Call for Papers

 

Charles University’s Geopolitical Research Centre, in cooperation with IPSA RC 41, announces a call for papers for the panel to be held at IPSA World Congress 2023 named:

Post-Westphalian Approach to Sovereignty: Political Space through New Lenses?

Chair:  Martin Riegl, PhD

Discussants:  Bohumil Doboš, PhD

The panel’s theme aims to re-consider how political space and sovereignty interact in the modern world. It intends to present and discuss novel approaches to the empirical analysis of anomalous and classical political entities. States and their borders still arguably play the primary role in any relevant analysis of the geopolitical state of play. It seems that neither doing away with states as units of analysis nor expanding their fundamental conceptual structure to new areas or their disaggregation produces a better understanding of emerging entities gaining power worldwide. Is Twitter a geopolitical actor? Was the Islamic State’s territorial control in Iraq and Syria a case of sovereignty? Both these questions, far apart as they may be, require a return to the fundamental nature of the political community, its relationship with the territory and the modelling of sovereignty. A better understanding of how political life in its most essential aspects plays out in a particular physical space and how it,
if required, is appropriated for core political purposes, would allow for a more thorough comprehension of the entities existing at the margins of the state system. Therefore, submitted papers should provide new impetus
to developing and repurposing various theoretical perspectives on the nature of the political and how it manifests in geographical reality through the rigorous empirical application of these perspectives.  

In this regard, we propose submissions on the following topics:

  • Can the Foucaultian notions of observability and truth regimes play a role in locating political entities in physical space?
  • Are there yet unconsidered alternatives to the Westphalian state prism for understanding the political organisation of space?
  • Can the neo-medievalist theoretical model be expanded to offer new perspectives into the current political space?
  • Are multinational corporations behaving as political actors outside of their home countries?
  • How do the violent non-state actors’ organisations incorporate the notions of the political into their management of the controlled territory?
  • Or any other topic in line with the panel’s aim and

Paper proposal requirements: The proposals should be uploaded
to the IPSA website after 15 Nov 2022 as an abstract using the following link.
In case of any questions, please reach out to us at: branislav.micko@fsv.cuni.cz

 

Call for papers timeline:

15 Nov 2022 – Paper proposal/abstract submission opens

18 Jan 2023 – Submission deadline

1 July 2023 – Full paper submission deadline