For the 9th European Workshops in International Studies (Thessaloniki, 6-9 July 2022), Adrian Rogstad and I are organising a workshop on Temporality and International (dis)order. Submissions are open until 31 January 2022 (access here).
Time matters in international politics. From international ‘memory wars’ contesting the past’s importance for the present, via the conflicting temporalities of the Covid-19 pandemic with its speeding up of history and slowing down of the present, to our attempts to control the future of climate change, temporal conflicts and interconnections shape international relations in myriad ways. Far from a neutral background condition of policymaking, time and temporality are increasingly understood as changing and manipulable, an instrument of international politics, and objects of analysis in their own right for scholars of international relations.
The interest in time and temporality has increased in International Relations (IR) in recent years. As a result, it has enriched IR with new concepts, approaches and methodologies, theories and perspectives, interdisciplinary engagements, and discussions. This workshop builds on this rich proliferation to engage with temporal patterns, interconnections and processes shaping international politics, order, and disorder. It welcomes theoretical discussions that advance the identification of temporal patterns in IR, and the empirical study of time and temporal interconnections embedded in history and/or contemporary times of international order and disorder.
What are particular conceptions of time and temporality embedded in the contemporary international order? How have these conceptions been dislodged or reconfigured by recent crises and processes of ‘disorder’? How does temporality shape global hierarchies and inequalities? What temporal dimensions and interconnections have shaped international responses to the Covid-19 pandemic? What are the consequences of eurocentrism for understanding temporality in international politics? What are the legacies of imperial temporal regimes/order for the current international order?
What is explored in this workshop is if and how different temporal patterns and interconnections manifest across different spaces and scales, what underlying ideologies influence such interrelations and timings, and their consequences for understanding international politics of ordering and disordering that remain understudied.
The workshop encourages submissions and debates on various issues, topics, experiences, spaces, and scales organised across four themes:
- Ideology and Time
- Temporal patterns of international politics of Neoliberalism, Messianism, and Modernisation, etc.
- The diffusion or contestation of temporalities in international politics
- Understanding power relations and hegemony through metronomy or heteronomy
- Synchronicity and Coordination
- Temporal patterns of international politics of Neoliberalism, Messianism, and Modernisation, etc.
- Time in International Institutions and Organisations
- The role of time in change in/of international politics and orders of different scale
- Temporality and Identity
- Time in/of trauma, war, peace.
- Pandemics, temporality, and international (dis)order
- Imperial/Colonial Temporalities
- Understanding time through historically oppressed, silenced, marginalised, or neglected perspectives.
- Colonial temporal regimes, chronocentrism and eurocentrism
- Histories of Temporalities
- The diverse experiences and theorisation of time in international politics based on gender, sexuality, race, and identity.
- Histories of International (dis)order and time
Alireza Shams Lahijani 