Monday 23 April 2012

Conference RSVP

Dear all


Just to remind you that the conference THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL IN DISCOURSES OF STATE-BUILDING is now drawing closer.


The event starts at 9.00am (registration 8.30am) on Friday 27th. Venue: The Boardroom, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW.



Please RSVP at:


http://statebuildingconference.eventbrite.co.uk




Hope you can all make it.




Best wishes
 
The Organisers

Sunday 8 April 2012


CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

POST-GRADUATE CONFERENCE: “THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL IN DISCOURSES OF STATE-BUILDING.” Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster
Fri, 27th of April 2012


Programme

8.30 - 9.00
Registration 

9.00 - 9.15
Welcoming address
Roland Dannreuther, Head of Department 

9.15 - 10.45
Panel 1
Statebuilding and Society: Discursive Formations and Conceptual Approaches

‘Authority vs Transformation: Accounting for Contemporary Statebuilding Through Its Absences’
Marta Iniguez de Herredia (LSE)

‘Building States Without Citizens? Postconflict Societies and Contested Citizenship’
Branka Marijan (Wilfrid Laurier University)

‘State-building as Discursive Formation: A Gendered Project?’
Audrey Reeves (University of Bristol)

‘The Discourse of Unintended Consequences in State-building Research’
Gezim Visoka (Dublin City University)


10.45 - 11.45
Panel 2
The State of Society: Ownership and the Democratization of Power

‘The Rise of the Social and the End(s) of Democracy’
David Chandler (University of Westminster)

‘Ownership Discourses in State-Building’
Dominik Zaum (LSE)


11.45 - 12.00 
Coffee break

12.00 - 1.15
 Panel 3
Working through the Social Question: State-building, ‘realpolitik’ and Material Interests

‘From Bismarck to Petraeus: The Question of the Social and the Social Question in Counterinsurgency’
Patricia Owens, University of Sussex

‘Governance and the Construction of the Social: The Truth behind Intervention and State-building’
Jonathan Joseph, University of Kent

1.15 -2.15 
Lunch break

2.15- 3.45
 Panel 4
Continuity or Change? Sovereignty, Hybridity and Reconstruction

‘Minority Rights in the Process of (Sub)State-building: The EU’s Role in Kosovo and the Question of (Ethnic) Sovereignty’
Marius Calu (Queen Mary)

‘Stability through Good Governance, Prosperity through Self-determination’
Kushtrim Bylykbashi (University of Westminster)

‘Good Governance for Statebuilding in the West Bank, Palestine: Fayyadism, Hybridity and Sovereignty’
Alaa Tartir (LSE)

‘From Post-Conflict to Post-Disaster Statebuilding: The Case of Haiti’
Zoi Vardanika (University of Reading)


3.45 - 4.00 
Coffee break

4.00 - 5.30
 Panel 5
Therapy, Justice and Self-Determination: Lessons from the Balkans - Dilemmas of State-building

‘Therapeutic Statebuilding: International Trauma Advocacy and Croatian Veteran Politics’
Vanessa Pupavac, University of Nottingham
‘Serbian Civil Society as an Exclusionary Space: NGOs, the Public and "Coming to Terms with the Past"’
Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Aston University
‘Self-Determination in Theory and Practice: Lessons from the Balkans’
James Ker-Lindsay


5.30- 5.45
Closing remarks
Elisa Randazzo, Pol Bargués, Jessica Schmidt


5.45
Reception

Conference Venue:
The Boardroom 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Call For Papers now Closed!

Dear all,

Please note that the call for paper is now closed.

Successful applicants will be notified by March 5th 2012. Please note that we are unable to notify unsuccessful applicants. 

More information on the final conference plan will be posted on this blog in the next few days.

The conference will be held on the 27th of April 2012 at the Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street W1B 2UW.

Kind regards,

The organisers.

Thursday 2 February 2012






POST-GRADUATE CONFERENCE:
“THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL IN DISCOURSES OF STATE-BUILDING.”


The Department of Politics and International Relations,

University of Westminster, are hosting a Post-Graduate conference on

“The Social and the Political in Discourses of State-Building”

on the 27th of April 2012.

Guest Speakers:

Professor David Chandler, University of Westminster

Dr. James Ker-Lindsay, London School of Economics

Dr. Patricia Owens, University of Sussex

Professor Oliver Richmond, University of St Andrews (tbc)

Dr. Jonathan Joseph, University of Kent

Dr. Dominik Zaum, University of Reading

Dr. Vanessa Pupavac, University of Nottingham

Dr. Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Aston University


Conference Venue:

The Boardroom, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW, University of Westminster.

The Organisers:

Elisa Randazzo, Pol Bargués, Jessica Schmidt,

Dr. Aidan Hehir and Professor David Chandler

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster


If you wish to present a paper, please email 

a 300 word proposal and a short biographical note to

 randazzoelisa @ gmail.com or polbargues @ gmail.com

by the 27th February 2012.

Successful applicants will be notified 

by 5th of March 2012.





CALL FOR PAPERS

In particular we seek papers that broadly

address the following issues:



* “Beyond Liberal Peace-building”:

How have sociologically informed critiques shaped contemporary

practices of state-building in post-conflict territories?



* “Good Governance vs Self-Determination”:

Is sovereignty functional capacity or formal

right to self-government?



* “The Future of Democracy Promotion”:

How have framings of democracy as social empowerment shaped

policy approaches to security and development?



* “Intervention in the Post-institutionalisation Era”:

How have claims of prevention, empowerment and capacity-building

shifted discussion to the social rather than legal/political terrain?



* “Agency International and Local”:

How do concepts such as hybridity and resistance

engage social and political understandings?



* “The Future of State-building”:

Does the shift to sociological framings limit

or enable critical approaches to state-building?

In addition to the issues raised the conference organisers are happy to receive any original submission around the subject of the rise of the social in discourses of state-building.

CONFERENCE THEME 

This conference, aimed specifically at post- graduate students, aims to discuss and analyse the shift from the political/legal discussions of humanitarian intervention, prevalent in the 1990s, to sociological discussions of state-building intervention today. Some of the core conceptual themes of state-building, which we wish to investigate, appear to have a social or sociological framing. For example, sovereignty is increasingly understood in terms of functional capacity rather than formal rights to self-government. Through the sociological shift, state-building interventions are seen to build sovereignty rather than undermine it. Similarly, democracy and its development are increasingly understood to be social processes of empowering or capacity-building citizens through intervention in the social realm of civil society. We want to discuss further the problematic of social empowerment and the shift to societal forms of intervention rather than interventions at the level of formal state institutions, now increasingly discredited. Whereas discourses of liberal internationalism forwarded understandings of a global community with global norms, state-building discourses increasingly focus on societal differences of culture, ideologies and social institutional frameworks. The emphasis on such conceptual and methodological themes might concern the turn to biopolitical understandings, the shift from state-based security to societal security under resilience, Arendtian framings of the rise of the social, and emergence of constructivism and sociological institutionalism, other new institutionalist and agent-centred framings in cognitive disciplines such as economics and history.






POST-GRADUATE CONFERENCE:
“THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL IN DISCOURSES OF STATE-BUILDING.”


The Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, are hosting a Post-Graduate conference on “ The Social and the Political in Discourses of State- Building” on the 27th of April 2012. 


The conference will be held at the Boardroom, Regent Campus, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW (nearest tube station: Oxford Circus).




The Call for Papers will be out tomorrow!