Talks 2018 – 2023

Faculty seminar presentation, ‘The Anthropocene Otherwise: Three Modes of Refusing to Save the World’, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

Abstract: This talk considers three modes of refusing the Anthropocene. Refusing the call to suborn ourselves to saving the world. Refusing the demand to unite in the cause of halting global climate change. This presentation will discuss three recent books as exemplars of distinct modes of refusal. The first paradigm, that of ‘liberal’ refusal reads Jairus Grove’s Savage Ecology as a call for living with climate insecurity in a spirit of speculative openness, realising that ‘the end of the world is not the end of everything’. The second paradigm reads Malcolm Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology as an exemplar of ‘decolonial’ refusal, arguing that reparation for colonialism and racial capitalism needs to come before there can be a shared global horizon of climate crisis. The final paradigm, that of ‘negativation’, reads Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt to argue against both a politics of worldly repair and a politics of speculative openness and insists instead upon ending this world.

28-30 September 2022 Climate Security: Toward a critical conceptualization, University of Hamburg

Wednesday, 28 September 2022

16:00 – 17:00 Troubling climate security I: Racism and the limits of critique
Jason Cons, University of Texas at Austin – The Unbearable Whiteness of Climate Security David Chandler,  University of Westminster – Climate Security: Refusing the Lure of Critique Discussant,  Christine Hentschel, University of Hamburg

Abstract: This paper examines the importance of refusing the lure of critically conceptualizing ‘climate security’. It suggests the desire to critically conceptualize contributes to a hegemonic discourse in which ‘climate security’ becomes reified as an ontological ground for ethico-political interventions through which harmonious cooperation becomes an existential necessity. There are three problems with this: 1) climate security is in itself a problematic starting point, expressing the fetishization of a shared, potentially harmonious world, thereby offering legitimacy to new forms of governance and regulation 2) critical conceptualizations of this framing necessarily tend to reinforce this discourse of harmony as a futural ground from which less critical framings can be challenged; paradoxically reinforcing and often extending harmonious visions and understandings beyond the human into more-than-human constructions of co-constitution and interdependency 3) critical conceptualizing of climate change legitimizes a discursive field in which harmonious futures inevitably paper over, obscure or disavow understandings which politically prioritise structural and ontological division. Rather than start with metaphysical assumptions of the futural possibility of a shared world, this paper ‘theorises against the grain’ to analyse how these assumptions of ‘world’ are materially and ideationally grounded on real histories of chattel slavery, indigenous dispossession, coloniality and racial capitalism. Thus, the point is not to critically conceptualize ‘climate security’ via enlarged understandings of community and relation but to problematise the fetishized understanding of a shared world that grounds and drives the ethico-political desire for a critical conceptualization of climate change. Draft paper available here.

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1-4 September 2022. 15th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Pandaemonium: Interrogating the Apocalyptic Imaginaries of Our Time, Panteion University, 136 Syngrou Av. Athens, Greece.

Co-convening with Delf Rothe Section ST09 – International Relations in the Anthropocene Draft section programme also attending International Political Design draft section programme

Thursday 1 September

Friday 2 September

09:00 – 10:45 Seminar B5 – From the global to the planetary: Political orders, power and agency the Anthropocene – Chair, Gitte Du Plessis, Finland; Discussant, Christine Hentschel, Germany; Presenters: Friederike Teller, ‘Which narratives help us to encounter and challenge the anthropocene within the cosmopolitical pluriverse?’, University of Applied Arts, Cross-Disciplinary Strategies, Vienna Austria, Germany; David Chandler, “The only thing in the world that’s worth beginning: the end of the world”: Critique and disavowal in the Anthropocene’, Westminster, Social Sciences, London, United Kingdom; Farai Chipato, ‘Black planetary geographies: race, space and ontology in the Anthropocene’, University of Glasgow, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, Glasgow, United Kingdom; Maximilian Lakitsch, ‘Peace and Power in an Entangled World’, University of Graz, Department of Global Governance Institute of the Foundations of Law, Graz, Austria

Abstract: “The only thing in the world that’s worth beginning: the end of the world”: Critique and disavowal in the Anthropocene. This paper seeks to question what could be understood as a growing consensus on the need to ‘end the world’. For critique, the need to end the world of the modern ontology is understood as resisting the politics of climate change emergency which seeks to sustain the world of capitalism and coloniality. This resistance is most often posed in terms of moving beyond the ontological separation of the human from the world, the framework of human exceptionalism and the liberal rationalist understanding of the individual. However, this demand to end the world and to move beyond the human has been seen to be one of disavowal. Axelle Karera, in her 2019 article, ‘Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics’ points to the problem that relational and posthuman ontologies of entanglement after ‘the end of the world’ still very much keep the human as subject and the world (and its antiblackness) in place. This paper thus asks what it would mean (and whether it is even possible) to work for the ‘end of the world’ without reproducing the subject and the world in problematic posthuman ways. I think the first step towards critique is the location of the subject and ‘the world’ as historical and ideational constructs, challenging the ‘ontological’ turn’s assumptions of alternative ways of grasping the ‘Real’. The second step might be to understand the subject and the world as constituted through a problematic set of cuts, divisions and exclusions: that the work of ontology is necessarily that of ‘antiblackness’. Perhaps the third step is that of refusing ontology or perhaps this is already beginning the work of ending the world.

Sunday 4 September 2022

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6-9 July 2022. 9th European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) The Interconnected Worlds of the Past and the Present: Co-constituting the International, Thessaloniki, Greece

I will be presenting a draft paper ‘Three Modes of Hope after the End of the World: Speculative, Pragmatic and Nihilist’ at the Crisis and Hope in International Relations workshop convened by Pol Bargues-Pedreny and Valerie Waldow (draft programme)

Abstract: This paper explores hope as a dominant framing for critical social theory in the era of the Anthropocene. It suggests that with the dissolution of modernist assumptions of human exceptionality, universal causality and temporal progress, critical social theory can be understood as having shifted fields. This shift is from the field of appearances, the ontic world of politics (of rational subjects, instrumental rationality and aspirations of progress), to the field of ontology (towards approaches which can be understood as working with or drawing upon a world beyond or below appearances). It will be argued that the Anthropocene is central to this shift from the centrality of questions of politics to those of hope. This is because the Anthropocene is seen to have emerged behind the backs of political reason, unseen and unintended (Chakrabarty 2021). Timothy Morton (2013) refers to this as the age of Hyperobjects, entities that we cannot grasp as we are entangled with them rather than observing from afar. If the Anthropocene as a condition is the product of the narrow reductiveness of the world as grasped in the modern ontology then access to a world beyond or other to this is necessary. The different forms of hope that will be engaged with in this paper articulate distinct understandings of this ‘other world’ beyond appearances. Full draft available here.

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9-11 June 2022

I will be giving the opening paper ‘Thought’s Journey to the End of the World: Resilience as an analytical and conceptual tool’, for the workshop ‘Resilience in the Post-COVID-19 World Disorder’, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Italy. Draft programme.

Abstract: This initial draft paper is about the resilience of Thought and the thought of Resilience. Thought’s need to adapt itself to the world – thought’s resilience – makes the ways in which we think about resilience a key indicator of changes in contemporary subjectivities. As we know from the work of critical sociologists from WEB Du Bois to Theodore Adorno, contemporary subjectivities appear to assert themselves over individual human beings (who cannot but be influenced) but at the same time, they operate through individuals pursuing their own interests and understandings (for example, Adorno 2006:26). Thus, subjectivities are not formed through open conscious processes of reflection or deliberation nor are they imposed upon us by any external or metaphysical force. This presents us with the question of thought as the object for thought. This is the question at the heart of the dialectical method. Draft available here.

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Thursday 21 April 2022

I will be introducing Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997) at the Anthropocene Islands reading group. Full details and Zoom link here.

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28 March – 2 April 2022. International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

Thursday 31 March 2022

BISA reception, 7.30pm in the Jackson E room.

Friday 1 April 2022

FA23: Pandemics and New Philosophies of International Relations 8:15 AM – 10:00 AM, Cheekwood B, Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center

Chair: Jonathan Joseph (University of Bristol)
Discussant: Laura Zanotti (Virginia Tech)

Abstract and Keywords: This panel looks at the impact COVID-19 has had on notions of science, progress, state intervention, expert knowledge systems, ecological systems, human and non-human agency, linearity and complex systems. The pandemic highlights these in various ways as well as making us reconsider some of them. We consider how the pandemic continues existing trends in governance under the Anthropocene, two papers building on the idea of non-human actants playing a role in this re-fashioning of governance. Other papers wonder whether the pandemic throws governance into crisis and thus undermines these prevailing trends. We engage with theories like biopolitics and governmentality while also criticising neoliberal methods of governing. These have been exposed during the pandemic as health systems struggle under the burden of cases and shortages of equipment. Ideas like resilience, which encourage people to be prepared for emergencies, have also been seen to fall short. Yet, as the paper on indigenous peoples makes clear, there is still room for a politics of hope. What is certain is that the pandemic highlights the challenges faced in responding to a complex world with multiple actors and actants. We draw on a diverse set of philosophical arguments to think through these challenges.

Pandemic clouds. Biocultural mattering all the way down and becoming with SARS CoV-2 Nadine Voelkner (University of Groningen); COVID-19: The Process Ethics of Anthropocene Authoritarianism David Chandler (University of Westminster); Were we ever resilient? Assessing resilience in the wake of Covid- 19 Christopher R. Zebrowski (Loughborough University) and Ksenia Chmutina (Loughborough University); Spectres of COVID-19: Understanding the Pandemic Through Derrida Jonathan Joseph (University of Bristol;) Hopeful resilience? Arctic indigenous peoples and the politics of pandemics Marjo Lindroth (University of Lapland) and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen (University of Lapland)

Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding reception, 6.00pm The Library

Saturday 2 April 2022

SA12: Legacies of Modernity 8:15 AM – 10:00 AM, Lincoln A, Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center

Chair: David Chandler (University of Westminster)
Discussant: Jennifer Leigh Lawrence (Virginia Tech)

Abstract and Keywords: This panel examines the interplay of modernist/ non-modernist assumptions in contemporary international theory and policy-practice. This is an exciting but also confusing time for academics and policy-advocates, with the recognition that many of the discipline’s grounding assumptions have lost their unquestioned authority but yet the normative goals of problem-solving (although often attenuated) remain in place. We see this across the theoretical and policy areas of the discipline, with the rise of more mediated and differentiated approaches and rejection of universalist or centralised framings, as the focus shifts towards understanding more complex or entangled relations where unintended consequences or side-effects of policy interventions proliferate. We seek to ‘stay with the trouble’ of modernity in this apparent time of transition to a ‘beyond’ or ‘post’, increasingly labelled the Anthropocene.

