Standing section «International Relations in the Anthropocene» at the Pan-European Conference on International Relations

We warmly invite you to participate in the standing section "International Relations in the Anthropocene" at the Pan-European Conference on International Relations!

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. 

If the Anthropocene marks a condition after the “global” and “international”, it is not characterized by a new sense of order or stability. Rather, it points towards a broken world in which the crisis of conceptual apparatuses of IR and their institutional forms overlap with and are altered by new conflicts, technological conditions, ecological devastation and post-apocalyptic sentiments. The Anthropocene thus marks an ongoing time of brokenness and endings that ‚we‘ cannot overcome and leave behind. It challenges us to re-think what it means to live and think with/in an irreversibly damaged planet and a political world in turmoil.

The standing section «IR in the Anthropocene» aims to provide a space for the multiple engagements of IR scholars with the Anthropocene, to think through the new forms of political agency, struggle and governance that we see emerging, but also foster discussions with other disciplinary perspectives. In particular, we want to encourage critical discussions of the concept – for example from decolonial, (queer-)feminist, new materialist and poststructuralist perspectives – and invite debates about new imaginations to undo and rethink (anthropocentric) conceptions of modern politics and norms, government, political agency, justice etc.

This year, we want to put a special focus on the topic of “Temporalities in the Anthropocene”. We invite scholars to explore the multiple dimensions of temporality that characterize international relations in the Anthropocene: How do temporalities of governance, crisis and resistance come to matter in the Anthropocene? Where do modern (political) temporalities break down, pile up, haunt us or transform in the Anthropocene? How do we re-think temporalities of repair, care, hope, refusal and resurgence in broken world(s)?

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

We warmly encourage contributions from across disciplines and regional areas. This includes both conceptual work on temporalities as well as empirical investigations of the complex manifestations of temporalities in relation to global anthropogenic changes.

We welcome submissions of panels and roundtables as well as individual papers.

Please submit your panel or paper proposals via the conference website: https://eisa-net.org/abstract-submission-guidelines-pec25/

There you will also find further information on the submission guidelines.

Deadline for submission: 20 March 2025

If you would like to discuss ideas or suggestions for alternative formats, please feel free to contact us at any time under:

Tom Scheunemann - [email protected]

Fiona Schrading - [email protected]