Research Group on International Political Sociology: Semester A Newsletter
Dear students, colleagues, and friends,
Welcome back to the first ‘25-26 edition of RGIPS’ semesterly newsletter. It contains the latest news, events, and research relating to the IPS research node in DPIR – enjoy the short read.
New members
Firstly, we’d like to extend our warm welcome to four new RGIPS members: Uygar Bespehlivan, Irene Garcia, Foteini Kalantzi, and Ollie Nixon. Should you wish to join the Research Group or know someone who would, please do not hesitate to email Jef and Mirko.
Upcoming events
RGIPS Annual Symposium
Save the date: this year’s symposium will take place on the 22nd April, 2026. Venue TBC.
Special Issue Launch: Digital Technologies & Migration – Behind, Beyond & Around the Black Box
Thursday 6th November, 15:00-17:00. Queen Mary; Collette Bowe Room.
This launch event celebrates the publication of a new Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies special issue that critically examines digital technologies in migration governance. Moving beyond the conventional framing of technologies as opaque “black boxes,” the issue proposes a conceptual framework for understanding digital tools in terms of their established relations, temporal shifts, and both immediate and hidden consequences. Guided by the principles of behind, beyond, and around the black box, the contributions collectively: (1) explore continuities and discontinuities introduced by these technologies rather than treating them as entirely novel; (2) investigate how technologies are embedded in social contexts, reshaping power relations among diverse actors; and (3) set aside normative assumptions about technological value to foreground how multiple actors engage with, resist, and repurpose these tools in everyday life.
This is a hybrid event. For more information about participants and how to attend, see here.
‘25-26 DoingIPS PhD Seminar Series – 8th Edition
31st Oct; 28th Nov; and 12th Dec, 2025. Various venues.
DoingIPS PhD Seminar Series is back with new organisers and a fascinating series of topics! The eighth edition of the Series is co-convened by our own Chana Rose Rabinovitz along with colleagues from King’s College and London School of Economics. It offers PhD students from various disciplinary backgrounds the opportunity to present their works-in-progress to PhD colleagues and senior academics who work within the realm of IPS. Topics for this year range broadly, including mangrove forests, technopatriotism, and weaving workshops as a methodology for understanding socionatural placemaking. If you are interested in attending, please contact ips.phd.seminar@gmail.com for up-to-date venues and presentation schedules.
Previous events
EISA Pan-European Conference on International Relations: DoingIPS Standing Section
25th – 29th Aug, 2025. University of Bologna, Italy.
The Standing Section on Doing International Political Sociology, co-chaired by Jef Huysmans (Queen Mary University of London) and Renata Summa (University of Groningen), had another successful presence at the Annual Conference of the European International Studies Association. The University of Bologna provided an excellent venue for intense discussions about contemporary world politics and the contributions of IPS.
The lead roundtable on The Promise of IPS in Times of Creative Destruction reflected on what IPS offers during a period marked by intense assertions of global-speak (including the global south/global north discourse), imperial politics, autarkic nationalisms with global aspirations, crises in democratic politics and multilateral institutions, and the forced displacement of populations. Unsurprisingly, this coincides with a widespread resurgence in framing the international as a question of great power polarities and geostrategic politics. At times, it appears that the fracturing and transversal approaches and tools developed in IPS over the past two decades are being overshadowed by the analytical lexicons of international relations and power politics, which it explicitly challenged for their failure to understand the complex diffusion and heterogeneity of social and political relations and the dynamics of forces. The roundtable contributions demonstrated how IPS's analytical repertoires provide valuable tools for explaining and understanding what is happening, challenging the resurging geostrategic and globalising approaches of International Relations.
Besides the lead Roundtable, the section organised the following panels:
- Performing legality through aesthetics and technicalities in global governance
- Security leftovers: exploring enduring (after-)lives of sites and objects of international politics
- International political sociologies of memory and aesthetics
- Everyday international politics in the urban space
- Contested knowledge and expertise in humanitarian practice: navigating the limitations of humanitarianism
- Grounding IR: the land question in international politics
- Contesting migration in reception communities
- How can we think critically about security in Europe in the present?