Governing Immanence in the Anthropocene: Becoming ‘With’ and Being ‘Within’
David Chandler (University of Westminster); Disentanglement in the Anthropocene
Stephanie Wakefield (Life University); Energizing Extinction: Petrocapitalism and Zombie Energy Jennifer Leigh Lawrence (Virginia Tech); Spinoza’s Amodernity: Heterotopias of the Universal Human Garnet Kindervater (Fordham University);
Outsides of Modernity or Catastrophic Pathologies Geoffrey A. Whitehall (Acadia University)

2021

Thursday 25 November 2021

4.00-6.00pm CET Leading online training seminar on ‘Post-humanism and its methodological challenges’, for the series ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Epistemology, Theory and Method’. The aim of which is to delve deeper into the philosophy and epistemology of social sciences in relation to research methodology and to answer questions such as: How do our epistemological priors influence the methods we employ and the way we conduct our research? What comes first – epistemology, methods or both? Can we mix epistemologies according to our research questions? Qualitative and Fieldwork Working Group, Department of Political & Social Sciences, European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy.

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Friday 12 November 2021

As external examiner for the MA International Relations, I will attend the autumn exam board of the Department of Social Sciences, Richmond, the American International University in London

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6-7 November 2021, Global Anthropocene: Free Virtual International Conference of the Philippines International Studies Organization

Sunday 7 November 2021

Plenary closing session and book launch for Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds Authors: Jonathan Pugh, David Chandler Book is free. Download here: t.ly/rxP4. 

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Wednesday 3 November 2021

3.00-4.30pm ‘Security in the Anthropocene’, presentation for online workshop/ seminar, with Pinar Bilgin and Can Mutlu, for the Politics of Security course, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield.

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Friday 15 October 2021

5pm start. Book launch for Ignasi Torrent’s Entangled Peace: UN Peacebuilding and the Limits of a Relational World, The Wild Card Brewery, 2 Lockwood Way, Walthamstow, London E17 5RB.

Presentation panel with professor David Chandler, University of Westminster, and the author, Dr Ignasi Torrent, University of Hertfordshire. Followed by a reception with live DJs. Taproom with craft beer open all through the event. Book discount code for attendees, provided by Rowman and Littlefield.

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Thursday 30 September 2021

International Advisory Board online meeting, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague.

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13-17 September 2021, European International Studies Association (EISA) 14th Pan-European Conference on International Relations ‘The Power Politics of Nature’, Virtual Conference

Monday 13 September 2021

11:00 – 12:30 (BST+1) Room 9 After Nature: Critique, Affirmation and Hope I

Under the title ‘After Nature: Critique, Affirmation and Hope’, this double panel discusses recent demands to (re)think critique in the Anthropocene, where nature cannot be thought as a whole or separated from society. We explore perspectives that welcome the Anthropocene as an opportunity for a radicalisation of critique (and reinvigoration of IR). These include, for example, those who affirm the crisis and end of modernist form of politics, or those who start from non-western ways of being entangled with nature. Is it hope what unites these perspectives or in the Anthropocene we find ourselves in a hopeless world? In essence, a key question for the double panel is how to ground and practice critique today. To sustain a dialogue between these increasingly diverging perspectives one of the panels is planned to be part of the ‘Crisis and Critique’ section (S04). The other one will be part of the section on ‘International Relations in the Anthropocene’

Chair Pol Bargués-Pedreny, Spain. Panelists: Pol Bargués-Pedreny, CIDOB Barcelona Centre for International Relations, Spain, D. Chandler University of Westminster, Department of Politics and International Relations, London, United Kingdom, S. Schindler Goethe University Frankfurt, Normative Orders, Frankfurt, Germany, V. Waldow University of Magdeburg, Political Science, Magdeburg, Germany. Hope after the end of the world: Rethinking critique in the Anthropocene; Srishti Malaviya, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for International Politics Organisation and Disarmament, Dehli, India Body as Critique; Heidi Sinevaar-Niskanen,University of Lapland, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland Politics of Hope in Indigenous-State relations; Harshavardhan Bhat, University of Westminster, Department of Architecture, London, United Kingdom De____________ or what is to be done with hope?

Tuesday 14 September 2021

11:00 – 12:30 (BST+1) Room 4 Teaching IR in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene does not only challenge existing forms of governance and international politics but also the way International Relations is tought. Teaching IR in the Anthropocene cannot simply mean to adding climate change to an existing list of crises in our disciplinary curricula. If established knowledge practices fail to grasp with the transformations that are discussed under the label of the Anthropocene, this includes our established ways of teaching IR. Drawing on the forthcoming textbook “International Relations in the Anthropocene: New actors, new agencies and new approaches”, the roundtable explores new avenues of teaching IR. How can we decolonize and pluralize our classrooms when teaching IR in the Anthropocene? How can we teach new methods and approaches? How do we deal with issues of complexity and entanglement in non-reductionist ways? How can we transcend disciplinary boundaries, if these are prescribed by faculties and study programs? These and similar questions will be addressed by the roundtable participants.

Chair Delf Rothe, Germany Discussant Delf Rothe, Germany Roundtable Participants:
David Chandler, United Kingdom; Maria Julia Trombetta, China; Judith Nora Hardt, Germany; Harshavardhan Bhat, United Kingdom

Wednesday 15 September 2021

11:00 – 12:30 (BST+1) Room 11 After Nature: Critique, Affirmation and Hope II

Under the umbrella ‘After Nature: Critique, Affirmation and Hope’ we want to engage in this double panel with recent demands to (re)think critique in the Anthropocene. This includes both perspectives which welcome the Anthropocene as an opportunity for a radicalisation of critique (and thinking of IR), even including an affirmation of its crisis, and the sceptical and critical accounts of the new epoch. In essence the question is how to ground and practice critique today. Hope will be one central framing to address these issues. To sustain a dialogue between these increasingly diverging perspectives one of the panels is planned to be part of the ‘Crisis and Critique’ section (S04). The other one will be part of the section on ‘International Relations in the Anthropocene’

Chair David Chandler, United Kingdom; Panelists: Pol Bargués-Pedreny, CIDOB Barcelona Centre for International Relations, Spain, D. Chandler University of Westminster, Department of Politics and International Relations, London, United Kingdom, S. Schindler Goethe University Frankfurt, Normative Orders, Frankfurt, Germany, V. Waldow University of Magdeburg, Political Science, Magdeburg, Germany. Hope after the end of the world: Rethinking critique in the Anthropocene; A. Causevic,  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere Programme, Stockholm, Sweden, Claes Tängh Wrangel, Mälardalen University, School of Business Society and Engineering, Västerås, Sweden Beyond the Denial/Acknowledge Dichotomy: Critical International Relations and the Anthropocene; Ignasi Torrent Oliva, University of Hertfordshire, School of Humanities, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom Negotiated Worlds; Valerie Waldow, University of Magdeburg, Institute of Political Science, Magdeburg, Germany For all Futility: Hope at the End of Critique

13:30 – 15:00 (BST+1) Room 8 Rethinking Security in the Anthropocene

Chair David Chandler, United Kingdom; Panellists:  Delf Rothe, Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Germany Oh Resilience, Where Art Thou? (In)visibilities of resilience in the Anthropocene City; Omayma Al-Khaffaf, The University of Manchester, Politics, Manchester, United Kingdom “Seeing IR Anew: Covid-19 and the Anthroposcenic Shattering of Rationalist Orthodoxy”; Maria Julia Trombetta, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, International Studies, Ningbo, China Rethinking security in the Anthropocene: Moving beyond environmental security; Dustin Breitling, Institute of Political Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic ‘The Stackocene’; Katinka Wijsman, New School for Social Research, Politics, New York City, USA Resilience Imaginaries and Political Creativity: The Politics of Engineering and Design in Assembling a Climate-Resilient Coast in New York City.

Friday 17 September 2021

15:30 – 17:00 (BST+1) Room 8 War and Peace in Posthuman International Relations

This roundtable is organised around the core topic of the section. It will explore the future directions of war and peace and interrogate if these two core terms of international relations will remain relevant for the international system and the discipline in the Anthropocene and the related shift to the posthuman condition.

Chair Jan Pospisil, Austria; Roundtable Participants: Jan Pospisil, Austria; Elisa Randazzo, United Kingdom; David Chandler, United Kingdom; Pol Bargués-Pedreny, Spain

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31 August – 3 September 2021, Royal Geographical Society with IBG Annual International Conference

Thursday 2 September 2021

Anthropocene Islands (1): Entangled Worlds – panel discussion (##conf1185) 

3.00-4.40pm BST Virtual Stage 6

AUTHORS: Jonathan Pugh – Presenting ⚑ United Kingdom – School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University; David Chandler – Presenting ⚑ United Kingdom – University of Westminster; Amina Ghezal – Presenting ⚑ United Kingdom – University of Exeter; Delilah Griswold – Presenting ⚑ United States – Cornell University; Jamie Lorimer – Presenting ⚑ United Kingdom – University of Oxford, UK; Kevin Grove – Presenting ⚑ United States – Florida International University; Stephanie Wakefield – Presenting ⚑ United States – Life University; Michele Lobo – Presenting ⚑ Australia – School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne; Elizabeth DeLoughrey – Presenting ⚑ United States – UCLA

ABSTRACT: This session will launch and discuss the book ‘Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds’ (Pugh and Chandler, 2021, University of Westminster Press). The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit. ‘Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds’ explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene. This agenda is being further developed through the ‘Anthropocene Islands’ initiative: Anthropoceneislands.online.

Anthropocene Islands (2) – panel discussion (##conf1185) 

5.00-6.40pm BST Virtual Stage 6

CHAIRED BY: Jonathan Pugh ⚑ United Kingdom – School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University; David Chandler ⚑ United Kingdom – University of Westminster

DESCRIPTION: The small island is one of the most emblematic and symbolic figures of the Anthropocene. In the media, academia and international policy-making, small islands are one of the most high-profile figures for debates about global warming, sea level rise, intensifying disasters such as hurricanes, the vast accumulations of plastics in surrounding oceans, and nuclear fallout. Just as notable, islands have become key sites for a whole range of different approaches to philosophy, politics and ethics in the Anthropocene; from islands often being at the centre of contemporary debates about resilience and indigeneity, to newly emerging speculative ontologies and technologies for correlating to the forces of the Anthropocene. This explicitly positions the figure of the island in the Anthropocene at the centre of a wide range of key contemporary cross-disciplinary debates that cut across many intellectual concerns and practices. The presentations in these TWO sessions will address some or all of the following three key questions: 1) Why has the figure of the island emerged as one of the most emblematic figures of the Anthropocene? 2) How are islands being reconfigured and appropriated in debates about the Anthropocene? 3) Given the centrality of the figure of the island, what does this reconfiguring of islands in the Anthropocene tell us about how the stakes of the Anthropocene itself are more broadly being approached and engaged?

