Progressive Geographies

2015 Millennium Conference, “Failure and Denial in World Politics”, LSE, 17-18 October 2015 – more details here.

Programme:  DRAFT 2015 Millennium Conference Programme

Call for Papers:   2015 Millennium Conference: Failure and Denial in World Politics

Conference Theme:   International relations are enmeshed in political failure and denial: from the governing of global climate change, financial collapse, and nuclear proliferation, to liberal statebuilding, development, and the potential for pandemics. Failure and denial reside in the background of world politics. In spite of their ubiquity and global relevance, however, it is paradoxical that these concepts remain under-theorised and under-conceptualised in International Relations scholarship. The 2015 Millennium Conference thus aspires to open new and critical grounds for debate and discussion by examining this paradox. It is a call for IR to theorise what has remained in the background of its thought and theory until now: failure and denial in world politics.

What constitutes failure and denial in world politics? What does the fear and effect of failure do to subjects, states, and international organisations? How does a state of denial affect and govern thought, conduct, politics, and subjectivity? In so far as failure and denial are socio-political categories, who can define a political outcome as a failure; how is the distinction between success and failure governed; how are failure and denial utilised as strategic tools; and how does the exposure of them feed back into political processes? What relations of power produce failures and maintain atmospheres of denial concerning gender, the postcolonial, the environmental, and insecurities of the international? How does the political recognition or denial of failure relate to temporality, memory, critique, and political action?

After a record number of abstract and paper submissions, the 2015 conference promises to offer stimulating theoretical explorations and discussions of this unexplored problematique within IR.  We hope you will join us at the LSE, 17-18 October, 2015!