in relation to the respective conference topic.

Building on the condition of the Anthropocene as an impasse, this year’s section turns toward the forefronts of the Anthropocene: the empirical sites and material landscapes where planetary transformations become tangible and where concepts themselves begin to falter. We invite contributions that think from these moments of impact — the flood, the virus, the landslide or the infrastructural collapse — and the geographic sites they take place in — the desert, the forest, the island, the ocean, the city, the war zone etc.

The standing section «IR in the Anthropocene» aims to provide a space for multiple engagements with the Anthropocene across disciplines — a space to think through its physical and conceptual disturbances. We welcome theoretical reflections on the notion of impasse and related terms that have come to describe or respond to this conceptual/political/affective impasse — forms of stuckness, exhaustion, collapse, uncertainty, refusal, negativity, disaffection etc. Particularly, we invite empirically grounded engagements with specific landscapes of destruction, collapse, and unmaking as entry points for exploring the impasse of the Anthropocene. Together we aim to ask how these sites of impact force us to theorize, sense and imagine otherwise, to destroy familiar modes of thinking and reconfigure the purpose of critique itself.

This section aims to provide a space at EISA conferences for engagement with research agendas centred around international political sociology as a site for critical explorations of the ‘problem of the international’. Over the past twenty years, IPS has sought to broaden critical investigations at the intersection of different social science disciplines to expand and diversify scholarship in IR. To continually push the boundaries of this intellectual movement, IPS has developed a range of initiatives that have reinforced mainly its transdisciplinary and transversal agenda, connecting scholars and researchers willing to challenge institutionalised methods of analysis and to 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 encourage debates that support its innovative research programme, emphasising the significance of boundary-crossing phenomena in world politics and the dynamics of fracturing social and political orders. Despite a growing interest in the situated, the everyday, the event, and the local within IPS, obtaining IR credentials often still requires that these small or fleeting analyses comment on larger orders, transformations, and world histories. IPS serves as a platform for exploring concepts and approaches that challenge these tendencies towards the ‘big’. It does so by encouraging conceptual and methodological innovation that questions sociologies of order and investigates sociologies of transversal connecting.

This section brings together researchers who are interested in the analysis of the international realm as a society, its institutions and norms, as well as their development. It wants to encourage debates about the historical development and present nature of the international society and international order, how its norms and institutions emerged and developed, its relations with world society, and its challenges. We value both analytical and normative approaches. Thus, we are, for instance, interested in analyses of how different types of institutions relate to each other and how they affect the behaviour of states and other actors, as much as we want to encourage normative and critical engagement with the current world order and its ongoing transformations. This includes, for instance, analyses of the tensions between pluralism and solidarism or between the global and regional international societies, or studies of the shifting distribution of power and its effects on international society and its institutions. While some of these issues are at the heart of the so-called “English School” of International Relations, we find them in many other theories and approaches, including Social Constructivism, Systems Theory, Institutionalism and various Critical Theories. We thus see the study of international society as a bridge between many IR approaches, and encourage a pluralism of methodologies. For 2026, we are particularly interested in paper and panel proposals that analyse the reconfiguration of international society and world society in the context of emerging technologies, an ongoing shift in the global balance of power, demographic and cultural transformations (including the gradual erosion of the foundations of the post-WWII and post-Cold War normative orders) and a simultaneous strengthening of state-centric realpolitik and of imperialist/hegemonic practices in world politics.

The study of knowledge in international politics has become a staple of (European) International Relations. This section calls for reflection on the state-of-the-art of knowledge-focused research in IR and for critical engagements with its possibilities and limitations in a world in upheaval. Epistemic struggles are implicated in the numerous crises of contemporary global politics, including but not limited to war, genocide, and other violences, the climate crisis, and the rise of authoritarianism. This section therefore invites contributions that break new theoretical and empirical ground in dealing with epistemic struggles in these and other global political fields and/or in probing the knowledge politics that shape the discipline itself.

We invite papers, panels, and roundtables that cover a range of knowledge-related themes, for instance, different epistemic actors in international politics and their various knowledges; the manifestation of epistemic struggles in concrete discourses and practices; the rise of the transnational new right and the challenges it poses to expertise-based governance; alternative ways of knowing and new regimes of truth in international politics; and the knowledge politics of the discipline of IR. We envision contributions to be drawn from the following fields, among others: war, peace and conflict; security studies; political economy; post/decoloniality; gender; political ecology; and norms, rules, and institutions. A broad church for IR scholarship foregrounding intersections of knowledge and power, KnowIR continues to be open to different theoretical persuasions, methodological approaches and empirical emphases. We particularly invite contributions that expand the horizons of existing research on the international politics of knowledge.

World events today demonstrate how intelligence gathering plays an increasingly crucial role in the definition of and solution to international problems, diffusing intelligence practices to countless professional fields, such as policing and border controls, counterterrorism, everyday surveillance, global trade, and diplomacy. In such contexts, intelligence seeks to anticipate the future by introducing into the present a logic of classification, differentiation, and division between those deemed suspicious or threatening on the one hand, and those to be secured on the other. Traditional intelligence services remain important too, but their priorities have expanded from protecting state secrets to conducting digital surveillance on citizens across the globe using advanced technologies. Intelligence has as such become a core component in the unfolding of multiple crises and disasters globally. An increasing number of people are entangled with intelligence work, either as agents or targets.

The established field of Intelligence Studies (IS) has largely failed to keep track of these current transformations of/in intelligence work, however, in part due to the lack of reflexivity and dialogue with social science scholarship. Hence, this section calls for new, interdisciplinary, and critical approaches to the study of intelligence. We invite contributions from across IR that challenge orthodox understandings, bring into view new actors, objects, targets, and sites of contemporary intelligence, or take a fresh look at intelligence services through perspectives centring on their professionals, practices, and violent effects.

We cannot understand international relations without studying the stories that are told about them. It is in the stories that are told—before, during and after—that events and relations are shaped, rationalized and given meaning. This section is concerned with the role of narrative in international cooperation and conflict. By “narrative”, we mean a form of telling that selects, arranges and frames events in ways that produce cultural and political meaning. Such narratives are fundamentally unstable. Dominant and emergent narratives exist in perpetual contest making narrative a site where hegemony is both established and challenged, and where history is continuously (re-)written. It is a key means for political actors to interpret past and present, imagine possible futures, and construct a credible story of the self and the world. As such, narrative is fundamental to (collective) sense and decision-making and therefore fundamental to world politics, cooperation and conflict. This section provides a space to unpack the work that narrative does in making, perpetuating and ending conflict and cooperation. It is interdisciplinary and creates conversations between different traditions and perspectives. It embraces all subfields from traditional IR, history and psychology, to literary studies, gender and de-/postcolonial studies, memory and trauma studies, media studies, and more. We invite theoretical and methodological discussions as well as analyses of concrete narratives and applied case studies using a range of techniques: from process tracing to literary analysis, and from foci on narrative emplotment to work studying the narratives inherent in architecture, monuments, and commemorative rituals.

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.

Peace Studies (PS) is an interdisciplinary field with a strong normative commitment to understanding the roots of conflict and the conditions that enable peace. Over time—particularly through the critical debate often termed the fourth generation of Peace Studies—the field has widened its theoretical and practical horizons. It increasingly incorporates bottom-up knowledge, everyday political claims, and locally grounded approaches to peacemaking. These perspectives have fostered more plural understandings of peace and informed more inclusive, context-sensitive policies.

Today’s international moment demands renewed efforts to reimagine the field. Escalating war rhetoric, polarization, nuclear discursive threats, and sharpening geopolitical confrontation unsettle established assumptions about conflict, identity and intervention. The proclaimed end of the liberal peace, combined with a broader geopolitical and pragmatic turn, challenges existing peace architectures and strains democratic systems already pressured by extremism, exclusionary politics, ontological insecurity, and the everyday reproduction of hostile “us/them” narratives. Meanwhile, the rise of the Global South and its increasingly assertive role in peace and security further reshapes the dynamics and legitimacy of global peace governance. These intertwined crises call for plural, innovative and reflexive approaches that move beyond state-centric or North/South binaries and attend to the everyday contexts in which peace and violence are co-produced.

