After International Relations – Beyond critique: Building the new in the shell of the old
Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 54 invites you to submit an abstract to this year’s Symposium on the theme of After International Relations – Beyond critique: Building the new in the shell of the old (see full theme below). We invite collaborators to take part in the 2025 symposium as a space to bring post-IR into being, not as a reflection on the discipline, but as a renewed engagement with the world it seeks to speak to/with/about. To this end, we encourage submissions in a variety of forms. A collection of the contributions in the form of academic journal articles, poetry, or short stories will be published as a Special Issue (Vol. 54 Issue 3) in Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Contributions that take the form of spoken word, visual art, or performance will be invited to present their piece at the symposium and have it recorded for display on the Millennium website should they wish.
General Information:
An in-person symposium will be held on 3-4 November 2025 at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The symposium is designed to highlight and develop critical, theoretical, and boundary-pushing work in the area of International Studies. The symposium is an opportunity to connect with colleagues, to help one another to fine-tune and/or share our work, and potentially have this published in Millennium.
Those who would be interested in presenting at the symposium and potentially contributing to the special issue, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words by 22 June 2025, 23.59 (BST). Please upload your abstract to this Google Form. For any questions or inquiries about the symposium, please contact us at millennium@lse.ac.uk
We aim to make our decisions by 15 July. If your abstract is selected, a first draft of 4000-6,000 words should be ready for review by 15 August. This first draft will be reviewed by the Vol. 54 Editorial Team. Feedback will be handed back by 1 September. The full draft (8,000 – 10,000 words) of your Symposium manuscript should be submitted by 3 October, to give all of our participants time to prepare feedback and comments to each other’s manuscripts. After the symposium, participants are expected to incorporate the feedback provided by their co-participants, and submit the manuscript to Millennium for blind peer-review. Please note, if selected, you are expected to be in London, UK, in person to partake in the full two days of discussion.
Millennium especially welcomes submissions from early career researchers and scholars in the Global South. Some bursaries are available, which can cover some costs associated with attending the symposium such as travel, accommodation and/or visa expenses. Please indicate in the submission process if you would like to be considered for a bursary. If you are able to claim institutional support, we ask you to refrain from opting-in for bursaries.
A selection of contributions will be published as part of a special issue in Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 54 (3) following the symposium and a successful peer-review process. Please, see the full thematic Call for Abstracts below.
We look forward to reading your submissions.
Elsa Bengtsson Meuller, Taylor Borowetz, and Rhiannon Emm
Editors, Vol. 54.
Call for Abstracts
International Relations emerged as a mode of knowing, intertwined with a mode of ordering, based on a particular understanding of states and conflict. It reflected large-scale wars in the West, as well as the birth of international organizations that followed to discourage their repetition and entrench capitalism and American dominance. The discipline of International Relations naturalized a range of analytical categories, processes, and hierarchies.
In order to stretch beyond this context, we have ‘turned’ toward history, new materialism, old materialism, multiplicity, considering new scales, spaces, agents, and temporalities. These turns allow IR to expand in content by widening the range of voices it includes, the spatial and temporal sites that can provide its data, and the methods it considers viable, all making IR more prolific as a system of producing knowledge. This expansion has been largely generated by critical scholars, reflecting on the ways in which the discipline works and the conditions of generating critique within it, aiming to expand its capacity to speak truth to power.
But, how effective are these turns? Baele and Bettiza write that they are unlikely to affect the core of the discipline (2021). Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” comes to mind. Black feminist and abolitionist thought teaches us to be skeptical of reforms. Instead of fighting for small amendments, abolition generates a bolder philosophical position than limiting our criticality to epistemological revisionism.
The problem an abolitionist position must face, Corry writes, is not just to critique what exists, but to imagine what comes next. The next task is to reflect together: ‘what is now our object of study?’, ‘how do we wish to study it?’ and ‘for what purpose?’ (2022 p. 301). We hope that this year’s Symposium will provide a space to experiment, to think otherwise, and to craft a new discursive field.
Inspired by the post-structuralist consolidation of a new mode of critique beyond the language, temporality, and causality of structuralism, Post-IR is an experiment in producing work that takes seriously our new political, theoretical, and technological context, thinking about how expressions of hope, despair, love, and in/justice can generate possibilities of solidarity.
We refuse to overdetermine the form or content of contributions, but suggest the following for inspiration:
- What forms of knowledge might inform the development of Post-IR? Is Post-IR disciplinary (Corry 2022)? Interdisciplinary? Transdisciplinary? Something else? Does the disciplinarity of IR matter at all?