The story of the moving island: the island and migration debate in the age of the Anthropocene – Amina Ghezal (⚑ United Kingdom – University of Exeter); Riding the private wave: The Caribbean post-disaster anthropocene – Ian Bennett (⚑ Bahamas – University of Bahamas); Sea Level Rise and the Temporalities of Islands in the Anthropocene: The Sinking/Growing/Artificial Islands of Tuvalu; Liam Saddington (⚑ United Kingdom – University of Oxford); Rifts, Shifts and Fetishes in the Energy Islandscapes of the Anthropocene – Steven Harry (⚑ United Kingdom – King’s College London); Antinomies of Mangroves: The politics of landlessness and nature-based climate adaptation in Fiji – Delilah Griswold (⚑ United States – Cornell University)

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Thursday 15 July 2021

I will be examining the PhD thesis ‘Agency is Molecular: Moved by being moved to moving or co-constitution in intra-active knowledge production’, Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media (CREAM), School of Arts, University of Westminster.

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Wednesday 16 June 2021

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6-9 April 2021, International Studies Association (ISA) 2021 Annual Convention: Globalization, Regionalism and Nationalism: Contending Forces in World Politics

Tuesday 6 April 2021

11:00 AM – 12:15 PM (EDT) (4.00 PM – 5.15 PM BST) TC12: Local Peacebuilding in a Globalized World Columbia, ISA Virtual Platform

Participants: Chair: Séverine Autesserre (Barnard College, Columbia University); Oliver Richmond (University of Manchester); Séverine Autesserre (Barnard College, Columbia University); David Chandler (University of Westminster); Peace A. Medie (University of Bristol); Sarah Njeri (Humanitarian Policy Group, Overseas Development Institute)
Participant: Roger Mac Ginty (Durham University)

Abstract: Leaders of the “liberal international order” routinely seek to build peace through top-down efforts that bring together elites and cost millions of dollars—and they regularly fail. Among scholars and practitioners, there is an emerging consensus that bottom-up conflict resolution is crucial to controlling violence in many conflict zones. However, many questions remain central to both scholarly debates and actual practice. How can international actors effectively support local peacebuilding? Should they actually do so? What can the residents of ostensibly peaceful countries like the United States learn from peacebuilding efforts abroad in order to address the issues that divide their own communities? This roundtable brings together some of the most important thinkers—and actors—in what has been called “the local turn in peacebuilding research.” They will answer these questions—and more—by analyzing the evolution of the international peace architecture (Richmond), discussing cases of successful international support to bottom-up peacebuilding (Autesserre, Mathews), probing the implementation and the co-optation of global norms (Medie, Njeri), and exploring issues of scale, temporality, and conceptualization of ‘peace and conflict’ (Mac Ginty, Chandler).

Wednesday 7 April 2021

8:00 PM – 9:15 PM (EDT) (1.00 AM – 2.15 AM BST) WI39: Afterlives of Modernity 1 Amazon, ISA Virtual Platform

Chair: Jennifer Leigh Lawrence (Virginia Tech) Papers: In Defense of Paradigms, Kevin Narizny (Lehigh University); ‘If Not This, then What?’ Cassirer, Post-Structuralism and Ethics in a Post-Truth World, Mark I. Bailey (University of Nottingham, Ningbo); Governing Immanence in the Anthropocene: Becoming ‘With’ and Being ‘Within’, David Chandler (University of Westminster); Pistols at Dawn, Five Minutes to Midnight: Firearms Analogies and American Nuclear Strategy, Jamie Levin (St. Francis Xavier University) and Joseph MacKay (Australian National University); The Future of Nuclear Energy in a World of Climate Change, Regina Axelrod (Adelphi University)

Abstract: We seek to examine the interplay of modernist/ non-modernist assumptions in contemporary international theory and policy-practice. This is an exciting but also confusing time for academics and policy-advocates, with the recognition that many of the discipline’s grounding assumptions have lost their unquestioned authority but yet the normative goals of problem-solving (although often attenuated) remain in place. We see this across the theoretical and policy areas of the discipline, with the rise of more mediated and differentiated approaches and rejection of universalist or centralised framings, as the focus shifts towards understanding more complex or entangled relations where unintended consequences or side-effects of policy interventions proliferate. We seek to ‘stay with the trouble’ of modernity in this apparent time of transition to a ‘beyond’ or ‘post’, increasingly labelled the Anthropocene. Questions we would be interested in pursuing include but are not limited to: How might collective or pluriversal identities be enabling in a world of increasing differentiation? What does it mean to talk about or aspire to ‘freedom’, ‘emancipation’ or ‘sovereignty’ in a world of entangled dependencies? How can politics and governance work or remain instrumentally meaningful if we no longer inhabit a ‘one world world’ of universal or linear causality?

Thursday 8 April 2021

9:30 AM – 10:45 AM (EDT) (2.30 PM – 3.45 PM BST) RB38: Afterlives of Modernity 2: After the Human Congo, ISA Virtual Platform

Chair: David Chandler (University of Westminster); Discussant: Jennifer Leigh Lawrence (Virginia Tech); Papers: Energizing Extinction: Petrocapitalism and Zombie Energy, Jennifer Leigh Lawrence (Virginia Tech); Modernity, Climate Change, and the Universal Human: Life in the Anthropocene, Garnet Kindervater (Fordham University);
Reflections on the Afterlives of Modernity, David Chandler (University of Westminster), Jennifer Leigh Lawrence (Virginia Tech); The Afterlife of Modernity is Animal, Geoffrey A. Whitehall (Acadia University)

Abstract: This panel examines the interplay of modernist/ non-modernist assumptions in contemporary international theory and policy-practice. This is an exciting but also confusing time for academics and policy-advocates, with the recognition that many of the discipline’s grounding assumptions have lost their unquestioned authority but yet the normative goals of problem-solving (although often attenuated) remain in place. We see this across the theoretical and policy areas of the discipline, with the rise of more mediated and differentiated approaches and rejection of universalist or centralised framings, as the focus shifts towards understanding more complex or entangled relations where unintended consequences or side-effects of policy interventions proliferate. We seek to ‘stay with the trouble’ of modernity in this apparent time of transition to a ‘beyond’ or ‘post’, increasingly labelled the Anthropocene.

Friday 9 April 2021

8:00 AM – 9:15 AM (EDT) (1.00 PM – 2.15 PM BST) FA40: Automated Security: The Role of Algorithms, AI and Big Data in the Knowledge Production of International Security Brahmaputra, ISA Virtual Platform

Chair: David Chandler (University of Westminster); Discussant: Renee E. Marlin-Bennett (Johns Hopkins University); Papers: Seeing with Machine Eyes? Cybersecurity as a Socio-technical Assemblage, Lilly muller (Kings College London); Automating Cybersecurity Assessment, Rebecca Slayton (Cornell University); Computer Says Prevent: Knowing and Governing Armed Conflict through Digital Technologies, Johanna Rodehau-Noack (London School of Economics and Political Science); Biology, Big Data, and Bioinsecurities: Illuminating the International Security Implications of Changing Epistemic Frameworks in the Life Sciences, Rebecca J. Hester (Virginia Tech); The Life Cycle of an Algorithm: Agents and Agency in Predictive Policing, Mareile Kaufmann (Peace Research Institute Oslo

Abstract: Emerging technologies do not only facilitate and accelerate data generation, analysis and dissemination but enable new ways of determining risks and recognizing threats. State agencies, international organizations and non-state actors increasingly make use of technologies to detect, assess, manage, and avert security threats, ranging from financial crashes, to climate crisis, conflict escalation or cyber-attacks. Socio-technological imaginaries emerge where knowledge production processes of state agencies and non-state actors intersect with technological developments and manifest as political assemblages of code, data points, algorithms, interveners, attackers and protectors impacting global politics. This panel explores the role of algorithms, Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the processes of knowledge production on security. It combines a range of perspectives at the intersection between International Relations, Critical Security Studies and STS that critically enquire into the agency of such technology in the construction of ‘risk’, ‘threats’ and ‘insecurity’. The five papers build on diverse empirical material of different applications of semi- or fully independent technologies, ranging from cybersecurity, to conflict forecasting, predictive policing and the determination of bioinsecurities.

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Friday 19 March 2021

2.00 – 3.00PM I’ll be running a discussion on ‘The Coloniality of Being’ for staff members of the Criminology Department, University of Westminster.

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Thursday 18 March 2021

2.30 – 4.30 (CEST) (1.30 – 3.30 GMT) ‘The Rise of Resilience: From Bouncing Back to Bouncing Forwards’, seminar for “Disasters and Local Resilience” (“Catastrophes et résilience territoriale”), French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Sciences Po, Rennes.

Nous avons le plaisir de vous convier à la 3ème séance du cycle de séminaires ‘politiques de l’après : catastrophes & résilience territoriale’. Ce cycle de conférences est organisé par la chaire TMAP de sciences Po Rennes, en partenariat avec le laboratoire arènes (UMR 6051) et VEOLIA. Pour cette 3ème séance en ligne (via zoom), nous accueillerons David Chandler, professeur de relations internationales à l’Université de Westminster (Royaume-Uni). Il est l’auteur, entre autres de: Resilience: the governance of complexity (Routledge, 2014); Resilience in the Anthropocene: governance and politics at the end of world (Routledge, 2020). Il a aussi dirigé la revue Resilience journal entre 2013 et 2019. Comme pour les deux premières séances, la participation à la conférence nécessite une inscription préalable à partir de ce lien.

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Friday 12 March 2021

10.00 – 11.00PM. I will be presenting on ‘Anthropocene Islands’ with Jonathan Pugh, University of Newcastle, discussing our forthcoming book, for the coffee morning, Arts, Communication and Culture Research Community, University of Westminster.

Prof David Chandler (UoW, Professor of International Relations) and Dr Jonathan Pugh (University of Newcastle, Reader in Island Studies) will be discussing their new book Anthropocene Islands, Entangled Worlds, published by the University of Westminster Press. David and Jonathan will talk about their collaboration in exploring these far reaching issues, starting with the question of how islands serve as a gateway for their thinking about entangled worlds. They will also consider how different forms of entanglement can be productively worked with for developing new approaches and imaginaries.Please sign up using via EventBrite link above.