This section brings together scholars committed to advancing critical research on peace, its meanings, practices and implications for diverse actors. By taking stock of recent shifts and promoting agenda-setting debates, the PEACE section will convene panels on feminist and post/decolonial approaches, everyday and identity-based dynamics of conflict, alternative transitional justice mechanisms, evolving peace architectures, the relationship between democracy and peacemaking, and the contemporary reconfiguration—and possible futures—of Peace and Conflict Studies.

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.

PEBB works towards a genuinely global political economy by encouraging contributions from global South scholars and those working from more marginalised sites in the global economy. We also encourage a shift in focus to those geographical sites and locations, which are vital to and formative of the current political, economic, and ecological moment, such as the plantation, the mine, the household.

PEBB adopts a radical and pluralist vision of political economy and welcomes contributions from scholars working in/across the social sciences and humanities.

The recent rise of far-right and extreme-right parties and ideologies, from the relative abjection after 1945 to the stunning success during the 2024 EU parliament elections and Trump’s re-election, is undeniably one of the most pressing issues of our time. We propose an innovative standing section specifically devoted to the critical study of global reactionary politics (which does not exist in the present) as a means to provide a scholarly home for, and the means to integrate, individual scholars who have been working on the issue in IR. Since at least 2016, in the aftermath of Brexit and Trumps’ first government, political scientists, political theorists and IR scholars have copiously written about rising radical populist movements (Robin 2018; Jarvis 2022; Hillebrand 2019; Mudde 2019; Kinnvall and Svensson 2022; 2022; Finkelstein 2017; March 2017; Roger and Goodwin 2018; Stavrakakis et al. 2018; W. Brown, Gordon, and Pensky 2018; Vaughan et al. 2024; Toros 2022; Meier 2022; Furtado 2018; K. Brown, Mondon, and Winter 2023). Drawing on the example of the Reactionary Politics Research Network (RPRN), we aim to invite contributions which focus on the unlikely alliances that make up the modern reactionary landscape from a marked intersectional perspective: how and why do disparate movements – ranging from TERFs to climate denialists, anti-vaxxers to neo-Nazis, reform voters to traditional conservatives and the political centre – join forces in political formations that have significant implications for the future of global democracy.

Realism is often still considered one of IR’s mainstream approaches. However, it also faces a dual challenge: firstly, realism is criticized as out-of-date, incapable of a positive vision that transcends the recurrence realists assume characterize the international. This is especially relevant in times of change, and as (seemingly) new challenges permeate policy and scholarly agendas, whether global warming, pandemics, populism, or terrorism. Secondly, realism has been argued to be tightly interwoven with Western-centric, elitist modes of knowledge production. Its critics suggest that realism’s disciplinary dominance has silenced alternative voices and eradicated historically divergent or marginal experiences. In this depiction, realism’s disciplinary role is not only undeserved, but downright detrimental.

And yet, the reemergence of great power rivalry, advances in military technology, and continued interstate competition have triggered renewed interest in realist analyses and prescriptions. Realist variants are increasingly employed and developed across the globe to better understand a wide range of historical and contemporary phenomena.

Against this background of theoretical, conceptual and disciplinary contestation, we invite submissions from all scholars who engage with the realist tradition, be they realists themselves, scholars of realist thought, or its critics. Papers, panels or roundtables could investigate, for example:

1) the genesis and roots of the realist tradition;

2) different realist approaches (e.g. classical realism, neorealism, realist constructivism, neoclassical realism, subaltern realism, etc.) and realist theorization (e.g. ontology, epistemology, methodology, causation, paradigmatic boundaries, concepts); including in terms of distinction/comparison to or complementarity with other theoretical approaches to IR/foreign policy;

3) realist theorizing of international politics and/or foreign policy, especially throwing new light at “traditionally realist” questions, specific actors’ policies (including beyond great powers and/or the Global North), or otherwise pushing realist approaches beyond their usual empirical scope;

4) the place of realist thought and analysis in the discipline, as well as its knowledge production and pedagogy;

5) realist visions and analyses of IR, and whether/how realism advances our understanding of contemporary/future challenges.

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.

Visual politics is a growing interdisciplinary field of academic research, political critique and aesthetic practice. It ranges from the analysis of visual artefacts, which are approached as repositories of meaning or political acts, to the interrogation of practices of vision and surveillance. Increasingly, visual international relations scholars embrace visual methods and produce visual artefacts as research, engaging in new practices of "visual writing.'' Over the past three years, the standing section on visual politics has established itself as the premier venue for visual politics in IR and has helped to push the boundaries of what formats of publication IR can take. Numerous papers first presented at the EISA standing section have been published in leading journals, new research partnerships have been formed, and early career scholars have made the section their intellectual home and developed their work in continuous dialogue with European and International colleagues. The Visual politics section continues this work and stresses two things: First, to expand the emphasis on "visual writing" and making more generally, and to encourage discussions on both practice and pedagogy, embracing new technologies and welcoming work that draws on adjacent fields. Second, it explores the implication of visual politics with broader histories of visual oppression, aligning technological developments with oppressive visual discourses.

International Relations (IR) discipline is based on the presumption that world politics is constituted by the international/domestic binary in which the international system is anarchical and the domestic realm is hierarchical. This presumption is challenged by the literature on functional differentiation and contestation, and state crisis. Simultaneously, there is a growing literature on non-state actors and non-state contributions to state sovereignty. However, statism and essentially conceived state power continue to dominate IR, contributing to the limits of IR ontology and marginalisation of non-state and societal dimensions of world politics in the study of IR. The standing section invites scholars to explore and discuss world politics beyond the state system through the lens of spaces, relations and struggles, addressing the questions of ‘where,’ ‘how’ and ‘what.’ Spaces (‘where?’) refer to the outside(s), frontiers, boundaries, liminal spaces, and ‘uncharted’ terrains beyond state power. Relations (‘how?’) embrace dynamics, developments, strategies and patterns of interactions and coexistence among state, non-state, and societal actors. Struggles (‘what?’) encompass conflict, collaboration, persistence, survival and securitisation. We welcome papers that study world politics beyond the state system through these questions, and their implications for IR. In particular, we are interested in mechanisms and practices that contest the anarchy of state system or the hierarchy of domestic realm. Moreover, we invite papers that advance approaches used to tackle statism in IR, such as heterarchy or societal multiplicity. We welcome both theoretically and empirically oriented contributions.

Nuclear weapons have returned to the forefront of international politics with renewed urgency. Yet the analytical frameworks through which we understand nuclear politics remain constrained by methodological nationalism, strategic rationalism, and techno-scientific expertise that brackets critical inquiry. This standing section establishes a sustained intellectual space for critical nuclear studies – scholarship that interrogates rather than accepts the terms through which nuclear politics are conventionally understood.

Critical nuclear studies intersects with diverse theoretical traditions including feminist IR, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, critical security studies, and international political sociology. These approaches share a commitment to denaturalizing nuclear weapons, treating them not as timeless strategic facts but as historically contingent sociotechnical assemblages embedded in relations of power, knowledge, identity, and materiality.

The section addresses three overlapping research agendas: the politics of nuclear knowledge production, interrogating how expertise and secrecy marginalize alternative ways of knowing; nuclear colonialism and environmental justice, tracing how extraction, testing, and waste disposal reproduce colonial hierarchies; and nuclear futures and temporalities, analyzing how nuclear threats shape political imagination and planetary thinking.

This research agenda holds enduring relevance: nuclear weapons will remain central to international politics for the foreseeable future, while critical scholarship continues generating new insights into their politics, ethics, and possible futures. By establishing this standing section, EISA positions itself at the forefront of critical engagement with nuclear politics, providing institutional support for scholarship that challenges dominant paradigms and imagines alternative futures beyond nuclear threat.

Critical reflection on knowledge production, authenticity, and positionality lies at the core of feminist and gender scholarship in International Relations (IR). While its knowledge claims and relevance have been contested in the past, this scholarship offers vital insights into today’s global challenges, ranging from the rise of disinformation, the contestation of the legitimacy of science, shrinking spaces for free expression and difference, to the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

The section aims to advance critical reflection on epistemic authority and contribute to broader EISA conversations about pluralism, inclusivity, and diversity concerning knowledge production and claims in International Relations. We invite junior and senior scholars from diverse backgrounds to explore the politics of knowledge production in global politics through feminist, gender, queer and intersectional lenses. Drawing on different theoretical approaches, methods, and focusing on a broad range of empirical phenomena across different policy areas, institutional settings and geographical contexts, panels may explore how gendered norms and hierarchies shape the production and value of certain knowledge(s) over others, whose perspectives gain legitimacy, who is perceived as an epistemic authority, and whose knowledge is silenced or marginalized.