- What methods or categories of analysis might provide the necessary critical dynamism, retaining an experimental, reflexive posture? Where does the descriptive and theoretical coalesce in the making of Post-IR?
- What conceptual vocabulary might we use or develop in order to structure Post-IR research?
- What fields, heretofore excluded or marginalised in IR, might emerge as surfaces of global politics?
- Which intellectual histories do we draw upon to think the world differently than before, and how might this alter our theories of history, change, and pedagogy?
- How could we encourage politicized practices of knowledge production, and the production of scholarship that does political work?
- How might we center other understandings of violence: not only states of “war” between parties, but recognise durable forms of settler colonial violence, or critique new forms of violence made possible by technological advancements?
- How can we democratize the attribution of agency that decides the new directions in the knowledge we produce as a collective?
Indicative reading list:
Abu-Bakare, A. Your Work Is Not International Relations. Alternatives, 47, no. 2 (2022): 115-122. https://doi.org/10.1177/03043754221076965
Allen, Kye J. ‘Why Is There No History of Fascist International Thought?’ Millennium 51, no. 3 (1 July 2023): 758–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298231177363.
Anderl, Felix, and Antonia Witt. ‘Problematising the Global in Global IR’. Millennium 49, no. 1 (1 September 2020): 32–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829820971708.
Baron, Ilan Zvi. ‘The Continuing Failure of International Relations and the Challenges of Disciplinary Boundaries’. Millennium 43, no. 1 (1 September 2014): 224–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829814541834.
Beauchamps, Marie. ‘Doing Academia Differently: Loosening the Boundaries of Our Disciplining Writing Practices’. Millennium 49, no. 2 (1 January 2021): 392–416. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298211031994.
Bertrand, Sarah, Kerry Goettlich, and Christopher Murray. ‘Translating International Relations: On the Practical Difficulties of Diversifying the Discipline’. Millennium 46, no. 2 (1 January 2018): 93–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817742838.
Conway, Philip R. ‘“The Citadel of Scholarship”: Rediscovering Critical IR in Millennium 1:1’. Millennium 51, no. 1 (1 October 2022): 305–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298221142947.
Gravlin, Matthew. ‘All My. . . Non-Relation: Critical Indigenous Theory in the Anthropocene’. Millennium, (1 April 2025) https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298251319283.
Grovogui, Siba N. ‘Regimes of Sovereignty: International Morality and the African Condition’. European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 3 (1 September 2002): 315–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066102008003001.
Jahn, Beate. ‘Critical Theory in Crisis? A Reconsideration’. European Journal of International Relations 27, no. 4 (1 December 2021): 1274–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211049491.
Kamola, Isaac. ‘IR, the Critic, and the World: From Reifying the Discipline to Decolonising the University’. Millennium 48, no. 3 (1 June 2020): 245–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829820937063.
Krishna, Sankaran. ‘Race, Merit, and the Moral Economy of International Relations’. Millennium 51, no. 1 (1 October 2022): 81–105. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298221139329.
Michelsen, Nicholas. ‘What Is a Minor International Theory? On the Limits of “Critical International Relations”’. Journal of International Political Theory 17, no. 3 (2020): 488–511. https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220956680.
Salgado, Pedro. ‘Against Sovereignty: The Colonial Limits of Modern Politics’. Millennium 52, no. 1 (1 October 2023): 85–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298231194742.
Shapiro, Michael J. ‘Moral Geographies and the Ethics of Post-Sovereignty’. In Perspectives on Third-World Sovereignty: The Postmodern Paradox, edited by Mark E. Denham and Mark Owen Lombardi, 39–59. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1996. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24937-4_4.
Shaw, Karena. ‘Indigeneity and the International’. Millennium 31, no. 1 (1 January 2002): 55–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298020310010401.
Sondarjee, Maïka. ‘Decentring the Western Gaze in International Relations: Addressing Epistemic Exclusions in Syllabi in the United States and Canada’. Millennium 51, no. 3 (1 July 2023): 686–710. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298231171615.
Soreanu, Raluca, and David Hudson. ‘Feminist Scholarship in International Relations and the Politics of Disciplinary Emotion’. Millennium 37, no. 1 (1 August 2008): 123–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829808093768.
Tavares Furtado, Henrique. “Confronting the Gated Community: Towards a Decolonial Critique of Violence beyond the Paradigm of War.” Review of International Studies 48, no. 1 (2022): 91–110. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052100022X
Walker, R. B. J. After the Globe, before the World. Global Horizons. London: Routledge, 2010. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203871249.