(En)countering violence: critical approaches to studying and representing violence, and dangerous and disposable subjects

In the context of increasing conflicts and contestations – be it associated with ongoing colonial legacies, migration, climate change, late capitalism, war and genocide, the rise of the far right, transphobia, and more – questions of violence are at the heart of global politics. Accordingly, a wealth of scholarship in International Studies explores the manifold origins, manifestations, and effects of violence, often through the lens of conflict and war. Nevertheless, the centrality of violence to International Studies is often overshadowed and obscured. The study of violence – that is, how we study violence itself – remains marginal(ised) and confined to critical subdisciplines. There is a need for an explicit focus on the ethico-political dimensions of knowledge production on violence and, importantly, people subjected to violence. This attention is crucial in a context where certain forms of violence are increasingly sanitised and rendered mundane, and relatedly, violence enacted on specific bodies is normalised. As a discipline, we lack the understandings, frameworks, and tools to adequately and ethically conceptualise violence in an integrated and sustained manner. For example, by refusing to confine the questions and politics of knowledge production on violence to administrative processes for ethical approval, research proposals, PhD methodology chapters, and superficial and perfunctory footnotes, which risk reproducing hierarchies, including of coloniality, class, race, and gender.

This symposium will provide a much-needed space to explore how we study, write, and talk about violence and people subjected to violence. It will attend to the centrality of violence in International Studies by building understandings, frameworks, and tools to conceptualise violence, in addition to foregrounding the politics of knowledge production on violence and how this can be integrated throughout the entire research process. Accordingly, the symposium is concerned with the following questions:

• What are the structures, materials, and discourses that shape and legitimate violence? 
• How do we challenge the subjection of certain people, deemed dangerous, deviant and disposable, to violence? 
• How can we bring together, expand on, and amplify the many theorists, frameworks, and methodologies used to study violence? Relatedly, how can we mobilise these theorists, frameworks, and methodologies to explore and challenge contemporary manifestations of violence? 
• What are alternative ways of studying violence that unsettle hierarchies, including those of knowledge production?
• How do we better connect ongoing enactments violence to the associated histories and legacies of oppression, exploitation, and exclusion?

In short, the symposium aims to unsettle assumptions about the study of violence: what constitutes violence, who is subjected to violence, whose knowledge is worthwhile, and whose experiences are legitimate. These questions go to the heart of International Studies and ideas of who matters, who can be targeted or protected, and ultimately, who is human.

Symposium agenda

Wednesday 9 September 2026

• Panel 1: Critical approaches to studying violence In this panel, workshop participants are encouraged to explore and foreground the structures, materials, and discourses that shape and legitimate violence. It aims to interrogate what constitutes violence and how certain forms of violence are increasingly sanitised and rendered mundane. 
• Panel 2: Critical approaches to studying people subjected to violence In this panel, participants are invited to interrogate the subjection of certain people – deemed dangerous, deviant and disposable – to violence. The panel aims to unpack who is subjected to violence, whose knowledge is worthwhile, and whose experiences are legitimate.

Thursday 10 September 2026

• Panel 3: Methodological complexities This panel centres methodological complexities and the socio-politics of knowledge production on violence and people subjected to violence. It encourages participants to foreground how methodologies enable and challenge hierarchies, including of coloniality, class, race, and gender. 
• Panel 4: Principles of onto-epistemology In this panel, participants are invited to attend to the onto-epistemological principles which underpin research on violence, including principles which can help us unsettle assumptions about the study of violence. It aims to explore and expand the theories, frameworks and concepts needed to adequately and ethically conceptualise violence in an integrated and sustained manner.

This symposium is co-hosted by the Critical Alternatives for World Politics (CAWP) BISA Working Group and the Research Group in International Political Sociology, School of Society and Environment at Queen Mary University of London.