This section creates a transdisciplinary space to interrogate practices of global and legal ordering reshaping the political present during the current period of intersecting planetary crises. We foreground ‘ordering’ as a device for understanding the reconfiguration of governance and law, organised along three cross-cutting themes:

(i) technology, data, infrastructure: how advanced digital technologies, data practices and sociotechnical infrastructures are redrawing conditions for political and legal ordering; (ii) violence, hierarchies, and coloniality: how postcolonial practices of violence and domination and other oppressive power relations are reinscribed into legal and global ordering, unevenly distributing conditions of life along lines of race, class and gender; (iii) materiality, practices, and politics: how and under which conditions legal and global governance practices are changing in response to socio-material shifts, and with what effects for global and legal ordering.

We welcome diverse contributions from IR, law, STS, critical data studies, postcolonial studies, and from different theoretical and methodological approaches. We specifically encourage early-career scholars to join our conversations and submit their contributions.

Asia and the Indo-Pacific are at the centre of global debates on security, development, and legitimacy. Yet too often the region is approached through external lenses that reduce its complexity to questions of strategic competition. This section seeks to highlight the diversity of actors, ideas, and practices that shape the region, emphasising the agency of local communities, states, and institutions alongside the influence of global powers. Building on the success of two previous PECs, the section will continue to provide a hub for scholars examining Asia and the Indo-Pacific as both a geopolitical project and a lived space of political, economic, and social interaction. In line with PEC 2026’s theme of questioning knowledge production, positionality, and authenticity, the section will foster critical reflection on how the region is studied, represented, and theorised.

An increasingly contested world order characterised by crises and geopolitical shifts such as Covid19, the war in Ukraine, the expansion of the BRICS and the US weaponisation of international trade has highlighted the relevance of economic interdependence and the fragility of critical supply chains. In this context, strategies such as de-risking, dual circulation, and technological self-reliance reflect broader transformations in the relationship between economics and security.

On these bases, how does the pursuit of economic security, shaped by perceptions of vulnerability and the drive for resilience, reshape global governance and the distribution of power in the 21st century? This section seeks to investigate these issues and the evolving nexus between economic security, strategic competition, and the global political economy.

Participants will examine how different actors define and operationalise “economic security,” the tools and strategies they employ, ranging from trade and industrial policy to financial statecraft and technological development, and the consequences for regional and global order. It seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, refine theoretical frameworks, and generate empirically grounded insights into how state power, economic interdependence, and security perceptions interact in today’s contested international system.

We invite paper proposals speaking to the above and below preliminary panel themes:

- Defining and Operationalising Economic Security

- Politics of Development Finance

- De-Risking or Decoupling? EU, US and China’s Approaches to Economic Security

- Global Governance under Pressure: Multilateralism, Fragmentation, and Competing Blocs

- Weaponised Interdependence and Critical Global Supply Chains

The world has entered a period of generalized political disorder, social convulsions, plural dissent, technological disruption, and ecological distress. Any reasonable prospect of peaceful change should recognize the value of diplomacy in this critical landscape. Diplomacy comprises practices, institutions, discourses, and techniques that historically emerged to mediate estrangement between political communities in an increasingly complex context. This evolving repertoire was crucial for the territorialization of world politics, shaping the very divide between domestic and international order. Diplomacy predates the international liberal order and, with due adaptation, will surely survive its demise. As long as world politics is marked by pluralism and multiplicity, diplomacy will remain a core foundation, for it is essential to managing the functional and normative challenges of ongoing transformations. Yet diplomacy constantly evolves. Notwithstanding, despite a great deal of inertia, it faces new challenges (e.g., climate change, cybersecurity, demographic imbalances), involves new actors (e.g., TNCs, NGOs, global media), needs to accommodate a changing political mood (e.g., anti-cosmopolitan), and grapples with technological advances (e.g., digitization). This combination of trans-historicity, change, and rediscovered urgency has fostered the vibrant field of Diplomatic Studies. Grounded in International Relations and Political Science, it increasingly draws from anthropology, communication, law, history, and other social sciences and humanities. In sum, this section of 10 panels wants to offer a platform to ongoing research in diplomatic studies, embracing theoretical and methodological pluralism and interdisciplinarity.

Much of diplomacy seems uneventful and mundane – one may think of high-level gift bestowals, evening attendances at embassies, or officially coordinated art exhibitions across borders. But these seemingly trivial practices occur in such ubiquity, and are sometimes communicated in such a public way, that one can explore them through a data-driven approach to unveil aggregate patterns pointing to fundamental structures of inter-polity dynamics. Could it be, for instance, that sentiments expressed in social media postings of government accounts can tell us something about how polarized world politics is in terms of liberal versus illiberal countries? Could gift bestowals and state visits tell us something similar, when viewed in the aggregate? Such a computational view of diplomatic practices does not foreclose ethnographies, qualitative discourse analyses, or archival explorations. Yet the digitalization of diplomatic practice and the rise of novel methods invite us to rethink how diplomatic practices – even seemingly trivial ones – produce world politics. By extracting, quantifying, and visualizing such inter-polity practices, one may gain new insights into patterns of conflict, cooperation, and world polarization.

At the same time, these approaches raise reflexive questions with regards to epistemology and ethics, such as: How do data-collection projects ensure authenticity in datasets while filtering and codifying diplomatic communication? Which actors are privileged or invisibilised in digital corpora? What does it all mean in an age of disinformation and AI-assisted research?

This section welcomes contributions that examine the promises and limits of ‘diplometrics’, broadly understood as the data-driven, often but not necessarily quantitative, analysis of diplomatic communication and practice.

Paradiplomacy has transformed from a marginal practice into a global and strategic dimension of international relations. Cities and regions now play a crucial role in addressing pressing challenges, including climate change, migration, economic development, and security. Their proximity to citizens and capacity for pragmatic, innovative engagement allow them to translate global issues into local solutions. Yet, this growing role also raises profound epistemological questions: whose voices are recognised as legitimate in international relations, and how is knowledge about global politics produced and circulated?

At a time marked by disinformation, technological disruption, and contested truths, paradiplomacy offers a unique lens through which to interrogate the politics of knowledge. Subnational actors frequently operate in conditions where their authority and authenticity are questioned by states, institutions, and even by mainstream IR scholarship. Still, their practices demonstrate that foreign policy must be understood as a genuinely multilevel phenomenon, where subnational, national, and supranational layers interact.

This section invites contributions that engage with both theoretical debates and empirical cases of paradiplomacy, from conceptual perspectives and comparative studies to city networks, cross-border cooperation, and multilevel governance. We also welcome reflections on data and methodological challenges, as well as on how teaching and research on paradiplomacy shape new epistemic communities in IR.

By examining paradiplomacy across different regions and perspectives, this section seeks to advance a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of world politics, one that recognises subnational actors not as exceptions but as integral contributors to global knowledge and governance.

Pacifism and nonviolence have gained scholarly momentum over the past two decades, with growing literatures in IR (Jackson 2018, Christoyannopoulos 2022), political theory (Butler 2020, Frazer and Hutchings 2020), and civil resistance studies (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, Chenoweth 2023), alongside the establishment of the Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence. From critical examinations of 'warism' (Cady 2010) and militarism, to proposals for civilian-based defence and unarmed civilian protection, to disciplinary reflections moving from security studies toward peace studies, this scholarship offers vital contributions on contemporary world order, alternative paths to peace and security, and the complicity of IR knowledge production in violence.

Significant gaps persist. How do anticolonial nonviolent resistance histories reshape understandings of sovereignty? What methodological innovations emerge from embodied, relational approaches that centre lived experience? How might pacifist epistemologies challenge not only what IR studies but how it studies—disrupting the field's embedded assumptions about legitimate knowledge? As violent crises continue and intensify, what practical repertoires does nonviolent scholarship offer beyond critique?

