'Haunting Histories': An IPS Symposium

This symposium invites participants to reflect on the role of history in shaping world politics and the ways we understand, (re)construct, and are moved by the past. Overarching questions include: How do legacies of empire and colonialism continue to haunt world politics in the twenty-first century? How can we balance fine-grained historical scholarship with interconnected histories that cut across spatial or temporal boundaries? How might our histories be animated by more-than-human forces from the natural to the supernatural to capitalism? How might the ‘return’ of geopolitics threaten current global political norms, institutions, and solidarities? This symposium brings together an interdisciplinary, international team of senior and early career scholars working at the cutting edge of these questions.

The symposium is co-organised with and sponsored by the Research Group on International Political Sociology (SPIR, QMUL), the LTDS programme Mobile People: Mobility as a Way of Life, and the School of Politics and IR at Queen Mary University of London..

Organisers: Jaakko Heiskanen and Joanne Yao

Where: Queen Mary University of London, Queens Building, Colette Bowe Room, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

Register here: Eventbrite Page

Roundtable 1 - The Ghosts of Empire

What does it mean to be haunted by someone or something? In common understanding, it is when something believed to be dead returns to assert itself, a force suspended between life and death, absence and presence, the familiar and alien, the known and unknowable. Empires exert such a pull on global politics. While empires as legitimate political configurations ‘died’ in the mid-20th century, their presence continues to haunt us from beyond the grave – from the formal institutions and frameworks of global governance and global capitalist circulations to the gendered and racialized hierarchies that shape political practices and the ongoing violence in Gaza. This roundtable explores the multiple ways we might conceptualize the ghost of empire and empire as haunting, and how it might help us think through how the past inserts itself into the present, often in surprising ways.

Roundtable 2 - Shadows and Scales: Micro and Macro Histories

Large things sometimes diminish in stature as we study them while small things sometimes cast large and lasting shadows. This roundtable explores the question of scale in historical analysis. With the dismantling of the Eurocentric metanarratives that had anchored our understanding of the past for much of the modern era, rich new histories of the international are being written. At one end of the spectrum, the rise of ‘global’ perspectives has sought to decentre Europe and highlight the agency of non-European actors, leading to new fields of study such as ‘global history’, ‘global historical sociology’, and ‘global international relations’. A contrasting response has been the revitalisation of micro-historical and micro-sociological approaches to the past that concentrate on the career of a single individual, community, object, or artefact, often with the aim of illuminating everyday lived experiences that resist sweeping generalisations.  

Roundtable 3 - Spectres and Spirits: From the Spirit of History to More-than-Human Histories

The entangled histories of human and more-than-human forces haunt global politics in that they are enduring and weighty presences that are often ignored, forgotten, or made invisible. The study of global history and politics often focuses on humans (particularly certain types of humans cast as ‘great men’) and their great deeds. This roundtable challenges the centrality of human agency in historical thinking by reflecting on the importance of both broader historical structures beyond individuals (often imagined as teleological visions of history having a spirit of its own) and on the centrality of entangled human and more-than-human forces that shaped our collective past. As human progress runs up against ecological and planetary boundaries that limit our material abundance and challenge our imagined mastery over the earth, grappling with these forces seem increasingly important.  

Roundtable 4 - Reanimating Geopolitics

In recent years, geopolitics appears to have returned from the dead. Like the undead of Haitian voodoo and recent science fiction tales, this reanimated geopolitics threatens to overwhelm and literally consume existing global political norms and institutions. From Russia’s ground war in Ukraine to Trump’s plans to purchase Greenland, annex Canada, and rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, the territorial underpinnings of state power have been brought into sharp relief. Meanwhile, the spectre of climate change is raising challenging questions about global environmental governance and the ways in which our understanding of the earth system is entangled with older geopolitical ideas of space, territory, and politics.

Programme:

09:00 - 09:45            Arrival and coffee

09:45 - 10:00            Opening Remarks 

10:00 - 11:15            Roundtable 1 - The Ghosts of Empire

Chair: Sharri Plonski (QMUL) 

Speakers: Aja Lans (Harvard), Nivi Manchanda (QMUL) Giovanni Mantilla (Cambridge), Sara Salem (LSE), Layli Uddin (QMUL)

11:15 - 11:45            Tea & Coffee Break

11:45 - 13:00            Roundtable 2 - Shadows and Scales

Chair: Jaakko Heiskanen (QMUL)

Speakers: Julia Costa Lopez (Groningen), Georgia Mansell (QMUL), Kim Wagner (QMUL), Ayse Zarakol (Cambridge)

13:00 - 14:00            Lunch

14:00 - 15:15            Roundtable 3 - Spectres and Spirits

Chair: Joanne Yao (QMUL) 

Speakers: Ida Birkvad (LSE), Zeynep Gulsah Capan (Erfurt), Kimberly Hutchings (QMUL), Timor Landherr (QMUL), Alice Rudge (SOAS)

15:15 - 15:45           Tea & Coffee Break

15:45 - 17:00           Roundtable 4 - Reanimating Geopolitics

Chair: Meredith Warren (QMUL) 

Speakers: Regan Burles (Edinburgh), António Ferraz de Oliveira (Groningen), Andy Li (LSE), Elana Rowe (NUPI), Danielle Young (Aberystwyth and Leeds)

17:00 - 17:30            Concluding thoughts 

17:30 - 18:30            Drink Reception