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Tuesday 9 March 2021

5.00 – 6.30 PM Chairing Olivia Rutazibwa, ‘Engaging Sankara on the Ruins of Epistemicide’, Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) seminar series, University of Westminster.

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Saturday 20 February 2021 HowTheLightGetsIn Winter Revel

10.30-12.00 Debates & Talks: The Hypocrisy of the Good

Julian Baggini, David Chandler, Ece Temelkuran. Myriam Francois hosts.
From fervent socialists to devout Christians, many have sought to live by a strict moral code. Yet from the gulags to the Inquisition it has often been those with the strictest codes who have perpetrated the greatest crimes. Is this just accidental, or is there something about a strict morality that makes hypocrisy unavoidable? Should we see such terrible outcomes as a sign of the frailty of humans rather than a threat to the moral principles themselves? Or is it possible that seeking to rigorously and universally enforce any moral code blinds the adherent to the real life consequences? Should we conclude that while a framework of ‘good’ action is valuable, an attempt to subsume all human behaviour within a strict code of rules is not only impossible, but dangerous? Groundbreaking political activist and journalist Ece Temelkuran, Professor of International Relations at Westminster University David Chandler, and renowned philosopher Julian Baggini debate the importance of morality. Hosted by Myriam Francois.

1.30-3.00pm Debates & Talks: Islands and the End of Modernity

Whether it’s the discussion on rising sea levels or nuclear waste, islands have gravitated to the epicentre of the geopolitical zeitgeist. But why are we more interested in islands than ever before? Join Professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, David Chandler as he explores the importance of islands in the Anthropocene. David Chandler is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy.

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Wednesday 27 January 2021

2020

Thursday 17 December 2020

‘No War, No Peace: An Introduction to the Process Ethics of the Anthropocene’, presentation for Annual State of Peacebuilding (StoP) Conference 2020,‘Peace Ethics after the Pandemic: Exploring the Long-term impact of COVID 19 on Peace and Peace Research’, Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR). Programme.

Abstract: This paper argues that the process ethics of the Anthropocene, the ethics of entanglement, necessarily imply that the cuts and binary conceptions necessary to ground concepts of war and peace lack their necessary ontological foundations. In the terminology of security studies, in an entangled world, it is difficult to distinguish the security referent (to be secured) from the security threat. In such a context, the waging of war and the formation of peace dissolve into an open-ended process ethics which increasingly forms the framework for a new moral compass for everyday interactions and a programme of regulatory governance (which I call elsewhere ‘Anthropocene Authoritarianism’). In the Anthropocene, the biggest global threat, catastrophic climate change, appears to be anthropogenically driven – with humanity in the role of both victims and perpetrator. More pointedly, modernity itself is often recast as a story of genocide and ecocide rather than one of progress and development. In fine, entanglements render ethical side-taking and ethical judgements problematic as the binary and reductionist cuts in time and space required increasingly lack resonance with our subjective sensitivities. Full one page abstract.

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2-4 December 2020

I will be presenting online ‘The Black Anthropocene’ a paper in response to Frédéric Neyrat’s keynote, ‘Planetary Sovereignty’, for the ‘Constitutionalizing the Anthropocene’ Workshop, Tilburg Law School, Netherlands.

2 page Abstract available here

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Thursday 24 November 2020

Chairing Elisa Randazzo, ‘Decolonising the Anthropocene: The Politics of Ecology and Indigeneity’, Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) seminar series, University of Westminster.

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16-17 November 2020, Researching Resilience in Islands Conference

This online conference is being organised as part of SUNRISE (Situated UNderstanding of Resilience in Island Societies and Environments), a research project funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council. The project is led by Birkbeck, University of London, in partnership with the University of Malta, University of Mauritius, University of the Sunshine Coast, and University of the West Indies.

Session 2: Theorising ‘islandness’ and ‘resilience’ Monday 16 November 2020 15:00 -17:00
Stacy-ann Robinson, Colby College
Jon Pugh, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University and David Chandler, University of Westminster
Godfrey Baldacchino, Department of Sociology, University of Malta
Laurie Brinklow, Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island Discussion

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Friday 6 November 2020

I will be external examiner for the MA International Relations course exam board, Richmond, the American International University in London.

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Friday 9 October 2020

I will be giving a keynote presentation online ‘Anthropocene Islands: A Critical Agenda for island Studies in the Anthropocene’ with Jonathan Pugh (Newcastle University) at the MA Art and Environment Launch Event, Dublin School Of Creative Arts, Technological University Dublin. Eventbrite details/ tickets.

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7-8 October 2020

Participating online in the International Advisory Board meeting for the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague.

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14-18 September 2020, Royal Anthropological Institute conference: Dialogues Past, Present and Future

Presenting online with Jonathan Pugh, ‘The Anthropocene and the Power of Thinking with Islands’

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9-11 September 2020, European International Studies Association (EISA) Virtual Conference 2020. ‘Knowledge Practices and Academic Community: Keeping the Fire Going in the Times of Corona’

Day 2: 10 September 2020: 1700-190 hrs (CET) – Round Table on ‘Precarity in Academia’

Chair: Ritu Vij (University of Aberdeen)

Panelists: Anna Agathangelou (York University); Liberty Chee (Independent Scholar); David Chandler (University of Westminster); João Pontes Nogueira (Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro); Matt Davies (Newcastle University); Jayati Srivastava (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/96940323674?pwd=SjNRbjZOUnVnN2haL3lkRm1oWSs1dz09

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Thursday 16 July 2020

Presenting online a discussion paper on the ‘Relations of Community Approach’, COMPASS work-in-progress seminar.

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Thursday 18 June 2020

Discussant for Nargis Nurulla-Khodzhaeva (Moscow State University) ‘Invitations from Sufi-Hamsoya to redefine our common (de-)colonization’, COMPASS Special Issue 2nd writing-up workshop ‘Hamsoya – United in Shadows’: The making of Resilient Communities in Central Eurasia,

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Wednesday 17 June 2020 

External examiner for the Master programme in Politics and International Relations, Richmond University (the American International University in London).

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Tuesday 28 April 2020 

External representative on the Politics and International Relations Periodic Programme Review panel, New College of the Humanities, London.

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23-24 April 2020 

‘Becoming Resilient: The “Right to Opacity” as the Foundation of “Relations of Community”‘, presentation for COMPASS Special Issue writing-up workshop, ‘Hamsoya -united in shadows’: the making of resilient communities in Central Eurasia’, University of Cambridge.

Abstract: For the architects of adaptive governance, community resilience is essential to finding new ways of coping in a world that is threatened by climate tipping points. This paper seeks to highlight the limits of Western views of resilience where communities, imagined to be ‘at risk’ or ‘vulnerable’, are encouraged to practice reactive adaptation or, in policy parlance, ‘to become resilient’. Resilience is thereby understood as the capacity to be aware of and responsive to feedback effects, bringing emergent processes and interconnections to the transparent surface, acting more rapidly in recognition of potential threats and opportunities. In the Western imaginary, a resilient community is able to self-govern and become empowered through becoming more ‘in touch’ with their ‘reality’: attuning to the economic, social and environmental processes, living harmoniously with change and ameliorating threats and dangers. It would hardly be novel to flag up how this ‘neoliberal’ framing threatens to naturalise or romanticise community strategies for coping at the edge of crisis, promoting self-responsibilisation as ‘self-determination’ and ‘empowerment’. This paper moves the discussion forward, drawing from regional practices – called here ‘relations of community’ – to highlight alternative understandings of resilience, which run very much counter to a Western discourse. Here, it is the recognition of opacity – the refusal to assume a power to direct and control underlying processes; the unwillingness to mechanically read feedback effects into processes of linear causality – that enables communities to enlarge their freedoms and to create space to experiment with new and creative forms of becoming. Opacity is thereby at the centre of enabling relational capacities; ‘the right to opacity’ (Glissant, 1997) is key to the development of both internal and external ‘relations of community’.

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29-30 January 2020

Panelist for the NordForsk Nordic Societal Security Programme scientific committee, Amsterdam.

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Wednesday 15 January 2020

Panelist for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) – UK Department for International Development (DfID) Collaborative Humanitarian Protection Research Programme – Thematic Research Grants moderating panel, Central London.

2019

24-28 November 2019 Cynefin Retreat: Foresight, Snowdonia, Wales

I will part of the faculty for deep exploration on Cynefin, Futures and Foresight. Cynefin Retreats are residential and tickets are inclusive of accommodations, meals, and session activities. Snowdonia Mountain Lodge, Nant Ffrancon, Bethesda, Bangor, Gwynedd
Wales.

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Wednesday 13 November 2019

‘How to set up and run an academic journal’, event with PhD student, Matthias Kispert,  involved in starting the Hyphen journal and David Chandler and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos who will talk about the excitement, pitfalls, difficulties and practical hurdles that a new journal set up entails, drawn from their very recent and still evolving experience of setting up, with Jane Lewis and the help of Andrew Lockett, the new journal of Anthropocenes: human, inhuman, posthuman https://ahip.journal.ubiquity.website/. Graduate School, University of Westminster.

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23-26 October 2019 – European International Studies Association (EISA) Exploratory Workshops, Rapallo, Italy

Hope in the Anthropocene 

Abstract: Through the Exploratory Symposia we aim at continuing the work of the EWIS 2019 workshop ‘Hope and Resilience in a World of Relation’ which brings together framings of hope and resilience. A connecting question between workshop and project is whether it is possible to sustain ‘hope’ through developing alternative forms of resilience or, by contrast, will whatever is done to preserve humanity inevitably be construed to be problematic –or hopeless– when humanity is collectively seen to be the problem rather than the solution. The workshop is a first opportunity to jointly deepen our hitherto observations on the relevance of hope for reflecting the Anthropocene and its implications for political imaginaries. Three of the four applicants (with Pol Bargués-Pedreny as convener) are participants of this workshop.

My introductory paper here.