This five-panel section creates space to examine these questions. Themes include: warism and militarisation (examining the war system's dynamics and the assumptions sustaining it); responses and resistance (alternative security methods and case studies of nonviolent action); knowledge production (how the field reproduces or contests inherited practices); conceptual reimaginings (reconstructing core IR concepts through nonviolent logics centring relationality, care, and collective safety); and histories and genealogies (recovering obscured nonviolent traditions from anticolonial, Indigenous, and subaltern movements that challenge Eurocentric narratives of both violence and peace).

This section examines the international relations of entities positioned between the global core and periphery, the digital and the analogue, whose in-between status is key to understanding today’s contested world order. The emphasis is on spaces where actors constantly negotiate their agency between multiple centres of power in political, social, economic, religious or cultural terms. This perspective captures spatial dimensions (East–West) and temporal dynamics, tracing how local and regional processes interact with global trends. It also raises epistemic questions about whose perspectives count as knowledge in IR, and how in-between entities are represented and studied in and increasingly tech-assisted world.

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) exemplifies in-betweenness as it has historically been a space of multilayered, often contested identities shaped by overlapping influences and structural asymmetries that simultaneously constrain and stimulate the search for agency. Today, CEE illustrates how strategies of adaptation, resistance, and cooperation allow in-between entities to anchor and unsettle broader dynamics, while revealing how knowledge about them is shaped by not only shifting hierarchies of authenticity, but also data-driven technologies. Beyond CEE, the Caucasus, the Balkans, or Southeast Asia also function as connectors, buffers, and innovators. By comparing different cases, it becomes clear that the place in between is not marginal but central to understanding how global orders evolve under conditions of uncertainty.

This section invites contributions representing diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to examine how in-between spaces shape, challenge, and transform both the global order(s) and scholarly knowledge. It also aims to foster dialogue among science practitioners to complement and critically engage with prevailing academic and scientific practices in the field.

The movement of security concepts, practices, and discourses across geographical, temporal, and professional boundaries has become a defining feature of contemporary security politics. From the global spread of counterterrorism frameworks to the circulation of cyber security vocabularies, from the transnational adoption of risk-based governance to the normalisation of emergency politics, security ideas travel, transform, and take root in diverse contexts. This section invites cutting-edge research examining how security concepts diffuse – and with what political consequences.

We welcome contributions exploring the mechanisms, patterns, and effects of security diffusion across multiple dimensions: geographical translation between states and regions; temporal evolution and path dependencies; movement across professional fields and epistemic communities; and shifts between political arenas. We are particularly interested in work addressing the role of populist and novel political movements in reshaping security discourses, examining both progressive and regressive forms of diffusion, and investigating the processes through which exceptional security measures become normalised.

The section encourages methodological pluralism, including historical analysis, conceptual innovation, empirical case studies, computational document analysis, and examination of diverse textual formats and media. By bringing together scholars working across these different dimensions and approaches, we aim to advance understanding of how security ideas circulate and crystallise in the contemporary international order.

This section showcases research that critically analyses the politics of (counter)terrorism and security. The contributions in this section will cover a wide range of theoretical and methodological themes covering but not limited to theoretical interrogations of the concept of terrorism, intersectional critiques of international and domestic counter-terrorism policies, and critical pedagogy, knowledge production, and methodology. Theoretically, we explore the coloniality of terrorism and racialised dynamics that inform counter-terrorism policies. Papers focus on issues ranging from carceral practices to court proceedings, securitised development policies to secrecy of the security state. We also invite contributions looking at the practicalities of critically researching terrorism by investigating the issues of secrecy and access, safeguarding issues for both the researchers and their subjects, the challenges of publishing critical work, and communicating with mainstream audiences. We also provide space to focus on academic freedom and critical pedagogy and discuss how scholars can undertake research-led teaching and bring criticality into the classroom. Given the attacks on academic freedom, especially on scholars involved in Palestine solidarity work, it is imperative to look at the challenges of conducting critical research and teaching that questions the coloniality embedded within our structures and processes of knowledge production. We must also address the need to embody the ethos of scholar-activism in the current climate and discuss how critical research and activism can survive in the neoliberal academy.

The return of war to the European continent, the ongoing civil wars that undermine peace worldwide, and a concern with the impact of emerging technologies on war have created an increasing demand for expertise on war. However, the study of key aspects of war (onset, conduct, termination, and experience) remains siloed across and within disciplines, with concepts, theories, and empirical approaches caught between the legacies of the ‘war on terror’ and the future prospect of great power war. Who knows what, how, and why about what kind of war has been subject to disciplinary demarcation: IR tends to focus on great power wars, while civil wars tend to be studied by comparatists, and issues of warfare, often divorced from the study of war, tend to be left to military strategists and historians. Consequently, we know a great deal about very few wars which we study in very specific ways in closed epistemic communities. The purpose of this section is to critically reflect on the practices of knowledge production on war and warfare. Basic questions such as ‘Who studies war? Which wars are studied? How is war studied? For what purposes are wars studied?’ are posed to identify current gaps and future directions for the study of wars.

Despite national and multilateral campaigns to rein in offshore jurisdictions, or recent claims of “de-globalisation,” the evidence points the other way: the offshore world remains thriving and is used across advanced, emerging, and developing economies alike. Far from a loose archipelago, it is an integrated infrastructure of states, law, accountancy, and corporate service. It enables tax planning and regulatory arbitrage as well as transnational kleptocracy, illicit financial flows, covert corporate control, sanctions evasion, and other national-security risks. Offshore is therefore not peripheral to international relations or political economy but constitutive of global order. Elites leverage opacity, professional intermediaries, and cross-border vehicles to consolidate power, blur the boundary between licit and illicit, and reallocate governance authority across jurisdictions.

This section invites contributions to five panels that examine this from multiple angles: the infrastructures of offshore finance, the role of enablers in rule-of-law jurisdictions, the political economy of illicit financial flows and the impact of kleptocratic control of strategic industries. A strand of the section will engage with the emerging concept of corrosive capital—foreign investment that exploits governance gaps and entrenches vulnerabilities in recipient states. We envisage potential panels that focus on the following themes: 1) transnational kleptocracy,;2) illicit finance and professional enablers; 3) the interrogation of overlapping concepts such as strategic corruption, state capture, and offshore power; 4) the tracing of the political, institutional, and geopolitical consequences of these practices; 5) the rise of new offshore jurisdictions, particularly in Asia. In doing so, the section will provide an intellectual home for researchers examining how offshore logics of accumulation and governance reach deep into domestic political economies while simultaneously reshaping international order.

The states of Europe and the European Union are reorienting their foreign and security policies in response to multiple crises and fundamental transformations in world politics. Citizens play a crucial and growing role in these processes of reorientation. They are the electorate that needs to be informed and persuaded, and policymakers are increasingly seeking to engage them directly in debates on foreign and security policy. At the same time, citizens have become targets of external campaigns of misinformation and manipulation. Understanding how citizens learn about, think about, and participate in foreign and security policy at both national and European levels is, therefore, essential. This (5-panel) section seeks to bring together scholars that approach the learning, thinking, and participation of citizens in foreign and security policy through multiple theoretical perspectives and with diverse methodologies. In particular, the section invites contributions on (i) public opinion and survey research, (ii) learning and education in the field of foreign and security policy, (iii) different forms of citizen participation in foreign policy processes, (iv) the relationship between citizens, public opinion, and grand strategizing, and (v) the dynamics of misinformation and manipulation. Papers may address developments at the national level, at the level of the European Union, or offer comparative analyses across countries and regions.

We propose a comprehensive re-examination of religion’s role in international relations (IR), addressing its persistent underrepresentation in mainstream theories and policy analysis. Although religion gained renewed attention after the early 2000s—especially through the securitization of Islam—IR scholarship continues to treat it as a peripheral variable rather than a central force shaping global politics, diplomacy, and state behavior.

Building on insights from two 2025 workshops, this proposal seeks to advance a multidisciplinary research agenda that positions religion as a core analytical category in IR. The section will focus on five major themes identified through cross-disciplinary dialogue:

how religious differences can deepen or drive conflict;

the underexplored potential of religious traditions and institutions as third-party peacebuilding actors;

the historical impact of religious institutions on global power distribution and diplomacy;

the relevance of pre–World War II world orders—including those shaped by Islamic empires, the Holy See, and the British Commonwealth—to contemporary geopolitical challenges such as US–China rivalry; and

the need to develop religious-centric IR theories that can address gaps left by realism, liberalism, and constructivism.

