From September 10 to 14, Sophia University in Bulgaria was alive with the buzz of the latest in the field of International Relations- as academics and researchers participated in the lively, well-attended 13th Pan-European Conference on International Relations (EISAPEC), engaging with the theme of ‘A Century of Show and Tell: The Seen and the Unseen of IR’. And of course, for our Research Group Leaders to Senior Research Fellows, to several researchers who have been our Fellows in the past- our Centre was well-represented!
Katja Freistein and Philip Liste, Research Group Leaders at the Centre, presented on ‘Repetition as a Technique of Global Governing’, a project currently underway. They suggested the need to look at repetitive institutional iterations as a window to global organizational politics. Philip Liste, in another panel, presented on the not-so-innocent facet of global cooperation: the coming together of powerful multinational corporations, offshore banks and law firms to create tax havens, to understand how transnational legal regulations operates in this space. Research Group Leader Frank Gadinger spoke in a panel on ‘Deconstructing Visual Global Politics’ on a practice-oriented approach to viewing art, through a case analysis of Edmund Clark’s exhibition, ‘Terrror Incognitus’, and its emancipatory political power. In yet another paper that he co-presented with Christopher Smith Ochoa and Taylan Yildiz, the authors looked at the legitimacy struggle in Western democracies, between the state and internet activists in relation to surveillance. Maryam Zarnegar Deloffre, who is currently a Senior Research Fellow with us, spoke on power, hierarchies and accountability in humanitarian governance. Katja Freistein also presented on her work with Alumni Fellows Alejandro Esguerra and Stefan Groth, on micro and macro power dynamics in international organizations, and how mundane practices within them have political implications. In another presentation with Thomas Müller, she spoke on the ‘rise’ of the BRICS countries within the Global Order, and on the patterns of status rankings for states.
Apart from current researchers at the Centre, the EISAPEC also saw contributions from further academics who are the Centre’s Alumni Fellows. Susanne Buckley-Zistel, an Alumni Senior Fellow, presented on the spatialization of global and local memory as well as on the Truth Commissions and how sexual violence was narrativized in Sierra Leone, Kenya and Liberia, while Kai Koddenbrock, an Alumni Postdoc Fellow, presented his work on capitalism and its production of international hierarchies in context of Western Africa, over the timeline of the slave trade to the CFA Franc currency.
The papers were invigorating and found great reception, and were representative of the great variety of original work being produced at the Centre.
EISA web space: https://eisa-net.org/