Conference Program

This paper focuses on the Baltic Sea region's position within the International Relations (IR) discipline. It employs a tripartite methodological framework: author profile analysis, citation network analysis, and thematic content analysis, using data from Web of Science and Scopus indexing databases. It approaches ten major international journals with a timespan of fifteen years. The author's profile analysis seeks to understand the demographic characteristics of those writing about the Baltic Sea region. The citation analysis, in turn, examines patterns of scholarly communication and looks into the discipline's "contact zones" with its "significant other" regarding the region, namely Area Studies. The thematic content analysis focuses on the theoretical and conceptual aspects of the articles. The paper hypothesized that the literature on the Baltic Sea region will reflect general stratification patterns characteristic of IR, including gender asymmetry and geo-institutional predominance of Western scholars. It also assumed thematic campification and a contemporary focus on security studies, energy politics, and regional integration.

The idea of promoting peace through education in times of war may be seen as naïve or impractical, as the focus is often on survival and gaining strategic advantage. In the heat of war, the implementation of peace education may be perceived as a luxury that cannot be afforded in the face of urgent and life-threatening circumstances. This research aims to investigate the validity of this argument through a case study of a peace education course implemented in a college on the periphery of Israel during the 2023-2024 war between Israel and Hamas. The course had a majority of Palestinian citizens of Israel and a minority of Jewish citizens of Israel. The study examines the impact of a peace education course on each group's willingness to reconcile with the other. A real-time study of the damaging effects of a war suggests a unique model that combines theories of reconciliation with exposure to popular media through a TV series depicting the shared life of Jews and Palestinian citizens in Israel. The quasi-experimental design included pretests and posttests for a research group and a control group. Interviews with course participants were conducted three times: before the course, midway through, and at the end. Preliminary findings indicate that the model reduced hostility between groups, suggesting its potential application in times of war.

Private Military Companies (PMCs) have gained prominence in the international environment since the end of the Cold War. Offering a wide range of services, these companies have been hired, both by state actors and private agents, to act in international conflicts, help in humanitarian missions, among other activities. The use of these companies, however, has raised suspicions regarding the legitimacy of their actions, especially when they provide employees for direct action in conflicts that occur in fragile states. This is because, as demonstrated by the actions of the Wagner Group in the Republic of Mali, these groups have carried out massacres not only against military and political targets, but also against the unarmed civilian population. The objective of this article is to analyze the action of EPMs in conflict situations in fragile States, as an exercise of ‘Necropolitics’, according to a concept developed by Achilles Mbembe. A politics in which technologies of destruction are used in a context in which life and death are decided, in a sovereign manner, seeking control over bodies and inscribing them in the order of maximum economy. Adding other concepts such as Agambem's ‘Camp’ concept and Foucault's ‘Biopolitics’, this work aims to demonstrate how the actions of these companies use the delimitation of virtual and fluid spaces within which the massacre of citizens' bodies becomes legitimate. Once they are considered as absent from citizenship, those citizens are viewed as legitimate targets in a politics of mere annihilation of the otherness.

This paper reflects on workshops conducted when mapping gender-based violence in Puebla, Mexico. Explored is how each participant deploys a series of strategies to mediate their exposure to violence; strategies that include a specific relation to friends and family. Of interest is how this relation is deployed in order to counter the individualizing effects of gender-based violence in public space. On display is a coming-into-relation between the participants and other female actors so as to evoke possible allies and thereby allay potential danger. In this context, put forward is the concept of sorority as a resistive relatedness amid gender-based violence. Sorority is a particular disposition that is both differentially lived by participants and context-dependent: sometimes it involves a premeditated sharing of location with friends and family, other times it is a more frantic search for potential support when caught in a violent situation. Apparent is a shared inherence to violent potential as a felt relatedness that contours how each emerges, and informs what each thinks/feels capable of doing. The result is an expanded appreciation of subjectification amid potential violence wherein a coming-into-thought implicates both self and other, while a coming-into-action holds together multiple emergent subjects.

The crisis of liberal internationalism is an urgent problem in international politics. However, existing International Relations (IR) scholarship does not offer a clear theorization of the reasons for the underlying tensions and frictions between the West and the rest. In this article, I focus on the rhetoric of the crisis, which allows us to theorize three simultaneous rhetorical modalities deployed by practitioners on the crisis of liberal internationalism: forensic rhetoric (past), epideictic rhetoric (present), and deliberative rhetoric (future). I argue that in the configuration of these rhetoric modalities in the hierarchical international system, practitioners engage in both establishing procedural political order and substantively averting global disorder in international politics. However, the complexities of such rhetorical deployment by superordinate states create problems of misperceptions and misunderstandings among the subordinate Global South states on the substantive expectations of change. They engage in counter-preaching rhetoric from below. I provide a case study of American rhetoric of ordering and disordering and its misperceptions in India. The conceptualization offered here allows avenues to investigate how rhetorical power politics creates problems that are deep-rooted in the prejudices of the international system.