The proposed sessions for the 2026 PEC Section include panels on the religious roots of conflict, religion’s peacebuilding capabilities, historically grounded analyses of religious influence on world orders, and the development of new IR theoretical frameworks centered on religion. A final roundtable will foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and lay groundwork for sustained research beyond the workshop.

This section explores how gendered power relations shape and are shaped by the institutions, practices, and discourses of global governance. While gender equality has become a prominent goal in global governance (e.g., the Sustainable Development Goals and institutional gender mainstreaming strategies of international organizations), implementation and political effects of gender equality-focused policies remain uneven, contested, and often symbolic. We invite scholars who examine how gender norms, identities, and hierarchies intersect with global governance processes across issue areas such as economic policy, climate change, security, humanitarianism, and digital governance. We particularly invite contributions that look at the design and the implementation of gender equality policies in global governance structures.

Building on feminist, intersectional, postcolonial, and queer perspectives, the section seeks to understand discursive, symbolic, and material engagements with gender in global institutions. The section aims to foreground contributions from scholars and activists in the Global South whose work challenges Eurocentric framings of global governance and its implications for gender equality engagement. We welcome conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions, including comparative analyses, discourse and text mining approaches, ethnographies of international organisations, and studies of transnational advocacy networks.

In an age of climate crisis, resurging great power competition, proliferating authoritarian politics, as well as rapidly changing technologies, societal and institutional demand for accurate and timely threat foresight and anticipation is higher than ever. Since the second half of the 20th century, this growing demand has been accompanied by a professionalisation and a diversification of actors participating efforts to imagine and detect future risks and threats, including think tanks, NGOs, consultants, and artists, as well as the multiplication of anticipation and forecasting methods, including the use of big data and LLMs, design fiction, and open-source intelligence. Examples of such initiatives are early-warning systems in foreign ministries and international institutions, projects to imagine climate change or future way using science-fiction narratives, and scenario planning in ministries and crisis management agencies.

Despite a proliferating field of academic research in this field, including both positivist and post-positivist approaches, this scholarship has remained fragmented and lacks a thorough conceptualisation of the multiple causalities and logics of action that could help understand how anticipation efforts, beyond their official purpose, actually modify international and domestic politics. The aim of this section is therefore to promote a more systematic, comparative approach to the study of foresight and threat anticipation, based on three interrelated questions: 1) what are the organizational motives and strategies of threat anticipation? 2) what are the logics of anticipation practices and interaction with other actors potentially competing in this field? and 3) what impact does anticipation practices actually have on decision-makers, societies, but also the human and non-human objects of threat anticipation?

To this end, the section invites panels and papers that can relate to at least one of these fundamental questions from a theoretical and/or empirical perspective. We are interested in both rationalist and reflectivist approaches and would particularly welcome efforts to build bridges between these epistemological positions. Given the underrepresentation of female and non-binary scholars in this field of study, and the epistemic importance of including their perspectives, we particularly encourage submissions from these groups.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming diplomacy, foreign policy, and security governance in Europe and across the international system. This section invites contributions that critically examine the ethical, political, and strategic consequences of integrating AI into the practice of international relations. It focuses on three key dimensions: ethical challenges, such as transparency, accountability, bias, and democratic oversight of algorithmic systems; political implications, including shifting power relations between states, supranational institutions, and private technology actors, as well as evolving notions of sovereignty and strategic autonomy; and strategic effects, ranging from intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, and military innovation to geotechnological competition and global standard-setting.

The section encourages interdisciplinary dialogue connecting IR scholarship with security studies, political theory, European studies, digital governance, and science and technology studies. While addressing global developments, it pays special attention to Europe’s unique regulatory and geopolitical position—its push for technological sovereignty, its role in shaping international AI norms, and its diplomatic strategies in managing technological rivalry.

In line with the PEC 2026 conference theme, “Even better than the real thing? Questioning knowledge production, positionality, and authenticity in IR,” the section also invites reflections on how AI transforms knowledge production in IR. This includes the epistemic authority of data-driven tools, the role of generative AI in academic research, and broader questions of authenticity and methodological innovation.

“Global economic disorder” refers to the growing fragmentation, uncertainty, and volatility within the post-1945 global economic system. The term captures not only the visible disruptions – such as supply chain shocks, geopolitical rivalry, or declining multilateral coordination – but also the deeper structural shifts eroding the foundations of the liberal economic order. As LSE analysts argue, the well-known global economic order of openness in trade, investment and migration is teetering. Financial Times’ Martin Wolf writes about the “world economy in an age of disorder.” He points out two recent major shifts in global economy: 1) abdication of the U.S. as global economic hegemon and 2) onset of artificial intelligence. Similar conclusions can be drawn from the 2025 edition of the Human Development Report. Simultaneously, IMF data show that global uncertainty has surged. Understanding the nature of global economic disorder is therefore essential for assessing the future of global trade, the sustainability of sovereign debt, the evolution of multilateral institutions, as well as policy choices facing both advanced and emerging economies. This section seeks to investigate these dynamics and to provide conceptual and empirical tools to interpret a world drifting away from predictable multilateral economic governance. In particular, the section attempts to address the following issues: 1) drivers of the current economic disorder, 2) future of multilateral trade and monetary governance, 3) implications for global trade, finance, sovereign debt sustainability, development financing, and emerging markets, 4) normative frameworks and/or policy reforms needed to re-stabilise the system and enable potential transition to a new order.

This section explores how authenticity, affect, and expertise intersect in the production and contestation of knowledge about war, crisis, and intervention. In contemporary conflicts, truth claims are generated and challenged within highly emotional, politicized, and digitally mediated environments. Scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike navigate a landscape in which objectivity, credibility, and knowing itself appear increasingly intertwined with moral judgment, opinion, and technological mediation. “Knowing” has thus become contested, and “knowledge” has emerged as a site of struggle where authenticity is both performed and disputed.

Building on debates in International Relations, critical security studies, peace and conflict studies, and political sociology, the section examines how affective experiences and technological infrastructures shape epistemic authority in violent and uncertain contexts. We invite contributions examining how emotional labour, witnessing, and positionality intersect with algorithmic mediation, disinformation, and strategic communication. The section seeks to connect discussions of authenticity and reflexivity with broader concerns about the erosion of shared truths and epistemic inequality.

By bringing together diverse conceptual, methodological, and empirical approaches, this section aims to move beyond binary distinctions between emotion and reason or fact and propaganda. It asks instead how authenticity and affect operate as conditions of possibility for knowledge in conflict. We encourage interdisciplinary dialogue by combining perspectives from fieldwork practice, media analysis, and theory-building on the politics of (un)knowing. We envision five panels, ensuring the diversity of their composition in terms of the career stage of the contributors, gender, academic background (e.g., Global South), and other characteristics underrepresented in academia.

While postcolonial theories have successfully recovered alternative imaginaries of global politics, the contributions of socialist worldmaking remain strikingly absent from current IR debates. At the same time, questions of authenticity, positionality, and legitimacy within the discipline are amplified by changing global orders. Disinformation, epistemic inequality, and the crisis of democracy challenge how knowledge is produced, circulated, and authorized, while socialism as a political response is reappearing on the global agenda. What counts as “real” knowledge about historical events surrounding the so-called Cold War and socialist worldmaking? Who is entitled to produce it, under what conditions, and what narratives are deemed appropriate for life experiences in (authoritarian) socialist pasts? How do these concerns intersect with historical and contemporary socialist imaginaries and their legacies?

The PoSoc section addresses this gap by recrafting the underexplored internationalisms of the socialist world. Revisiting the Global East allows us to recover socialist attempts at imagining a different world, challenging conventional narratives that reduce it to bloc confrontation. We bring together scholars working on past state-socialist projects, the post-socialist condition, and current transnational socialist movements, while interrogating how technological and institutional transformations reshape epistemic authority today.

Key to this exploration is re-examining foundational IR concepts, such as transnational cooperation, peace and security, and ontologies of the political and the economic, from the vantage point of the Global East.

