POST-GRADUATE CONFERENCE:

“THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL IN DISCOURSES OF STATE-BUILDING.”

Department of Politics and International Relations

University of Westminster

Fri, 27th of April 2012

CONFERENCE THEME

This conference aims to discuss and analyse the shift from the political/legal discussions of humanitarian intervention, prevalent in the 1990s, to sociological discussions of state-building intervention today. Some of the core conceptual themes of state-building, which we wish to investigate, appear to have a social or sociological framing.

For example, sovereignty is increasingly understood in terms of functional capacity rather than formal rights to self-government. Through the sociological shift, state-building interventions are seen to build sovereignty rather than undermine it. Similarly, democracy and its development are increasingly understood to be social processes of empowering or capacity-building citizens through intervention in the social realm of civil society. We want to discuss further the problematic of social empowerment and the shift to societal forms of intervention rather than interventions at the level of formal state institutions, now increasingly discredited.

Whereas discourses of liberal internationalism forwarded understandings of a global community with global norms, state-building discourses increasingly focus on societal differences of culture, ideologies and social institutional frameworks. The emphasis on such conceptual and methodological themes might concern the turn to biopolitical understandings, the shift from state-based security to societal security under resilience, Arendtian framings of the rise of the social, and emergence of constructivism and sociological institutionalism, other new institutionalist and agent-centred framings in cognitive disciplines such as economics and history.

Programme

8.30 - 9.00

Registration

9.00 - 9.15

Welcoming address

Roland Dannreuther, Head of Department

9.15 - 10.45

Panel 1

Statebuilding and Society: Discursive Formations and Conceptual Approaches

‘Authority vs Transformation: Accounting for Contemporary Statebuilding Through Its Absences’

Marta Iniguez de Herredia (LSE)

‘Building States Without Citizens? Postconflict Societies and Contested Citizenship’

Branka Marijan (Wilfrid Laurier University)

‘State-building as Discursive Formation: A Gendered Project?’

Audrey Reeves (University of Bristol)

‘The Discourse of Unintended Consequences in State-building Research’

Gezim Visoka (Dublin City University)

10.45 - 11.45

Panel 2

The State of Society: Ownership and the Democratization of Power

‘The Rise of the Social and the End(s) of Democracy’

David Chandler (University of Westminster)

‘Ownership Discourses in State-Building’

Dominik Zaum (LSE)

11.45 - 12.00

Coffee break

12.00 - 1.15

Panel 3

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

‘From Bismarck to Petraeus: The Question of the Social and the Social Question in Counterinsurgency’

Patricia Owens, University of Sussex

‘Governance and the Construction of the Social: The Truth behind Intervention and State-building’

Jonathan Joseph, University of Kent

1.15 -2.15

Lunch break

2.15- 3.45

Panel 4

Continuity or Change? Sovereignty, Hybridity and Reconstruction

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

Marius Calu (Queen Mary)

‘Stability through Good Governance, Prosperity through Self-determination’

Kushtrim Bylykbashi (University of Westminster)

‘Good Governance for Statebuilding in the West Bank, Palestine: Fayyadism, Hybridity and Sovereignty’

Alaa Tartir (LSE)

‘From Post-Conflict to Post-Disaster Statebuilding: The Case of Haiti’

Zoi Vardanika (University of Reading)

3.45 - 4.00

Coffee break

4.00 - 5.30

Panel 5

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

‘Therapeutic Statebuilding: International Trauma Advocacy and Croatian Veteran Politics’

Vanessa Pupavac, University of Nottingham

‘Serbian Civil Society as an Exclusionary Space: NGOs, the Public and "Coming to Terms with the Past"’

Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Aston University

‘Self-Determination in Theory and Practice: Lessons from the Balkans’

James Ker-Lindsay

5.30- 5.45

Closing remarks

Elisa Randazzo, Pol Bargués, Jessica Schmidt

5.45

Reception

Conference Venue:

The Boardroom

309 Regent Street

London W1B 2UW

(nearest tube: Oxford Circus)

Organizers:

Elisa Randazzo, Pol Bargués, Jessica Schmidt, Dr Aidan Hehir, Prof David Chandler