'En)countering Violence’ symposium keynote: Mirko Palestrino
We are excited to announce that the keynote speaker for the (En)countering violence symposium will be Mirko Palestrino. The keynote will be held at Queen Mary University of London. The title of Mirko’s keynote is ‘On time and violence’. Attendance at the keynote is open to all.
This keynote is part of the ‘(En)countering violence: critical approaches to studying and representing violence, and dangerous and disposable subjects’ symposium. This year’s 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. Mirko’s keynote responds to these concerns by centring considerations of temporality and its role in shaping war and peace.
Mirko Palestrino is a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. Mirko’s research sits at the intersection of Critical War Studies and International Political Sociology. He investigates the sociologies and politics of time and temporality, experiences and narratives of war, theories and practices of military victory, and the embodied politics of military training and deployment. He has recently authored ‘Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime’ (Oxford University Press, 2025). In this book, Mirko rethinks hegemonic understandings of military victory as the outcome of war and offers an innovative account of what victory means, shedding light on understudied victory practices that straddle the lines between war and peace, politics and military strategy, narratives and materiality. His work has also appeared in International Political Sociology, the European Journal of International Relations, and the Journal of Political Ideologies among others.
His keynote ‘On time and violence’ interrogates the relationship between violence and time. This relationship is profound, multiple, and complex. In the vernacular, for example, there is a time of war and a time of peace. Violence, however, unfolds across both phases, punctuating time as one of its unwavering features - it precedes and exceeds war, and it is very often found to characterise peace too. Time and timing decide what counts as violence and for whom. Time is even adopted as a tool of militarisation. This keynote uses time to shed light on the sociologies and politics of violence. It grapples with the multiple connections between time and violence, and explores how time can be employed to engage reflexively with knowledge production and its violence.
The keynote and wider 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.
Registration will remain open up until the 5.30pm start.