This section examines conceptions and realities of “world orders” and their “crises” at a moment when the very foundations of knowing and interpreting global politics are under strain. Building on the conference’s focus, the section interrogates how competing visions of world order emerge, clash, and seek legitimacy in an age marked by disinformation, epistemic inequality, and the growing influence of generative AI. Moreover, it builds on one of the most pressing and prolific debates across IR.

The current crisis of world order is geopolitical and epistemological. Contestations over whose experiences count, whose narratives define crises, and whose concepts of order guide global governance reveal deep asymmetries in IR’s knowledge structures. As long-standing Western and state-centric assumptions are questioned, alternative ontologies and subaltern perspectives challenge content and custodians of global political knowledge. Simultaneously, genAI reshapes authorship, authority, and the circulation of truth claims.

This section therefore envisages five panels uniting contributions that interrogate the knowledge politics surrounding the current crisis of world order(s). It explores who possesses epistemic authority over world orders and their crises and how nostalgic notions of “golden ages”, the knowledge reproduced by genAI and struggles over the legitimacy of certain forms of knowledge interfere with this authority. The section also explores how, beyond their role as battlefields of epistemic contestations, international orders can be conceptualized and operationalized to assess how and why they undergo crises and transformations as well as to ascertain how they can perform as integrative spaces for the debate of knowledge claims.

Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) has long been shaped by assumptions derived from the Western – and particularly U.S. – experience of statecraft. Yet, in a world marked by epistemic inequality and the questioning of established truths, the time is ripe to globalise the study of foreign policy. This section invites contributors to rethink FPA as a plural, globally grounded field of knowledge, attentive to diverse cultural, philosophical, and epistemological traditions of state decision-making and representation.

Building on the conference theme, Global Foreign Policy Analysis interrogates the challenges and opportunities involved in doing Global FPA, asking who is authorised to speak about foreign policy, whose experiences count as authentic knowledge, and how digital technologies – including generative AI – mediate the production and circulation of such knowledge. It asks how Global approaches to agency, action, morality, and responsibility can challenge and refine entrenched, state-centric or behaviouralist understandings of foreign policy.

The contemporary international order is increasingly shaped by a “polycrisis”: a set of interlocking, mutually reinforcing disruptions that span expanding armed conflict, renewed geopolitical tensions and great-power rivalry, accelerating climate breakdown, democratic backsliding, rising authoritarianism, economic precarity and intensified digital contestation. These crises interact non-linearly, magnifying fragility and producing a global environment marked by volatility, escalation and uncertainty. Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS), with its interdisciplinary focus on structural violence, interdependence and transformative change, should in principle be well positioned to interpret and respond to this moment. Yet the field has increasingly drifted into empiricist and technocratic approaches that struggle to address large-scale systemic crises or to engage with the deeper political and normative questions they raise.

This section seeks to re-centre critical, radical and historically grounded perspectives capable of confronting today’s complexity. One point of departure for re-energising Peace and Conflict Studies lies in revisiting the diverse legacies of peace research developed across different historical moments to address structural dynamics of militarisation, rivalry, insecurity and the spiral logic of fear—dynamics that remain central today. Re-examining this broader intellectual heritage, alongside more recent critical, feminist, decolonial and environmental perspectives, may help illuminate both the limitations and the continuing relevance of past insights for understanding today’s more complex, fragmented and polycentric global system.

We invite contributions that rethink peace research for an age of polycrisis: analyses that interrogate dominant security logics, explore alternative imaginaries, engage with new actors and technologies, and articulate pathways for peace promotion amid overlapping global transformations.

The European Union had to change overnight from a neighbourhood policy focused on incremental reform to one that is about the survival of some Eastern Neighbourhood countries as independent, self-determined states. Ukraine’s application for European Union membership has been immediately replicated by Georgia and Moldova. Russian and Chinese influence in some accession candidate countries is on the rise. This opens crucial questions about the European Union’s enlargement strategy, requiring not only political answers but also academic reflection and expertise. In this section, panels are expected to analyse the European Union’s current neighbourhood and enlargement strategy and toolbox in the light of the new situation where military aggression or the threat with it and political exploitation of economic dependencies are once more used as foreign policy tools in Europe.

In a world fractured by geopolitical rivalries, economic insecurity, and competing claims to moral authority, Europe’s pursuit of global influence has become both more urgent and more uncertain. The so-called “Global South” has emerged as a contested arena — of goodwill, trade, and resources, but also of ideas and legitimacy. Here, Europe’s ambitions collide with a history of broken and asymmetrical partnerships, burdened by the legacies of colonialism and the enduring hierarchies of knowledge and power.

As Europe attempts to reposition itself as a global actor through new partnerships, climate diplomacy, and connectivity initiatives, it confronts some fundamental questions — not only about its political and economic impact but also about its epistemic authority: Who speaks in and for the "Global South" as partners “on a level playing-field"? What makes European framings of development, democracy, or sustainability authentic or credible? And how do power asymmetries shape which narratives circulate, and which are silenced, particularly in rivalry with competing narratives, for instance by China or the BRICS? EU-Global South relations have become a charged site for interrogating whose knowledge counts, whose voices are heard, and whose visions of international order are deemed legitimate. This is ever more important, as developing countries represent a key part of the EU’s foreign, trade, and developmental policies. The demand on Europe is therefore also to reconcile its normative identity with strategic imperatives. The Indo-Pacific strategic space epitomizes the EU’s attempts to reconcile its values-based identity with the realities of great power competition, economic security, and post-colonial critique.

The US pursuit of great power competition against, primarily, China as its emergent rival has intensified geopolitical rivalry, which increasingly engulfs evermore dimensions of global political economy: production, finance, infrastructure, global governance, and above all, strategic technologies. With the Liberal International Order in a state of protracted decay, global climate crisis, militarisation, intensified domestic political polarisation worldwide, and the US headed by the mercurial President Trump, states and regional political formations such as the EU, ASEAN, BRICS, and others are struggling to (re)position themselves politically and in terms of economic competitiveness.

The future direction of globalisation and global politics remains radically open and hotly contested. Will there be a fragmented world (dis)order, East-West decoupling between spheres of interest, or a US-China Cold War with proxy wars but also space for political manoeuvring and non- or poly-alignment? Alternatively, what are the pathways toward renewed collaboration along more progressive and post-capitalist principles?

Rather than examining the general structural dynamics of these developments this section is interested in the agency behind them. It investigates how inter- and intra-state tensions, social forces, and corporate rivalries have driven the resurgence of geoeconomic competition that is, in turn, reconfiguring the highly integrated but uneven architecture of the capitalist world economy. In particular, this section is interested in perspectives and analyses that highlight the role and competing strategies of political and economic elites i.e. private or public individuals, firms and institutions endowed with decision-making power in global politics. What are the conflicts, contestations, and alliances through which they navigate these uncertainties and shape the direction of the global political economy.

This section examines how knowledge regimes organise the political life of truth and condition the possibilities of justice in international relations. It explores how truth emerges not as an objective given but as the contingent outcome of struggles over epistemic authority, in which ideas, institutions, and material forces align to stabilise particular truths as hegemonic knowledge formations, while rendering alternative realities marginal or unintelligible. Justice cannot be disentangled from the production of truth, and the viability of justice depends on the epistemic conditions under which truth-claims are authorised. Truth claims order world politics. International courts, truth commissions, and diplomatic bureaucracies generate “truth-effects” that determine what becomes legible as harm, responsibility, or injustice, while their omissions demarcate the limits of institutional imagination.

The section invites contributions analysing how institutions generate truth-effects in contexts of conflict, displacement, or structural inequality. Ηow evidentiary practices reflect power asymmetries, and how actors situated in peripheral, subaltern or otherwise marginal positions mobilise counter-hegemonic epistemic practices to contest dominant narratives and articulate claims to justice. Attention is directed to the erasures and asymmetries that determine which injustices become visible and which remain ignored.

In an era marked by epistemic fragmentation and competing truth-claims, at times “even better than the real thing”, at others revealing the contours of a global “fake empire”, the pursuit of justice is inseparable from the struggle over truth itself. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue across IR and related fields, this section interrogates how truth-making practices sustain, fracture, or reconfigure the horizons of international justice.

