CfP for the Panel: Governing War(s) and Political Economy: Accumulation and Global Warring, Amsterdam, 18-20 July 2020

Seda Yuksel Announcement
Announcement Type
Call for Papers
Subject Fields
Anthropology, Sociology, Public Policy, Political History / Studies, Law and Legal History

CfP for the Panel: Governing War(s) and Political Economy: Accumulation and Global Warring, Amsterdam, 18-20 July 2020

 

As part of the 32nd Annual Meeting of SASE “ Development Today: Accumulation, Surveillance, Redistribution,” University of Amsterdam – Amsterdam, The Netherlands 

18-20 July 2020

 

Deadline: 15th of December 2019

 

Panel Description:

This panel invites papers that explore the interconnectedness of the political, economic and social structures with wars and violent conflicts in our current global era. Since Mary Kaldor (1999) has famously declared emergence of “New Wars,” characterized by the spill-out effects of globalization and transnational politics on localized wars, many scholars have discussed how the given global political and economic order has effected and shaped the current warfare – such as the increasing centrality of identity politics, the employment of various novel population and media techniques for territorial control, and the war coalitions bringing states and non-state actors from different scales. 

War(s) have always been in the agenda of social scientists, yet the fragmented, transnational and “flexible” (Lutz and Nonini, 1999) character of current warfare curtails their centrality and constitutive role in political and economic organization of societies. Here, we suggest going beyond the constitutive role of the “permanent arms economy” in capitalism (Mandel, 1975) that is based on a duality of the military field and the economic field as parallel and autonomous fields. We are rather interested in the intricate ways through which warfare and economic and political fields (relations, policies and dynamics) are mutually constructed and re/defined. In our current unsettled economic order, fragmentation and informalization of warfare goes hand in hand with a growing globalized informal economy that not only reinforces already existing geopolitical and economic disparities at global scale but also rescales localities by creating place-specific advantages for cities or regions located around war zones. War(s) have become symbolic references in the construction of local empowerment discourses or invisible locomotive sectors in urban or regional economies that reshuffle local power relations. Emergency-governance, which used to be a defining element of war governmentality – i.e. increasing recourse to exceptions or exceptional regimes – has gradually legitimized itself on the basis of efficient policy-making and replaced the rule of law by creating new forms of dispossession and displacement. What forms of novel entanglements are constituted between practices and contradictions of accumulation and redistribution on the one hand, and wars and conflicts on the other? How do these novel links translate into politics and policy-making, i.e. developmental policies or urban policies, struggles and politics? 

We invite papers from scholars in sociology, anthropology, history and/or any related discipline that address these broad issues and questions from diverse perspectives. Our aim is to create a theoretical discussion about how to re/conceptualize wars and conflicts as a prism to understand the reconfigurations of the economic and political fields and their interrelations. Papers with historical analysis of case studies are also welcomed. Panelists might address, but are not limited to, the following themes: 

  • Transnational economies of war (actors, networks and external flows such as remittances, humanitarian aid, foreign investments to war zones)
  • Urban governance and war economies
  • Narration and discourse on development and war
  • Affinities between neoliberal governmentalities and governmentalities of war
  • Alternate vocabularies/perspectives for understanding intersecting dispossessions and increasing disparities created by war economies

Paper proposals should include author name(s), affiliation, title and a max. 500 word abstract. Please send your proposals to Seda Yüksel (seda.yuksel@univie.ac.at) and Ayse Caglar (ayse.caglar@univie.ac.at) no later than December 15th. 

The final decision upon acceptance of the panel will be taken by the SASE in the course of February 2020 and acceptance notifications will be sent by late February. 

Panel Organizers: 

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ayse Caglar (University of Vienna)

Dr. Seda Yuksel (University of Vienna)

 

Contact Information

Seda Yuksel

Contact Email
ayseseday@gmail.com