Conference Program

The objective of the proposal is focused on analyzing the asymmetric relations between the United States and Mexico, specifically the case of the city of Tijuana, through the mediation of the artwork installation Century 21 by the artist Marcos Ramírez ERRE, a flimsy hut built making use of secondhand wood, and the specificity of its location on the esplanade of the Tijuana Cultural Center (CECUT). The selection of ERRE's work as a mediating element corresponds to three reasons: 1) the title has two significant references for its evaluation: it refers to the name of an important American real estate company; it points to the nascent 21st century; 2) the specificity of its location is significant, being that it was in a space where, prior to the urbanization and canalization of the Tijuana River, “Cartolandia” was found (an irregular settlement populated by multiple self-built huts with waste materials by a migrant population whose numbers exceeded the city's planning); 3) historically the majority of secondhand wood comes as waste from the United States, which allows the material to be thought of as an element through which to analyze the asymmetric relations between the United States and Mexico. Based on theoretical-methodological perspectives of a microhistorical type, hemerographic sources, national and international journalistic notes were reviewed. This with the purpose of historically contextualizing the situations around the process that laid the foundations for the assembly and exhibition of ERRE's work, as well as its social and political relevance today.

The paper details the considerations of EU officials as subnational actors in making (no) sense of their work for the EU, arguably a supra-national actor or entity. Specifically, the paper draws on a series of over 50 interviews with EU officials to gain a sense of their real-world experiences in working behind the scenes of EU politics, in the mundane bureaucratic process. In this way, the paper shows EU officials as both participants shaping EU policy, and as individual actors commenting on that policy.

What transpires from these commentaries and narrated experiences of officials, is the idea of an impossibility of ending as a central dynamic influencing EU politics. Concretely, the interviews show this in relation to EU officials’ work on two EU military counter-migrant smuggling operations: operations EUNAVFOR MED Sophia and Irini. In both instances, the point of curiosity is how EU officials narrate how the operations cannot logically stop. As the end is unattainable, the officials cannot but go on.

In engaging with the double puzzle of the impossibility of ending I argue for the instability of endings. Where beginnings and ends are typically conceptualised as two points of demarcation of a linear time, both show themselves here as in fact unstable landscapes in themselves. Moreover, they destabilise the ‘time-space’ that stretches out in between, and beyond, them. Centrally, I argue that this landscape of time ‘in-between’, is where EU officials reimagine the policy and diplomacy they engage in.

No science can be neutral, ahistorical nor apolitical. As all sorts of knowledge -science included- are made by sociohistorical subjects, therefore, knowledge production is motivated, biased, sponsored, celebrated, or rejected by our socioecological contradictions, moral principles, oppression wounds, political agendas and so on (Alvin W. Gouldner, 1962; Hugo Zemelman, 2021).

But science has been supported not only to collect information or to improve the quality of our lives, but to control and destroy based on it (Immanuel Wallerstein, 1999; Ana Esther Ceceña, 2004). As a result, IR understanding of the world and its dynamics, in general, is also shaped by systems of domination which centuries-long “disorder” now seems unintelligible for scientists, scholars, students and citizens.

That is when the concept of ‘ecological-civilizational collapse’ emerges to assemble the international “chaos”. Based on the analysis of the multiple and simultaneous processes that we are experiencing all over the world (i.e. climate change, local wars, the sixth mass extinction, inflation, police repression, growing social movements, etc.); tracking systemic tendencies, adaptations and limitations of the modern-capitalist patriarchal World-Ecology (Jason Moore, 2020); as well as rethinking classical theory of knowledge in general and IR theory in particular (Roberto Peña, 2013 and 2019); we were able to find the notion of ‘collapse’ (John Saxe, 2019; Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, 2020).

Even though that concept it's new in International Relations, on this paper we argue how it has the potential to help us understand transtemporal, transdimensional and transescalar global problematics (Pamela Escobar and Patricia Sánchez, 2022).

Contrary to the international trend, German peace and conflict studies define themselves as a field of research rather than a discipline. This unique standpoint fuels an ongoing discussion regarding the essence of peace and conflict studies, prompting critical questions about how the unsettled field represents itself and its institutional history. Yet, such critical approaches do not seem to be fully transferred from the field’s self-understanding to its outward presentation. Existing sources that reflect on the subject primarily focus on Western trends, while the knowledge production of the global South is often marginalized and framed as an object rather than a producer. Building upon this premise, our research aims to critically examine and disrupt the self-representation of peace and conflict studies. Introductory volumes are chosen as an artefact that represents the field. In aiming for critical deconstruction, this content analysis interrogates how the field perpetuates itself in terms of ontological perspectives, the inclusion of non-Western thoughts, and the diversity of theories and methods employed. By tracing underrepresented knowledge and blind spots, we shed light on apparent assumptions and power relations that shape the field.

Gender inequality continues to be more persistent across societies than any other form of inequality. In their endeavor to translocate local knowledge onto a global platform and thereby introduce new concepts and definitions, international gender inequality indexes and their indices have become a major reference for knowledge production and diffusion on gender inequality. While these indices are frequently cited as references by both scholars and policymakers for evaluating gender equality, they are also often criticized for their shortcomings and areas that need improvement. We argue that this deficiency, is rooted to an imbalance in the formation and dissemination of knowledge regarding gender inequality, particularly between the Global North and the Global South. Given the multifaceted roles of international organizations like the UN encompassing classification, transformation of information into knowledge, norm construction, norm shaping, and goal setting, it is deemed crucial for an awareness to emerge concerning the local-to-global knowledge asymmetry, and vice versa, epitomized by these indices—an asymmetry that resonates with the concept of epistemic injustice.