Since the late 1990s, poststructuralist - or postfoundational - approaches have employed their conceptual and analytical frameworks to understand international phenomena and what is conceived as international. Drawing on philosophical categories developed by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Derrida, poststructuralism seeks to comprehend the conditions under which narratives about the international are established, how issues are framed, how categories become cemented and are legitimised. Rather than merely attempting to provide unambiguous answers about the international arena, poststructuralism aims to dispute and question its established foundations and understand the possibilities that allow not only to set out and frame this particular field of knowledge, but also to erase and displace contradictions, aporias, and inherent instabilities in political and social discourse.

Adopting a stance that is both critical and relativistic, poststructuralism positions itself as a non-normative mode of knowledge production, aiming to explore the possibilities of re-signifying the key concepts used by internationalists whilst highlighting the limitations imposed by the very questions raised by more traditional theories. Allegedly positioned somewhere between constructivist approaches — often self-described as a via media — and newer contemporary agendas such as feminism and decolonialism, poststructuralist approaches seek to test the boundaries and generate intersections between established and evolving perceptions and understandings within IR. In a global wave of phenomena like nationalism, authoritarianism, so-called ‘identity politics’ and new - or displaced - social and political rivalries, poststructuralism continues to offer relevant insights and tools concerning not only the international arena in general, but also its premises, assumptions and conclusions.

We are witnessing a transformation of global political orders. Established and rising powers engage in hegemonic struggles; wars are increasing in number and intensity; and authoritarian regimes and supremacist ideologies are resurgent. The erosion of egalitarian ideals is accompanied by defensive nationalism, militarism, and protectionism. Capitalism, it seems, has outlived its (neo)liberal political formations.

Although capitalism has long structured international relations, its theorization within the discipline remains fragmented. This standing section takes the current conjuncture as a point of departure to ask how these political transformations fit within the broader dynamics of capitalism. It invites theoretical and empirical contributions that approach capitalism as a world-ordering project. Marxist, feminist, and decolonial traditions offer key entry points, having illuminated the violent materializations of capitalism and the unequal expropriation of gendered and racialized bodies through empire and sovereign statehood.

We invite papers that engage with the material, racial, and gendered relations through which value production is organized and contested; the epistemic regimes through which capitalism and resistance operate; and the political forms in which capitalism is embedded. This includes conceptual work on value, crisis, and knowledge production; interrogations of capitalism’s universal claims and local manifestations; and analyses of how its materializations are rendered legible—or resisted.

By re-centering capitalism in IR theorizing, Capitalism and Global Ordering aims to provide an enduring platform for rethinking the international through capitalism’s material relations and ideological forms, consolidating a transdisciplinary community at the forefront of critical and global IR.

Global politics is increasingly defined by the erosion of shared truths. The section mobilises political psychology to illuminate how knowledge of the international is produced, judged, circulated, and weaponised across universities, newsrooms, and ministries. Attention falls on the affective and cognitive processes that steer judgement—attention, emotion, identity, and motivated reasoning—and on the criteria that render claims credible, urgent, or disposable. We follow disinformation, framing, and narrative cues as they shift mass opinion and elite choices, and we examine how platforms and metrics amplify some voices while muting others. The programme also looks inward, asking how methods, incentives, and professional norms entrench bias or create space for corrective learning. A simple yet consequential question anchors the section: how is knowledge in IR made, by whom, and with what effects on democratic accountability [maybe instead: rule of law] and security? Empirically, we encourage studies that combine experiments and surveys with interviews, field and archival work, and computational analyses of text and images to trace ideas from inception to uptake and policy use. Conceptually, we seek contributions that connect micro-level mechanisms in foreign and security policy to institutional and geopolitical outcomes, and that speak across disciplinary boundaries. The aim is diagnostic and practical: to identify and test practices that foster epistemic trust, strengthen democratic safeguards, and lower the pay-offs to manipulation under conditions of polarisation and information abundance. Putting minds, emotions, and media infrastructures in the same frame yields a sharper, usable account of how international knowledge is built—and how it might be rebuilt for [insert:) consensus-building and collective governance.

In an era marked by epistemic fracture, geopolitical turbulence and postcolonial turmoil, the study of international relations (IR) must reconsider not only what we know but also who produces it, from where, and with what ethical implications. This Section proposes to place Islamic epistemologies, diplomatic traditions and statecraft at the heart of this reexamination. By focusing on the Muslimmajority MENA (Middle East & North Africa) region — and its diasporic circuits — we ask: how might Islamic thought reimagine the positionality and authenticity of IR knowledge? How do diplomatic practices grounded in Islamic governance challenge Eurocentric frameworks of state, war, diplomacy and knowledge? How does religious persecution, minority protection, and interfaith diplomacy disrupt dominant forms of international order? This Section convenes scholars across IR, Islamic studies, multicultural studies, diplomacy and global ethics to interrogate the intersection of Islam, diplomacy and epistemic contestation. The section builds on prior work in Islam & IR, yet advances a distinct agenda: positioning Islamic traditions as active contributors — not passive objects — to IR theory and practice.

International regimes have long been central to understanding patterns of cooperation, rule-making, and norm diffusion in world politics. From arms control to trade, from human rights to climate governance, regimes have provided both the institutional and legal architecture and the normative frameworks that shape state and non-state behaviour. Yet in the current post-liberal, multipolar order, international regimes face profound pressures such as populist and nationalist backlashes against multilateralism, unilateral withdrawals from treaties, rising geopolitical rivalries, and growing contestation of liberal norms. This section invites scholars to critically examine the contemporary fate of international regimes. How resilient are regimes under conditions of global polarization? What mechanisms allow some regimes to adapt, while others erode or collapse? To what extent do regional or minilateral arrangements substitute for or undermine global regimes? And how do actors ranging from right-wing populist governments to transnational social movements contest, reinterpret, or reinforce regime norms?

This section advances new directions in Global IR by rethinking authenticity in knowledge production from the margins of world politics and the discipline itself. Questions of who produces knowledge, whose experiences are recognized as credible, and how epistemic authority is constituted remain deeply political. This section makes a distinctive contribution by exploring the relational, embodied, and ethical dimensions of authenticity, which remain underdeveloped in the existing Standing Sections.

While Global IR has pluralized the field and provincialized its Western core, the debate on authenticity calls for deeper reflection on how knowing is entangled with care, vulnerability, and accountability. Through indigenous epistemologies, queer worldviews, disability perspectives, and feminist ethics, authenticity is redefined not as universality but as responsiveness to lived struggles and relational commitments. Drawing on concepts like Homo curans and care ethics, knowledge emerges as a practice of connection—an evolving negotiation between self and other, local and global, human and non-human. In today's context, where generative AI and digital technologies are rewriting the very notion of authorship and epistemic authority, this section invites IR into what it means to know with care and remain truthful in a world where originality and authenticity are endlessly reproduced.

This section opens new intellectual avenues within Global IR by integrating ethical-relational, embodied, and digital turns to bridge epistemological, technological, and political debates. It will complement but not duplicate existing Standing Sections and offers an innovative focus on authenticity as a lens for reimagining Global IR's methodological, ethical, and ontological commitments.

This section explores how complexity—nonlinearity, adaptation, feedback dynamics, and emergence—reshapes contemporary international relations. As global politics becomes increasingly interconnected, traditional linear models struggle to capture cascading crises, multilevel interactions, and rapidly evolving strategic environments. This section invites theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that examine complexity across issue areas including conflict dynamics, great-power competition, regional security orders, institutional resilience, and foreign-policy decision-making.

This section aims to give space in EISA conferences for a multi-disciplinary and methodologically agnostic engagement with the study of democracy, liberalism, and global governance, interrogating their present and imagining possible futures. The erosion of liberal democracy and the pressure these processes put on existing structures of global governance is arguably the greatest contemporary political challenge in Europe and beyond. Processes of autocratisation ‘from within’ in democracies are increasingly common worldwide, questioning the future of liberal democracy and global governance as we know it. Yet, resisting these political efforts to weaken democratic norms and institutions, increasingly international actors, such as civil society actors and international organisations, mobilise with campaigns to promote and protect liberal democracy and resist autocratization. At the same time, domestic and international movements promoting illiberalism are also gaining ground.

