Conference Program

This paper looks into the social structures behind the knowledge production process about the Russo-Ukrainian War within the discipline of International Relations. It asks a straightforward question regarding the latter structures: what is the geo-epistemological location of the Russo-Ukrainian War within the global published dimension of IR? It seeks to investigate the disciplinary stratification, qualitative thematic variation, and citation network associated with the War. Its methodological framework blends citation network and thematic content analyses to receive an all-embracing image of the conflict within the discipline. The articles analyzed come from the special and ordinary issues of the top ten international IR journals, thus ensuring a precise correspondence with the conventional label of the "disciplinary mainstream." Given the abrupt character of the War, missed by much of the mainstream IR scholarship, the results of this analysis might serve as a perfect case study regarding the disciplinary intellectual structures. The absence of such studies is surprising given the geopolitical impact, policy-academia nexus reaction, and the overall historical magnitude of the War.

The League of Nations' failure to stop Japan's invasion of Chinese Manchuria in 1931 and Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 were evidence of the dysfunctionality of the security system built after World War I. It is, therefore, not surprising that the next two interwar International Studies Conferences (ISC) in the mid-1930s were devoted to the issue of collective security. The paper aims to answer the question of what vision of collective security was presented by Polish Scholar Ludwik Ehrlich (1889-1968) during these conferences.

The post-Cold War development of IR historiography resulted in challenging many concepts regarding the Interwar period and yielded interest in the pre-Second World War ideas. However, these studies are often Western-oriented (mostly Anglo-America-centered) or focused on non-European cases (e.g., Asian traditions). As a result, there is an apparent lack of research focused on non-Western European cases. Meanwhile, the states in Central Europe that emerged after World War I (after years of subordination to the Russian, German, and Austrian empires) presented a different point of view than the West.

The paper consists of three parts. The first introduces Poland's international situation in the mid-1930s as the background to Ludwik Ehrlich's reflections. The second part describes this researcher's previous professional experience as a context for his scientific considerations. The last part reconstructs the content of Ehrlich's speeches at the ISC and courses for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs foreign service. The paper is based on a case study strategy. The method of data collection is qualitative text analysis.

Peace and conflict studies has largely evolved in the Anglo-American sphere and that is perhaps why its foundational epistemes, theories and methods continue to be euro-centric. It is against this backdrop that this paper asks: how ‘taking Global South seriously’ stands to transform its knowledge production premises and parameters. The paper makes its argument in two parts. The first part outlines certain characteristic features of the field and identifies its dominant sites of knowledge production in order to understand why the scholarly endeavors seeking to include the voices from the Global South have yielded limited dividends thus far. The second part seeks to explain how its agency was subjugated by the racialized logics of enlightenment philosophies and how race and racism, as one of the foundational principles of knowledge-making, have been subjected to a ‘double erasure’ through history and our disciplinary inquiries have yet to come to terms with just how deeply implicated such racialized logics are in its metatheoretical foundations and find expression in contemporary conflicts. Deconstructing these, I argue, is necessary both to address the enduring disjuncture between the knowledge frames of peace and conflict studies and the lived realities of people across the globe as well as to understand that the former continues to be shaped by their underlying hierarchical modes of knowing.

Global governance which emphasizes collaboration of multiple stakeholders as well as a system of decision-making at international level in resolving global affairs and hot-button topics from security to health, environment and climate change has received more attention in the past centuries. As the world is becoming more interconnected than ever, the growing popularity of a new form of governance with the involvement of multiple actors and new types of mechanisms that can be applied globally is becoming more and more essential. With its special governing structure of a tripartite model connecting governments, employers and workers from 187 member states as well as its numerous programs, mechanisms, the International Labour Organization (ILO) is one of the exemplary cases of global engagement in addressing important labour-related issues. In an attempt to promote safety and health for workers in global supply chains, the Vision Zero Fund - a multi-donor trust fund and part of the ILO's flagship program Safety + Health for All was launched in 2015 with the goal of creating a world 'with zero workplace deaths, accidents and diseases'. The example of Vision Zero Fund draws a great picture of how global governance can mobilize actors across fields and engage them in a common goal of enriching human lives. In this paper, we will discover the presence and orchestration of global governance under the Vision Zero Fund especially in the work of ILO in improving safety and health at every step of global supply chains in developing countries.