- International political sociologies of counter-politics
- Creative theorising in international political sociology
10th Edition of the IPS Winter School at PUC-Rio
30th June – 11th July 2025. PUC-Rio, Brazil.
Jef Huysmans co-organised the 10th edition of the annual Winter School in International Political Sociology at PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro, and Sophie Harman and Engin Isin also travelled to Rio to work with the students. There were some fantastic discussions during the seminars on Concepts and Methods of IPS (Joao P Nogueira & Jef Huysmans), Global Health Security (Sophie Harman), Planetary Citizenship (Engin Isin), Modernity and Discrimination (Victor Coutinho Lago), and Body and Politics: Notes on a Feminist Cartography (Lara Selis). William Walters opened the two weeks with a provocative keynote revisiting Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended in light of the far-right Project 2025. Kyle Grayson, along with Paulo Chamon and Roberto Yamato, delivered excellent sessions on writing and publishing. This year, the Winter School also hosted a week-long International Writing Workshop, funded by the British Academy (IWWEAF21\100027), for early-career researchers from across Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia.
The two intensive weeks of teaching, mentoring, and debating concluded with an excellent roundtable led by the students, which sparked a lively discussion on methodological nationalism, followed by drinks at the usual venue in Gavea.
Awards, publications, and grants
PSA ECN Annual Conference 2025
We extend our heartfelt congratulations to PhD candidate Irine Kurtanidze, whose paper ‘Is Fear Politics Enough? How the Emotional Economy of Fear and Hope Influences Voting Behaviour: The Case of Georgia’ won Best Paper Prize at the Political Studies Association’s Early Career Network Conference. Irine’s work focuses on voting behaviour in hybrid and transitional democracies, with a particular focus on post-Soviet states and Eastern Europe. Well done, Iri!
BISA Annual Conference 2025
Postdoctoral scholar and new RGIPS member Uygar Baspehlivan achieved outstanding success at this year’s British International Studies Association conference. His doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Meme-ing Global Politics: Moving Encounters with Capital, Race, and the State’, was awarded ‘Best PhD Thesis in Emotions in Politics and IR’, as well as an honourable mention for the ‘Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize’. Alongside these awards, his article ‘Theorising the Memescape: The Spatial Politics of Internet Memes’ was awarded the ‘Best Article in the Review of International Studies Prize’. You can read more about his achievements here. We wish you many congratulations and a warm welcome to Queen Mary and RGIPS, Uygar!
Publications
Niharika’s article ‘Enacting a politics of possibilities against Zulm and towards Azadi from coloniality and occupation’ was published this summer as part of the first Special Issue on Conceptual Diversity in the social sciences in the European Journal of Women’s Studies. Her 2023 Enloe Award-winning article, ‘A feminist analysis of the coloniality of militarisation: thinking with Kashmir at the margins on the Global South’ was also published online earlier this year in the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Mirko’s book Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime is now out with Oxford University Press. He has also recently published an article titled ‘’Sow the seeds of victory’: wartime gardening and the ontology of military victory’, in the European Journal of International Relations.
Georg’s article ‘’If I could turn back time’: Temporal security narratives, ontological disruption, and Germany’s Zeitenwende’, written together with Malte Riemann, has recently been published in the European Journal of International Security.
Jamie’s article ‘Unabsorbed: Assemblages and Spectres of Contested Welsh Waterscapes’ was published in the August 2025 volume of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
Grants
Rachel Humphris was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant for her project ‘Digital Welfare Borders: The Effects of Artificial Intelligence in Migrants’ Access to Welfare (DigiWeB)’. The project will run from February 2026 to February 2031 and will investigate how governments are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence to merge welfare systems with migration management. Combining data science and social science, it will examine how welfare-AI systems function, how social workers implement them in practice, and how they impact migrants’ access to services across three countries: the UK, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
We hope you enjoyed this newsletter and wish you a lovely semester.
Jef Huysmans, Mirko Palestrino, and Anastasia (Ana) Barclay