Against this background, this section aims to foster and promote research advancing a systematic understanding of: (1) the interactions between the domestic and international causes of democratic backsliding; (2) the movements resisting and conversely, promoting these processes; and (3) the consequences of autocratisation for global governance.

Concepts and theories are the products of their times; they reflect the when, the where, the how, and the what for of their production. The concepts, theories, and categories that IR scholars routinely deploy are predominantly the product of a post-Cold War experience. Often, they either embrace key normative and empirical commitments of the liberal international order, or they develop a critical stance which militates against it. In the face of fundamental social, political, environmental, and economic challenges this constellation looks increasingly fragile and unproductive. Hence, there is a continuing demand for theorising, and a need for conceptual labour. Against this background, we propose a standing section which can serve as an open and pluralist space to facilitate this type of work across a wide range of perspectives and with a view to democratizing the practice of theory in the field of International Relations.

Neoliberal dominance triggered the rise of populist movements, democratic backsliding, and authoritarian tendencies across regions. Western democracies are not exempt from the rising trend, which can be traced in differentiated protection regimes increasingly challenging human rights norms, as illustrated by the Ukrainian–Syrian dichotomy or Western feminist framings questioning the agency of “other” women.

Democratic backsliding disrupts the norms of accountability and human rights. Across Europe and beyond, the rise of populism, anti-gender politics, shrinking civil society and the securitisation of migration and asylum coincide with the closure of civic spaces. These interconnected shifts expose tensions between sovereignty, borders, migration, and multilevel governance.

In a context where everything is negotiable in global politics, “unlikely” alliances proliferate. The EU’s simultaneous reliance on externalisation deals with weak democracies and its competition to recruit highly skilled workers from the same regions exposes the fragmented, interest-driven logic of contemporary governance.

This section adopts a bottom-up perspective: How do communities targeted by these policies negotiate, resist, or transform them? Can transnational alliances and regional actors counter democratic erosion? And what space remains for grassroots mobilisation under growing uncertainty?

In an era of multiple, competing, and complex crises, what is the role of ethical reflection in (re)shaping global order? This regular section promotes investigation of how political, non-governmental, institutional, civil society actors and academics navigate crisis decision-making. In an era of geopolitical realignment and cuts to aid and foreign budgets, a multitude of actors must take decisions about how to spend limited material and political resources. At the same time, ‘crisis ethics’ are not confined to high-level policy arenas. Actors on the ground — peacekeepers, frontline responders, medical teams, and community NGOs, among others — regularly make difficult ethical judgments in situ, often without clear institutional guidance or deeper reflection about the myriad consequences of their actions. Their decisions illuminate a set of moral dilemmas that are immediate, practical, and deeply shaped by unequal power relations, yet are easily overlooked in debates.

The section will also consider the ethical challenges that researchers working in or on crisis contexts face. Scholars must negotiate access, representation, and personal safety without reproducing the very inequalities they seek to analyse. The pressures related to fieldwork, knowledge production and authoritative commentary can sit uneasily alongside the experience of working with vulnerable populations. The positionalities of age, gender, nationality, sexuality, language ability, and scholarly seniority (or lack thereof) all influence the nature and type of dilemmas researchers experience. Bringing these strands together, the section invites contributions that critically examine the theory and practice of how ethical reasoning and decision making operates under conditions of uncertainty, scarcity, and structural imbalance.

The 7th planetary boundary has now been crossed. War and military expenditures are rising while we know that this level of expenditures will make it impossible to meet climate change targets. Authoritarian practices are rising and when in power, regularly undo environmental regulations and climate cooperation. This standing section (5 panels) intends to be a space for three conversations across these developments.

First, it takes seriously the material conditions of survival on the planet and the practices jeopardizing the conditions of possibility of life on the planet. In doing so, it avoids the discipline’s frequent ‘survivability bias’ and instead starts with ‘the end of the world’ as a moment we are in. To start addressing this condition, we require an identification of how agents or networks of agents that can cause planetary devastation secure their unaccountability.

Second, this section will be a space for conversations about the interaction between practices of militarization, nuclearization and de-democratization which are usually studied in isolation in different subfields and standing sections of EISA. We seek panels that work through such ‘existential silos’ to analyse empirical evidence either present or historical in new ways.

Third, the section will be an opportunity to redefine transnational political dividing lines across different policy sectors building on existing work and typologies but grounding them in political and legal struggles. This, we argue, shines light on new possibilities emerging from the study of these interactions, sidelined in existing scholarship.

As digital technologies like AI, machine learning, and quantum computing progressively pervade the practices and imaginaries of international politics, scholars across IR fields are grappling with enduring tensions and contradictions surrounding the relations between the digital and non-digital dimensions of global politics. On the one hand, ‘the digital’ seems to radically transform the ways in which global politics is done, envisioned and understood. On the other, ‘the international’ appears to be deeply rooted in familiar relations of power and inequality – relations that are embodied and material, rather than abstract and virtual. With the objective to advance the Digital IR research agenda and provide further empirical grounding, this section seeks to critically explore the transformations and continuities between the ‘digital’ and ‘non-digital’ dimensions of global politics. As such, it seeks to engage with the enduring objects, sites of knowledge and expertise that permeate global politics, and to study how ‘the digital’ challenge, rework, or reconfirm existing concepts and registers of power in IR, and with what effects on global political orders.

In particular, we invite contributions from across the different subdisciplines of IR that engage with one of the following research strands:

1. ‘Digitalising’ the International: How does the digital enact the international and how does it remake international relations at the level of politics and policy?

2. ‘Infrastructuring’ the Digital: What are the material, epistemic and organisational practices that underpin ‘the digital’ in global politics?

3. ‘Doing’ Digital IR: How do digital technologies offer new methodological opportunities and multimodal strategies for studying IR?

As space activities open new “frontiers” for exploration and exploitation, scholars across disciplines are highlighting the growing interconnections between Earth and outer space. An expanding array of Earth observation and surveillance satellites, the rise of commercial actors, and the construction of new spaceports and space technologies are transforming our relationship with space. These developments are part of a new space economy that impacts security and environmental politics, raising critical questions about sustainability, equity, and the future of international relations. How do aspirations for space exploration and exploitation echo colonial histories on Earth, and what implications does this have for global justice? How are space technologies and infrastructures conceived and built, and what kind of futures do they make possible – or foreclose? What does it mean to think of politics beyond Earth, and how might this transform our conceptual thinking in International Relations and beyond? This section aims to create a platform for exploring the new ways in which Earth and outer space are becoming connected. We seek to offer a place for intellectual exchange among the increasing number of scholars engaging with outer space politics and governance. The section encourages research perspectives from critical security studies, science and technology studies (STS), environmental politics, decolonial and postcolonial studies, and cultural anthropology that advance a symmetrical perspective on space activities and infrastructures’ material and imaginative aspects.

FPPS directly engages with the overarching theme by asserting the irreplaceability of relational ethics as a response to the crisis of knowledge production, positionality, and authenticity in IR. Concretely, we connect to the three central challenges of the conference (disinformation, epistemic inequality, and the legitimacy of knowledge) in seeking contributions focused on:

Challenging Positionality and the Gaze: FPPS offers an alternative epistemological starting point that shifts the scholar’s positionality from a state-centric, adversarial perspective to a relational, trust-based one. This provides an authentic counternarrative to traditional knowledge, actively working to decentre the gaze of the powerful by prioritizing mutual recognition and the knowledge generated from the ground-up.

Restoring Authenticity and Shared Truths: Friendship, grounded in trust, reciprocity, and shared vulnerability, provides a model for generating knowledge that is resilient against disinformation and the erosion of shared truths. Contributions are invited to explore how the ethical practices underpinning Positive Peace (e.g., justice and structural non-violence) offer a pathway to building authentic, human-centered truths in a contested world.

The Role of Academia in Pedagogy and Ethics: By focusing on the human relational experience, we affirm the ethical core of knowledge production against the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. We welcome contributions on how teaching friendship and positive peace prepares future generations of scholars to produce responsible knowledge, prioritizing human connection, empathy, and ethical reflection over purely descriptive or algorithmically generated outputs.

We welcome theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions on friendship and positive peace, especially those that amplify non-Western and marginalized relational epistemologies to create a more complete and authentic understanding of cooperation and ethics in international politics.