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28-30 August 2019 – Royal Geographical Society-IBG Annual International Conference, London

Tuesday 27 August 2019

Note: opening reception 18.00-20.00 (Marquee)

Wednesday 28 August 2019

Note: Chemical Kinships (1) 9.00-10.40 (RGS-IBG Lowther Room)

Islands on the Periphery: Challenges and Opportunities of a Changing Climate 11:10-12:50 (RGS-IBG Sunley Room)

Session abstract: Over the last decades, changes in climate have led to impacts on human and natural systems in many regions across the planet. Among the most vulnerable regions are remote islands and low-lying coastal areas, due to the risks associated with sea level rise, changing weather patterns and their impact on saltwater intrusion, storminess and coastal erosion. In order to limit existing and future climate-related impacts on remote island communities, incremental and transformational adaptation will be needed. However, the potential for climate-resilient development pathways varies across and within regions and geographies, due to different development contexts and systemic vulnerabilities. This session will bring together contributions from various types of small and remote island territories and geographies worldwide to discuss island-specific aspects, including: temporalities of planned island relocation in response to climatic and environmental changes; the role of connectivity in island communities’ climate change coping strategies; revisioning traditional land as a refuge from extreme weather; centralized vs. autonomous island governance structures; islands as the emblematic figure of the Anthropocene; and adaptation planning for exposed, low-lying island coastal habitats.

Anthropocene Islands: ontology, politics and ethics Jonathan Pugh (Newcastle University, UK) David Chandler (University of Westminster, UK)

Paper abstract: The island is the emblematic figure of the Anthropocene. Islands are symbolic for debates about global warming, intensified hurricanes, sea level rises and nuclear fallout. Islands are also figured as the laboratories of the Anthropocene; testing grounds for new approaches to politics, ethics and philosophy by international policy-makers, Anthropocene philosophers and critical theorists alike. This paper explores three key schematics associated with islands in the Anthropocene: (1) Adaptation (exemplified by smart island technologies and resilience paradigms); (2) Attuning (relational island ontologies, indigenous and pluriverse reasonings); and Affirming (the recent rise of speculative island ontologies). The key argument of the paper is that these three schematics not only tell us new things about islands in the Anthropocene; they also raise questions about academic and practitioner sensibilities, and about how the Anthropocene itself is being approached and engaged.

Note: More-than-human haunted landscapes (3): Hope 14.40-16.20 (Sherfield Building, SALC Room 6)

Note: Antipode reception + Rowman & Littlefield reception 18.45-20.00 (RGS-IBG Drayson Room)

Thursday 29 August 2019

I will be co-convening (with Jonathan Pugh) Hope in the Anthropocene (roundtable) 14:40-16:20 (Sherfield Building, SALC Room 10)

Our contemporary moment appears to be without hope. Catastrophic global warming and climate change are spinning out of control while the traditional political frameworks of politics appear unable to cope. It seems that political possibilities are closing down just when the world needs new approaches to politics the most. When considering this in conjunction with the title of this year’s annual conference, it is little surprise that hope is increasingly becoming a fundamental concern for those interested in geography and the Anthropocene. Hope has always been key to investments in ethical, political and philosophical practices. This session explores different ways in which hope can be invested today, in the age of the Anthropocene. This panel discussion session will engage in three very different schematic ontologies of hope. (1) The first promotes a hope based on human capacities, imaginaries and the telos of progress (what could be called the schematic of ‘modern hope’). (2) The second argues for a more radical and less subject-centred approach grounded upon hope as external to us and in the world of embedded and entangled relations (the more ‘radical hope’ invested in, for examples, vitalist ontologies, indigenous frameworks of reasoning, and a ‘pluriverse’ ‘world of many worlds’. (3) The third schematic rejects the idea that hope resides either in human capacities or the world external to us and argues that we should free ourselves from the hubristic illusions of hope (what could be called ‘beyond hope’; variously reflected in Object-Oriented Ontologies which posit that the reality of the Anthropocene is always withdrawn from us; Speculative Realism, which argues against the ‘correlationism’ of Kantian hope and the assumption that the world ‘is there for us’; or recent work on the ‘geological sublime’, which argues for a non-romantic sublime and recognises that the world is not beyond meaning but is, instead, literally meaning-less). The purpose of the panel session is to encourage debate across and within these three schematics, and what they each tell us about hope in the Anthropocene.

Friday 30 August 2019

Note: Losing or Gaining Hope in the Apocalypse: Pre-/Peri-/Post- Apocalyptic Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (1): Fiction 9.00-10.40 (Sir Alexander Fleming Building, Room 119)

Note: Losing or Gaining Hope in the Apocalypse: Pre-/Peri-/Post- Apocalyptic Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (2): Non-Fiction 11.10-12.50 (Sir Alexander Fleming Building, Room 119)

Note: closing drinks reception 18.45-20.00 (reception)

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5-6 July 2019 – 8th Annual London Conference in Critical Thought, Centre for Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London.

‘(Re)Thinking New Materialism with Whitehead: From Ontology to “Process Relation”‘ paper for panel ‘Difference, Evolution and Biology 2’.

Abstract: New materialist, speculative and object-oriented thinking are becoming increasingly dominant across the social sciences and humanities. Hailed as a shift away from epistemology (seen to be too subject- or human-centred), new materialist approaches are often framed as overcoming the modernist bifurcation ofculture/nature. This presentation will argue that the privileging of matter/ontology over thought/epistemology inverses and thereby reproduces the divide, rather than overcoming it. It thereby adds to recent debate by taking forward an understanding of relationality as a method or approach rather than as ontological statement. Drawing upon the work of Alfred North Whitehead, it will argue that a process relational approach can move beyond the privileging of ontology to enable a rethinking of new materialism through (perhaps counter-intuitively) restoring the vital agency of the human subject.

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Wednesday 3 July 2019

26-29 June 2019 – 6th European Workshops in International Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków

‘Hope and Resilience in the Anthropocene’ paper presentation for Workshop X, ‘Resilience and Hope in a World in Relation’.

Abstract: Resilience has rapidly spread throughout the policy world over the last two decades, driven by the desire to use systems theories and process understandings to develop adaptive approaches to the world. However, this paper argues that under the auspices of the Anthropocene, the assumptions and goals of resilience have become problematized. In modernity, supporting and enabling vulnerable communities and ecosystems can help resolve crises but in the Anthropocene resilience approaches can easily appear to be spreading rather than containing any problem. Attempts to resolve problems through focusing upon redistributing resources to enable capacity- building can be seen to speed up the process of resource depletion and the arrival at the Earth’s ‘Planetary Boundaries’ rather than slowing it down (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2017). In the place of ‘linear’, infrastructural, engineering or ‘top-down’ approaches to resilience, alternative approaches have been advocated, based upon more responsive cybernetic framings of automated or ‘algorithmic’ real-time adaptation. This paper highlights the limits of these two approaches to resilience so as to draw out the distinctive nature of the demand to ‘become indigenous’, in the context of our workshop, it is this third approach which is most associated with discourses of hope and often articulated as an agential and futural alternative relying upon speculative or indigenous analytics to enable or ‘work with’ so-called ‘natural’ processes. Draft paper available here.

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Tuesday 11 June 2019

I will be in Prague for a PhD pre-viva examination at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.

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7-9 June 2019 –  Art in the Anthropocene, international conference, Trinity College, Dublin.

‘Beyond humanism and posthumanism in the Anthropocene’ paper (with Jonathan Pugh, Senior Academic Fellow, Newcastle University of Newcastle)

Abstract: Recent debate concerning the Anthropocene has not only critiqued modernist frameworks, but increasingly posthumanist reasoning as well. From the varied approaches of object-oriented ontologies and speculative realism, to more recently critical life studies, a momentum is now gathering to reject the notion that hope resides in either human capacities and modernity, or the world external to us and what increasingly seem like older posthumanist ontologies. Thus, there has been a turn away from the modern imaginaries of Elon Musk, Richard Branson and discourses of resilience as being able to adapt to the world, as well as a growing rejection of new materialism, vitalism and more-than-human relational entanglements of flourishing. Some of these recent shifts in debate place hope in speculative approaches, whilst others are more drawn to nihilism or notions of the geological sublime, engaging different normative horizons. Drawing upon Whitehead and our method of ‘process relation’, this paper engages that shift away from what could be called ‘modern’ and ‘radical’ hope in the Anthropocene, towards the recent rise of more ontologically neutral positions, as well as a new schematic of what could be called ‘beyond hope’.

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23-24 May 2019

‘Un-Governing the Anthropocene: After Resilience, from ‘Un-Governing With’ to ‘Un-Governing Within’’, paper presentation for the workshop ‘Global Un-Governance’, University of Edinburgh. Draft programme.

Abstract: This paper locates ‘un-governing’ as a growing field of experimentation, which flags up the limits of traditional ‘command-and-control’ assumptions of power and seeks to develop or reflect non-modern approaches to governance. The majority of ‘un-governing’ work falls into categories with which we are increasingly familiar, which draw upon immanent alternatives to transcendence. These initially involved the system- and process-based framings associated with ‘resilience’, seeking to tap into or enhance ‘innate’, ‘internal’ or ‘endogenous’ capacities to meet policy goals. Newer approaches to un-governing challenge these claims and seek to develop less governmentalized alternatives: firstly, those of ‘un-governing with’, which, suggest that instrumental interventions are too reductionist and homogenizing, fail to facilitate differentiation and individuation, and remain too human-centered; secondly, those of ‘un-governing within’, which highlight alternatives that co-exist in the present. Rather than generating new forces, powers and capacities the latter focus on working ‘within’ less predictable environments, where sensing and attunement to forces beyond direct knowledge and experience is key. Draft paper.

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Tuesday 7 May 2019

I will be chairing the panel ‘The Politics of the encounter: Fieldwork, activism, resistance’ at the ‘Encountering Indigenous thought and politics: Power and ethics in the academy’ workshop, John Henry Brookes Building (JHB), Room 202, Oxford Brookes University.

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Monday 29 April 2019

I will be examining a PhD in the School of Life Sciences, University of Westminster.

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18-20 April 2019 – Western Political Science Association (WPSA) annual convention ‘The Politics of Climate Change’, Manchester Hyatt, San Diego, California.

‘Algorithmic Governance: Actor Networks and Machinic Correlation’ paper for
Panel 30.03 – Affective and Defective Algorithmic Governmentalities –
1:15 – 3:00pm, Friday 19 April – Algorithmic Politics mini conference.

Abstract: This paper is organised in four sections. The first section introduces algorithmic governance in terms of the governance of effects rather than causation, focusing on the work of Bruno Latour in establishing the problematic of contingent interaction, rather than causal depth, as key to emergent effects, which can be unexpected and catastrophic. The second section considers in more depth how algorithmic governance enables politics by other means through putting greater emphasis on relations of interaction rather than on ontologies of being, and links the methodological approach of governance closely to actor network assumptions that disavow structures of causation. The final two sections analyse how correlation works to reveal new agencies and processes of emergence and how new technologies have been deployed in this area, providing some examples of how the shift from causal relations to sensing effects has begun to alter governmental approaches.

