Conference Program

International Relations as a discipline continues to have a contentious relationship with its object of inquiry. What is the ‘international’? How has it been traditionally defined and how have these mainstream definitions been critiqued? The semi-plenary aims to intervene in these debates at the intersection of international political sociology and historical sociology and problematizes how the international has been understood and employed within the field of IR and further engages with issues of its (lack of) conceptualization. The semi-plenary aims to open for discussion a series of questions, that include but are not limited to; how to approach the transformation(s) of the international, what is the role of hierarchies in this process, what is its relation to other concepts (such as sovereignty), how to locate the international, and what is its relations to the discipline and disciplinary politics?