International Studies and Emerging Technologies symposium: emerging technologies and global dis/re/order
The International Studies and Emerging Technologies Working Group are hosting an online Symposium on "Emerging technologies and global dis/re/order", taking place on Friday 23 January 2026, from 9 am to 1.30 pm GMT.
This one-day event brings together emerging and leading scholars to explore how emerging technologies are reshaping international relations, presenting new security challenges, and requiring us to rethink global ‘order'.
Programme:
9.30 – 9.45 am: Benjamin Farrand (Newcastle University) Introduction to ISET Global Disorders
9.45 – 11.15 am: Digital disruption, risk, and security
1. Xinchuchu Gao (University of Lincoln) From Order to Disorder: China’s Role in Rewriting the Global Digital Landscape
2. Mel Meadowcroft (London School of Economics) Emerging technologies, emerging conflicts: Assessing the Use of Technologies to Support Early Warning in the European Union
3. Konstantinos Manakos (Northumbria University) Promising Security, Delivering Dependency: The Material Constraints of EU Semiconductor Collective Securitisation
4. Samah Rafiq (King’s College London) Digitising Risk: Expertise, Pre-emption, and the Technological Reordering of Security
11.25 – 11.50 am: Break
11.50 am – 1.20 pm: Theorising world (dis)order and emerging technologies
1. Mike Bourne (Queen’s University Belfast) Technicity and Metastability in International Relations: Modes of stability and disruption
2. Elisabeth Schweiger (University of Stirling) The Pinnacle of Modernity: New weapon technologies and colonial imaginaries
3. Jing Su (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) & Caice Jin (University of Exeter) Cyberspace and the Transformation of International Order: Four Scenarios of Sino-European Norm Contestation
4. Abhishank Mishra (Jawaharlal Nehru University) Reconceptualizing Catalytic Nuclear War in South Asia: An Exploration of Emerging Sub-conventional Pathways to Escalation
1.20 - 1.30 pm: Closing and next steps
Panel participants please register by Friday 16 January. For other attendees registration will close two hours before the event begins.