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Monday 25 March 2019

I will be presenting at the roundtable ‘Humanitarian Intervention after Kosovo:1999-2019’, co-organised by The Centre for the Study of Democracy and The LSE’S Research on South East Europe. 6pm. The Boardroom, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster
London.

To mark the twentieth anniversary of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo this roundtable will assess the impact of “Operation Allied Force” on the practice of, and academics debates on, humanitarian intervention. Themes to be discussed include: The rationale behind the intervention; The impact of the intervention on Kosovo/Serbia; The effect of the intervention on the UN/international law; The legacy of the intervention, particularly the emergence of the Responsibility to Protect; The status of humanitarian intervention today

Speakers:
David Clark: Special Adviser to UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook from 1997-2001
Dr Kate Ferguson: Founding Director “Protection Approaches” and Chair of Policy at the European Centre for R2P
Dr Spyros Economides: Associate Professor in International Relations and European Politics at the London School of Economics and Deputy Director of the Hellenic Observatory
Professor David Chandler: Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, and founding editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding
The event will be chaired by Dr Aidan Hehir, University of Westminster

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21-22 March 2019

I will be providing the closing remarks for the Monsoon [+ other] Grounds symposium M416, University of Westminster Marylebone Campus, 35 Marylebone Road, London.

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Friday 1 March 2019

“Technical Thought for the Anthropocene’, paper presentation at the international conference ‘AI: Rethinking the World’, Patriotic Hall, Charles University, Prague.

Abstract: AI is often understood to be the peak of humanity’s hubris, the desire to replicate and magnify thought independently of its finite, fleshy and embodied container of the body. The fullest separation of the human from nature that can be imagined. The Anthropocene, the catastrophic reminder of thought’s embodied being and of the dependence of thought upon matter, appears to ring the death toll for artificial intelligence and to restore natural intelligence to its original position, beyond human comprehension. For most theorists of the Anthropocene, technology is the enemy: a product of artifice and narrow instrumentality and materially destructive in the forms of extraction and pollution (Parrika’s Anthrobscene). For some (Stiegler’s Neganthropocene) technology is neutral and can restore human capacities as well as alienating us from them (a Pharmakon). This paper seeks to experiment with seeing how technological advances of Big Data and the Internet of Things take us into the Anthropocene as a vector for posthuman becoming. AI is thus re-envisaged as accessing ‘natural’ intelligence rather than extending exponentially modernist forms of knowledge and control. Here, the key theorist will be Gilbert Simondon (read as the alter ego to Wired Magazine‘s Kevin Kelly’s subject-centred understanding), who articulated technics as a posthumanist understanding of “What Technology Wants”: i.e. for us to shed hubris and instrumentality and instead to see technology as leading us back “Down to Earth” (Latour).

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Friday 15 February 2019

I will be presenting at the “How to Get Published” workshop organized by two research centers VITRI and BOHEMS, Charles University, Prague.

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Wednesday 30 January 2019

Book launch for Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data, published open access by the University of Westminster Press. I will be speaking at the panel along with Christian Fuchs, Joanna Boehnert, Robert Cowley, Paolo Gerbaudo, Anastasia Kavada and Paul Rekret. 6.00-8.00pm, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster.

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Monday 28 January 2019

As Chair of the Advisory Board I will be making a short presentation at the COMPASS London Policy Forum, ‘Building Resilience in a wider Eurasia: challenges and opportunities’, European Commission, Europe House, London and attending the House of Lords reception.

2018

Monday 17 December 2018

Prague AI Reading Group, at the third meeting we will discuss Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley’s Are We Human: Notes on an Archeology of Design (2016). Institute of Political Studies, Klikatá 13, Charles University, Prague. 5pm. Further information.

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Monday 10 December 2018

I will be introducing the concluding discussion for ‘Research in Conversation: Anticipation, Experimentation & Design in the Anthropocene: On Governing Futures of Life with Kevin Grove and Stephanie Wakefield’, Department of Geography, University of Durham.

Once encouraged and celebrated in social and environmental theory, non-binaried approaches to human-environment relations are now a key feature in governmental policies, technological design, military strategies, and urban planning. Driven by concerns over climate change and the associated ecological challenges signaled by the Anthropocene, more-than-, non-, and extra-human forms of life increasingly circulate both as subjects and agents of emerging governmental strategies (Wakefield and Braun 2016). Perhaps nowhere has this been more notable than in the rise of resilience planning (Chandler 2014; Grove and Adey 2015). An increasingly central concept in governmental policy, resilience thinking has sparked novel geo- and bio-political arrangements as well as new modes of experimentation with and on life (Grove 2014; Wakefield 2018; Bulkeley et al 2018). This workshop will explore the ways that the Anthropocene’s more-than-human imaginaries and their potential futures are produced and framed as part of emerging strategies of environment governance. Engaging with the work Kevin Grove and Stephanie Wakefield, we will put research into conversation around how various forms of experimentation, design, and engineering are bringing particular visions of future life into being–and foreclosing others.

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Monday 3 December 2018

I will be introducing the 2018 film Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s best-selling Southern Reach Trilogy, and discussing how to use speculative realism in teaching IR, IR Cinema, Studentský klub Celetná, Prague. 7pm. Facebook details.

We will screen Annihilation, the 2018 movie directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina), based on Jeff VanderMeer’s best-selling Southern Reach Trilogy. Despite receiving widespread critical acclaim, the film went straight to Netflix after its US release in February (test audiences found it too “intellectual” and “complicated”). We are thrilled to provide a big screen viewing. The plot is a group of (female) military scientists entering the mysterious and shimmering ‘Area X’ which overturns their assumptions, resulting in a journey of disorientation into a zone of indistinction. The allegorical overtones are rich and plentiful: this is the IR Cinema of the crisis of liberal international intervention (where missions rapidly turn Western hubris into humility and epistemological certainty into radical doubt) and, for the theorists, it is a great cinematic introduction to the pluriversal/ vitalist/ speculative/ new materialist/ object-oriented turn to immanence.

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Monday 3 December 2018

I will be giving a public lecture ‘AI and the Anthropocene’, Hollar building, Smetanovo Nabrezi, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. 5pm. Further details.

Abstract: The Anthropocene (exemplified in anthropogenic global warming and climate change) is often understood as ending the divide between humans (as knowing actors and agents) and nature (as a passive object to be known – as the background, or stage, for our actions). This lecture looks at how AI can be used to engage in a world increasingly conceived to be complex, unpredictable and unknowable. The key focus of the talk will be on the application of AI as a technology of ‘sensing’ (considering the role of Big Data and the Internet of Things) and how, in this framework, correlation is seen to be more important than the understanding of causality.

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29-30 November 2018

I will be speaking at the panel on ‘Resilience and Engagement Strategies in the European Neighbourhood’ at the Czernin Security Forum conference ‘Moving Sands in Global Politics and European Security: Resilience and Beyond’, Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Czernin Palace, Prague. Draft programme.

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Wednesday 28 November 2018

‘Hope in the Anthropocene’ public seminar, Hollar building, Smetanovo Nabrezi, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Further details.

Today, it often seems that we are living in catastrophic times with global warming, climate change and species extinction and, even worse, the view that humanity itself is the cause of these problems, in the Anthropocene. If ever there was a dark time for hope, it is today. This seminar discusses whether it is possible to challenge prevailing thinking and to use hope as a resource to engage with our contemporary apocalyptic mood. The three presenters, from the UK, Spain and Germany will discuss what it would mean to develop an analytics of hope and how this could be the basis for political problem-solving and radical political imaginaries. They will also discuss whether hope is even possible, feasible or necessarily desirable today.

Speakers:
Dr Pol Bargues-Pedreny is a Research Fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. More information here: https://www.cidob.org/en/experts/pol_bargues_pedreny
Dr Valerie Waldow is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the Chair of International Relations, Institute of Social Sciences, Otto-von-Guericke-University. More information here: http://www.pacs.ovgu.de/Team/Valerie+Waldow.html
Prof David Chandler is a visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague and Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, London. More information here: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/chandler-david

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Monday 26 November 2018

Prague AI Reading Group, at the second meeting we will discuss Alexander Galloway’s The Interface Effect (2012). Institute of Political Studies, Klikatá 13, Charles University, Prague. 5pm

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Thursday 22 November 2018

I will be introducing introducing Adele Clark and Donna Haraway (eds) Making Kin not Population – Reconceiving Generations (2018) at the Materialisms Reading Group, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster.

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Friday 9 November 2018

Presentation on ‘Resilience: The Contemporary Challenges’ for ‘Roundtable I: The EU and Resilience: interrogating the theory’, at the Joint COMPASS-UPTAKE workshop ‘The EU and Resilience: interrogating theory, policies and practice’, Instituto Affari Internazional (IAI), Via A. Bruentti 9, Rome. Draft programme.

Abstract: We are familiar with contemporary uses of the resilience concept and its centrality to the EU’s New Global Security Strategy, but less discussed are the contemporary challenges to the resilience discourse. These challenges can be understood to complicate and perhaps underline the importance and meaning of resilience. In my short presentation, I will look at two such challenges: firstly, the problem of ‘coercive’, ‘hard’ or ‘engineering’ approaches to resilience, which are seen as problematic vis-a-vis ‘natural’, ‘soft’ or ‘critical’ approaches; and secondly, the problems raised by even ‘natural’, ‘soft’ or ‘critical’ approaches to resilience.

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Monday 5 November 2018

I will be giving a short presentation at the MA Data, Culture and Society information evening. A new MA course launching September 2019

MA Data, Culture and Society: We live in an age where almost everything of what we do is connected to data. Big data and datafication pose great opportunities but also risks for contemporary societies. This new MA course addresses, explores and creatively utilises this transformation. We place an emphasis on current and future technologies and practices such as algorithms, artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, data analytics and data mining, the Internet of Things, and others. The information evening features an introduction to the MA course and short talks from members of the course team: Dr Jacob Johanssen, Senior Lecturer, School of Media and Communication, Course Leader MA Data, Culture and Society; Dr Philip Trwoga, Principal Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Deputy Course Leader; Dr Pieter Verdegem, Senior Lecturer in Media Theory, School of Media and Communication; Professor Christian Fuchs, Professor of Social Media, School of Media and Communication; Professor David Chandler, Professor of International Relations, School of Humanities – 5pm-6.30pm, Room: C2.14, 115 New Cavendish Street, University of Westminster.

