At the 19th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, held at the University of Lisbon, PLATFORM WARS’ Jasper van der Kist will organize a conference section on Digital IR in collaboration with Vanessa Ugolini from Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
As digital technologies like AI, machine learning, and quantum computing progressively pervade the practices and imaginaries of international politics, scholars across IR fields are grappling with enduring tensions and contradictions surrounding the relations between the digital and non-digital dimensions of global politics. On the one hand, ‘the digital’ seems to radically transform the ways in which global politics is done, envisioned and understood. On the other, ‘the international’ appears to be deeply rooted in familiar relations of power and inequality – relations that are embodied and material, rather than abstract and virtual.
With the objective to advance the Digital IR research agenda and provide further empirical grounding, this section seeks to critically explore the transformations and continuities between the ‘digital’ and ‘non-digital’ dimensions of global politics. As such, it seeks to engage with the enduring objects, sites of knowledge and expertise that permeate global politics, and to study how ‘the digital’ challenge, rework, or reconfirm existing concepts and registers of power in IR, and with what effects on global political orders.
In particular, we invite contributions from across the different subdisciplines of IR that engage with one of the following research strands:
1. ‘Digitalising’ the International: How does the digital enact the international and how does it remake international relations at the level of politics and policy?
2. ‘Infrastructuring’ the Digital: What are the material, epistemic and organisational practices that underpin ‘the digital’ in global politics?
3. ‘Doing’ Digital IR: How do digital technologies offer new methodological opportunities and multimodal strategies for studying IR?
Abstracts for panels, round tables, or paper submissions can be submitted until February 19th, via the EISA website. For more information on the section or format, see this link (S41), or send an email to jasper.vanderkist@uantwerpen.be