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Monday 29 October 2018

Prague AI Reading Group, at the first meeting we will discuss Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey’s, Evil Media. Institute of Political Studies, Klikatá 13, Charles University, Prague. Details here (in Czech only), please contact me for details.

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Monday 29 October 2018

I will be giving a public lecture, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Resilience’, Institute of Political Studies, Klikatá 13, Charles University, Prague. Starts 14.30. Details here.

Abstract: Resilience is increasingly seen as a key policy framework, for everything from poverty to climate change. AI is at the centre of contemporary challenges to the resilience discourse. These challenges can be understood to complicate and perhaps underline the importance and meaning of resilience. This lecture will look at two challenges: firstly, the problem of ‘coercive’, ‘hard’ or ‘engineering’ approaches to resilience, which are seen as problematic vis-a-vis ‘natural’, ‘soft’ or ‘critical’ approaches; and secondly, the problems raised by even ‘natural’, ‘soft’ or ‘critical’ approaches to resilience.

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Wednesday 3 October 2018

I will be introducing Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation at the third Expanded Territories reading group, at 17.30, M330 Marylebone Campus, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster.

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12-15 September 2018 12th EISA Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Prague, Czech Republic

Co-covening with Delf Rothe, Section 03 – Anthropocene politics: International relations after the end of the world

29-30 June 2018

Co-organising with Harshavardhan Bhat the stream ‘Politics of/in the Anthropocene’, London Conference in Critical Thought, University of Westminster.

The 7th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, will offer a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who work with critical traditions and concerns. Central to the vision of the conference is an inter-institutional, non-hierarchal, and accessible event that makes a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emerging academics, fostering new avenues for critically-oriented scholarship and collaboration.

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25-29 June 2018

I will be teaching a short course on ‘Resilience: Governance in an Uncertain World’ as part of the Summer School in Global Politics, Development and Security, Institut Barcelona D’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Barcelona, Spain. Draft PDF here

Today’s world, of complexity, interdependence and unexpected crises, is often seen to be ungovernable in traditional ‘top-down’ or ‘command-and-control’ ways. This course looks at the emergence of alternative, ‘bottom-up’ or immanent approaches to the problems of global politics, development and security; these new approaches are often grouped together under the rubric of ‘resilience’. In three two-hour sessions, we will explore three ways of rethinking governance in discourses of resilience, relating to how we learn from the past, how we can be more responsive in the present and how we can speculatively enable alternative futures. The first approach understands governance as recursive, governing the effects of previous actions and their unseen or unintended consequences through mapping or tracing relations and path-dependencies. The second approach focuses on the capacity to see or to sense processes in their emergence, aspiring to increasingly real-time responsiveness, preventing crises through enabling effects to be mitigated or modulated, often through the use of new technologies such as Big Data and the Internet of Things. The third approach increasingly recasts problems as opportunities for learning and experimentation, which we need to become attuned to, arguing that we should focus on governing or becoming-with other actors and agencies through practices of speculative engagement, enabling new possibilities to unfold.

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Friday 22 June 2018

‘The Anthropocene Dilemma: Governing for or against Climate Change?’ presentation at the ‘Governance beyond the Anthropocene: Ecological Issues in European Political Practice and Thought’ conference, University of Herefordshire. Programme available here.

Abstract: There is often the assumption that the Anthropocene is just another word for the coming together or intensification of a collection of man-made (anthropogenic) environmental and natural problems and crises, from global warming, to ocean acidification, to plastic pollution and species extinction. If this was case, things would be difficult but there would be no big dilemma beyond any traditional discussions of politics and power regarding distributive priorities. I wish to suggest in this paper that the Anthropocene expresses a dilemma (or maybe a series of dilemmas) that takes us well beyond the problems and contestations of modernist politics. What if the Anthropocene wasn’t a problem to be solved? What if climate change and global warming weren’t merely threats to be secured against through resilience and social and technological engineering? What if the more we understood ourselves as ‘at war’ with the Anthropocene, the worse the problems would be? What if governing against climate change merely encouraged, intensified and reproduced the modes of economic and social being in the world that caused the problems? What if we need instead to govern for (and with and through) the Anthropocene and therefore for climate change, rather than against it? How does this work and what forms of subjectivity and what forms of governance ensue from the reversal of modernist securing assumptions? What does it mean to welcome the Anthropocene? How does this ‘welcome’ of speculative and creative unfoldings differ from the modernist engineering assumptions of the ‘Good Anthropocene’?

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Thursday 21 June 2018

‘Resilience as a Flawed Concept’ – keynote address for the ‘Adversities, Trauma and Resilience in Periods of Transition’ workshop, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham. Programme available here.

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22-23 May 2018

As a member of the advisory board I will be attending the Global Challenges Research Fund COMPASS (Comprehensive Capacity-Building in Eastern Neighbourhood and Central Asia) project Launch, Belarusian State University, Minsk, Belarus. Programme available here.

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Tuesday 2 May 2018

Life Science and Biomedical Science seminar presentation, ‘Big Data: Knowing Differently in the Anthropocene’, 1.00-2.00pm Clipstone 1.108, Department of Life Sciences, University of Westminster. 

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Thursday 26 April 2018

‘Peacebuilding and the Crisis of Policy-making’, lecture, 1.15 – 2.45pm,
Linna 5015, Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI), University of Tampere, Finland. Livestream video

The idea of peacebuilding seems to have come to its end. Its grounding assumptions that democracy, the rule of law and free markets can be a universal solution to conflict-prone states and societies are considered naive at best, and hubristic and Eurocentric, at worst. But is the end of peacebuilding a cause for celebration? Have we really entered a ‘post-liberal’ era? And what comes after it, if not a mere realist resignation to the world as it appears? David Chandler presents key findings from his new book “Peacebuilding – The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1997-2017”, charting the rise and fall of peacebuilding and revealing the discursive shifts in the self-understanding of the peacebuilding project in policy and academic debate.

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Wednesday 25 April 2018

Co-convening with (Hannes Peltonen) the workshop ‘Thinking through Planet Politics: Resilience, Security and Climate Change’, 10.00am – 5.30pm, Pinni A1081, Kanslerinrinne 1, University of Tampere, Finland. Draft programme.

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Tuesday 24 April 2018

‘Resilience and the New Governmentalities of the Anthropocene: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking’, Speakers Series lecture, 4.15 – 5.45pm, Pinni B1097, Kanslerinrinne 1, Institute for Advanced Social Research (IASR), University of Tampere, Finland.

In this presentation I explore three ways of rethinking governance in the Anthropocene. The first is autopoietic and recursive; here, the use of ubiquitous data is seen to enable new methods of mapping/tracing relations in time and space. In this paradigm, problems are seen more clearly through an ontology of depth, ‘drilling down’ to context where processes/path dependencies come to light which can be intervened in. The second is responsive, the paradigm of sensing and datafication: seeing relations in real-time, to enable increasingly automated processes of governing emergence. Here, the Internet of Things and cyborg more-than-human assemblages are imagined to govern with rather than over or against potential problems or threats of climate change, disease or socio-economic crises. The goal is that of resilience: the maintenance of the status-quo or homeostatic governance. The third form of adaptation is sympoietic, less goal-directed and therefore more future-orientated, for example, hacking as a project of exploration of the possibilities of relations and processes, detaching and repurposing assemblages creating new possibilities. In all three, the ‘what-is-ness’ of the world is given its due; there are no assumptions of linear, abstract or universal frames of knowledge or governmental capacity. They could also be seen as stages through which understandings of the human relation to the world is transformed, enabling adaptive possibilities and facilitating the building of a home in the post human age of the Anthropocene.

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12-13 April 2018

Monsoon Waters symposium, University of Westminster. The second in a series of symposia convened by the Monsoon Assemblages project. It will comprise inter-disciplinary panels, key-note addresses and an exhibition. It will bring together established and young scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines, knowledge systems and practices to engage in conversations about the ontologies, epistemologies, histories, politics, practices and spatialities of monsoon waters. Draft Programme.

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International Studies Association annual convention, San Francisco, 4-7 April 2018

Wednesday 4 April 2018

8:15 AM – 10:00 AM WA38: Environment, Natural Resources, and Peace
Sutro, Parc 55 San Francisco

Chair: Dave Benjamin (University of Bridgeport); Discussant: Florian Krampe (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI))
Papers: Pursuing Peace and Justice: Identifying and Using Correlates of Peace and Peacebuilding, Author: Robert C. Johansen (University of Notre Dame); The Triumph of the Vegetal Is Total, Author: David Chandler (University of Westminster); Using Structured Expert Models to Evaluate the Climate-Migration-Conflict Pathway, Author: Elisabeth Gilmore (Clark University); The Water Taboo: Restraining Use of Water as an Instrument of International Conflict, Author: Charlotte Grech-Madin (Uppsala University); Business for Peace? Applying Complex Systems Theory to Uncover New Insights About the Impacts of Mining on Peacebuilding in Guatemala, Author: Aviva Silburt (University of Waterloo)
Abstract and Keywords: This panel will analyze the interplay between peacebuilding and conflict resolution processes and the environment, including its impacts on natural resources or on the governance of the environment.

Paper abstract: This paper seeks to interrogate the ‘vegetal moment’ in IR. It starts with Michel Houellebecq’s novel ‘The Map and Territory’- a rich exploration of the object-oriented turn as an attempt to, at first, escape and then to come to terms with the perishable and transitory nature of the modernist human project – which ends with the extinction of the human: “Then everything becomes calm… the triumph of vegetation is total”. We know now that, in the Anthropocene, vegetal life is not fragile and passive but rather vibrant and active, aware and sensitive. In IR the tendency is to anthropomorphise and instrumentalise the vegetal: to practice the Deleuzian art of ‘becoming vegetal’ – their being is so ‘resilient’ so ‘sense-able’, so ‘adaptive’, and thus deploying Tsing’s imaginary of salvation, of ‘the vegetal… at the end of the world’. IR and its survivalism: they are co-constitutive. This is not the perspective of Houellebecq’s protagonist: there is no hubristic assumption of knowing the vegetal; there is no posthuman: i.e. there is nothing after ‘the end of the world’, no deus ex machina, no second chance. Whether to resist or to accept? It would appear that the triumph of the vegetal is total.

1:45 PM – 3:30 PM WC57: Resilience and Global Security: European Union and Beyond
Nob Hill 1, Hilton San Francisco Union Square

Chair: Christian Lequesne (CERI Paris); Discussant: David Chandler (University of Westminster)
Papers: A Genealogy of Resilience in World Politics, Author: Philippe Bourbeau (Canada Research Chair, University Laval); Resilience as an Emergent European Project? Author: Jonathan Joseph (University of Sheffield); Author: Ana E. Juncos (University of Bristol); Resilience as EU Governance in the Neighborhood: A Fancy Concept or a Critical Turn?
Author: Elena Korosteleva (University of Kent); Resilience and EU Foreign Policy: The Promise of Justice? Author: Ben Tonra (UCD Dublin); Governing Protracted Crises Through Resilience: Practitioners’ Perspectives Author: Rosanne M. Anholt (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Abstract and Keywords: Resilience has gained substantial traction in international politics of late. This scholarship has sparked several debates concerning the usefulness of resilience in world politics and how scholars should go about studying it. Are we therefore witnessing a resilience turn – both in scholarly literature and in policy circles? If so, where does resilience come from? By tracing the diverse expressions of resilience in world politics, this panel opens conceptual, empirical, historical, and interdisciplinary questions about the concept of resilience. The papers will (a) argue that an extensive genealogy of resilience is needed to better theorise the relationship between resilience and world politics, (b) study practitioners’ understanding of the concept of resilience, (c) analyse the development of the resilience approach in EU foreign policy to argue that the EU’s resilience approach is emergent out of competing underlying discourses and projects, (d) investigate the EU’s neighborhood policy to contend that in order for resilience-framed governance to gain more traction it musts recognize and engage with ‘the local’ on the outside, (e) and examine EU Global Strategy to argue that resilience may be an opportunity to EU foreign policy few steps forward, notably by thinking about justice as mutual recognition.

4:00 PM meeting

7:00 PM Continental 3, Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Civil Wars, Ethnopolitics, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding gathering.

Thursday 5 April 2018

4.30 PM meeting

7:00 PM – 11:00 PM Bartlett Hall, 242 O’Farrell Street, Millennium community gathering.

Friday 6 April 2018

8:15 AM – 10:00 AM FA27: The Politics of the Anthropocene: Politics, Biopolitics, and Ontopolitics
Union Square 22, Hilton San Francisco Union Square

Chair: Charlotte Heath-Kelly (University of Warwick); Discussant: Claudia E. Aradau (King’s College London)
Papers: “I” Am Uncertain, but “We” Are Not: The Anthropocene’s Politics of Technological Identity, Author: Scott Hamilton (Balsillie School of International Affairs); Theorizing Beyond Life: Subjectivity in the Anthropocene, Author: Stefanie R. Fishel (University of Alabama); Life in the Anthropocene: Humanism, Vitality, and Critique, Author: Garnet Kindervater (University of Minnesota), The Anthropocene Ontopolitics of Indistinction,
Author: David Chandler (University of Westminster); Here Be Moderns! The Anthropocene and Comparative Political Cosmology, Author: Jairus V. Grove (University of Hawaii at Manoa)

Abstract and Keywords: Does the Anthropocene have a politics? What sort of politics does it call forth? For some commentators the Anthropocene extends liberal or cosmopolitan visions of the global, for others it disrupts shared visions and aspirations, clarifying the divisive histories that shape the inequalities and hierarchies of the present. Other commentators argue that the Anthropocene can also be understood and analyzed in the framework of the biopolitical. If so, what sort of life is being governed and how does the Anthropocene disrupt or enable our understandings of the biopolitical? There is also the possibility that the politics of the Anthropocene exceed the biopolitical, that there is no separation between life and its governance: that the politics of the Anthropocene are best grasped as ontopolitics. What, if anything, do conceptions of the ontopolitical do and how do they operate? This panel hosts papers which focus on the politics, biopolitics or the ontopolitics of the Anthropocene and which seek to explore their potential interconnections.

Paper abstract: In International Relations we are increasingly aware that the key distinctions of the discipline seem to have less analytical purchase – these include conceptions of sovereignty/anarchy, peace/conflict, combatant/non-combatant, sick/healthy, development/underdevelopment, referent/threat, human/nature, knowledge/ignorance etc. This paper addresses the rise of indistinction and its implications for International Relations (both as an area of academic thinking and of policy-making) and links this to our understanding of the Anthropocene as our contemporary condition. I argue that in the Anthropocene, the cuts and separations necessary for the instrumental and regulatory imaginaries of both political and biopolitical forms of rule are no longer possible. I conclude with suggesting some new ontopolitical imaginaries of governance in the Anthropocene. The key argument is that the shift away from reductionist or linear frameworks towards more processual and relational understandings engenders a focus on non-causal approaches. This policy push towards real-time responsiveness is driven by new technologically enhanced forms of ‘seeing’ the emergence of events – driven by ubiquitous computing, the connectivity of the Internet of Things and the new correlational epistemologies of Big Data. The paper provides examples of these approaches, applied to environmental disasters, conflict management and disease outbreaks.

Saturday 7 April

1:45 PM – 3:30 PM 7SC15: The Vegetal Moment in Global Politics? Vegetal Ontologies of Presence and Resistance in the Anthropocene
Yosemite A, Hilton San Francisco Union Square

Convenors: Charlotte Heath-Kelly (University of Warwick); David Chandler (University of Westminster)
Chair: Antonia Szabari (University of Southern California); Discussant: Antonia Szabari (University of Southern California )
Papers: Appropriating the Vegetal in Post-Terrorist Design: The Conflated Ontologies of Memorial Trees, Author: Charlotte Heath-Kelly (University of Warwick); Automation, Settlement, and Agency in Vegetal Worlds, Author: Dan Bousfield (University of Western Ontario); Forest and the City: Urban Resilience as a Form of Vegetal Hacktivism, Author: Delf Rothe (University of Hamburg); Pirates or Protectors: The Politics of Plant Conservation in the Anthropocene, Author: Xan Chacko (UC Davis); Of Plants and Their Statements – or How to Sense Alternative Ontologies, Author: Doerthe Rosenow (Oxford Brookes University)
Abstract and Keywords: Of what status are trees and plants in global politics? How are they deployed against security threats, and within disaster recovery? And how can vegetal ontologies advance our conceptualisation of the Anthropocene? Questions of vegetal significance are not new. In Heidegger’s text ‘What is Called Thinking?’, his phenomenology was articulated through an encounter with an apple tree. The tree faces Heidegger’s protagonist, defying standard phenomenology, in an account of the vibrant presence of the vegetal. Similarly, Michael Marder has uncovered the place of the plant within Western philosophical trajectories (2014) and together with Luce Irigaray (2016) has articulated the feminist necessity to embrace vegetal ontologies within the Anthropocene. This panel contains papers which theoretically and empirically explore the place of the vegetal in contexts varying from colonial botany to the neoliberal security state. It explores the deployment of the vegetal in urban regeneration projects, memorial symbolism and environmental activism, as well as offering papers which explore the importance of vegetal ontologies for the Anthropocene. Finally the overlap between securitisation agendas and vegetal life is laid bare in the exploration of biodiversity protection schemes and the mobilisation of plants and trees as objects with which to protect the human subject.

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Thursday 15 March 2018 THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED

‘Death: A Reappraisal’ presentation for ‘Death’, Crossings – interfaculty research seminar series, 5.00-6.30, Fyvie Hall, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster.

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Wednesday 7 March 2018 THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED DUE TO STRIKE ACTION

Speaking at the ‘Resilient Data’ event, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick.

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27 February – 1 March 2018

I will be teaching a short intensive course, ‘Securing the Anthropocene: Discourses, Knowledge(s) and Techniques’, Charles University, Prague.

Course programme.

The Anthropocene captures more than a debate over how to address the problems of climate change and global warming. Increasingly, it is seen to signify the end of the modern condition itself and potentially to open up a new era of political possibilities. The focus on a raft of new security problems and new ways of approaching policy-making coincides with a growing array of scientific and technological advances, including algorithmic computation, Big Data and the Internet of Things. Spread over three consecutive days, this intensive course focuses on what security might mean in the Anthropocene. It is divided into three sections, discourses (various ways in which the Anthropocene is understood and discussed), knowledge(s) (how and why new ways of knowing are being advocated) and techniques (new practices and ways of being which seek to go beyond the limits of traditional ways of problem-solving).

The course is run by Professor David Chandler, University of Westminster (UK) who edits the journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses and is the author of a number of books on contemporary approaches to international policy governance and new security regimes. His personal webpages can be found here: www.davidchandler.org.

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Thursday 15 February 2018

Speaking at the book launch and roundtable for my new book Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking, with Rowan Lear (School of Film, Media and Design, University of West London) Harshavardhan Bhat (The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster), Alan Gillingwater (illustrator) and Paulina Tambakaki (Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster), Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster.

The Anthropocene captures more than a debate over how to address the problems of climate change and global warming. Increasingly, it is seen to signify the end of the modern condition itself and potentially to open up a new era of political possibilities. This is the first book to look at the new forms of governance emerging in the epoch of the Anthropocene.

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Wednesday 7 February 2018

Conference keynote address, ‘Challenges of State-building and State-consolidation in the Contemporary World’, Sandhurst Trends in International Conflict Symposium 2, ‘Fragile States: Challenges and Responses’, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Draft programme.

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Monday 5 February 2018

Staff and student seminar presentation, ‘Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governing through Mapping, Sensing and Hacking’, Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, University of Durham.

The rise of resilience as a governance discourse is intimately connected to the perceived failings of traditional, liberal or modernist forms of politics, which assumed that governance could be centrally directed on the basis of ‘command-and-control’ understandings. Confidence in this framework has gradually eroded, with an appreciation that the world is much more globalised, interconnected and relationally entangled than ‘top-down’ forms of governance assume. Resilience approaches appear to have arisen to fill the gap between traditional framings of governance and the need to respond and adapt to contingent and unexpected events and shocks. The new geological epoch of the Anthropocene appears to further bring to a close subject-centred or anthropocentric understandings of power and governmental agency. The three modes of resilience governance analysed in this lecture all depart from a modernist framing and seek to govern adaptively or responsively in ways which increasingly appear to become at home in the Anthropocene condition.

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18-19 January 2018

‘Resilience and the Strange Death of Neoliberalism: New Policy Discourses of Affirmation and Alterity’, presentation at the ‘Resilience, Hegemony and Resistance’ workshop, Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen. Draft programme.

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Saturday 13 January 2018

‘Resilience, Governance and Ethics’, American Society for Cybernetics webinar (7 AM PST, 3 PM GMT). Video available.

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8-9 January 2018

Co-convening an author’s workshop (with Pol Bargues-Pedreny and Elena Simon) for the Routledge book Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age, at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen. Draft programme.

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