Call for papers: South East Europe as a site of theory, method and political imagination.

The South East Europe Working Group is pleased to announce its fifth annual Worlding from South East Europe, Remaking International Relations workshop.  

What changes when South East Europe (SEE) is approached not simply as a region to be interpreted through the established categories of International Relations, but as a site from which those categories can be questioned, revised, and created? 

Scholarship concerned with South East Europe has long challenged the region’s positioning as peripheral, transitional, belated, exceptional, or available primarily for comparison with an implicitly Western norm. Researchers have recovered overlooked intellectual and political histories, examined the disciplinary production of the region, unsettled foundational concepts, and demonstrated how experiences situated in and across SEE illuminate wider international processes.  

This workshop begins from these interventions but also asks what might come next. How can research from and with South East Europe generate new concepts, methods, comparisons, and political imaginaries? Which disciplinary assumptions become unstable when viewed from the region? What relations, histories, and futures come into view when SEE is treated as a point of intellectual departure rather than merely an object of study? 

The SEE Working Group seeks to create a supportive and exploratory space in which researchers, both established and early-career, can discuss emerging arguments, methodological experiments, unfinished projects, and new forms of collaboration. We particularly welcome contributions that take intellectual risks, cross disciplinary or methodological boundaries, or reflect openly on conceptual and empirical difficulties. 

Possible questions and areas of engagement include: 

• How might South East Europe reshape the concepts and vocabularies of International Relations? 

• How are SEE, Europe, the Balkans, East and West produced, contested, and related? 

• What can artistic, visual, creative, and popular-cultural practices in/about the region contribute to understanding international politics? 

• How do gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, citizenship, and whiteness organise political life within and beyond the region? 

• How are mobility, migration, borders, displacement, and forms of containment experienced and contested? 

• What political possibilities emerge through protest, activism, mutual aid, organising, refusal, and everyday practices? 

• How do ecological crisis, extraction, infrastructure, energy, and environmental struggle connect SEE to wider regional and planetary processes? 

• How are socialist, post-socialist, post-Yugoslav, imperial, and colonial inheritances remembered, transformed, or refused? 

• How might the foreign-policy agency of SEE states and actors be understood beyond narratives of dependence, alignment, or geopolitical competition? 

• Which concepts, methods, archives, or comparisons do not travel easily and what might be learned from that difficulty? 

These questions are indicative rather than exhaustive. We welcome contributions from researchers working with/on South East Europe broadly understood, as well as work that examines the region's relations with other places, histories, and intellectual traditions. 

 The workshop will continue to build collaborative networks within and beyond the Working Group and the UK. The format will be based on presentations of extended abstracts, enabling discussion of research at different stages. After the workshop, we envision the discussions to continue at BISA 2027 (June 2027, Manchester) and encourage authors to submit their paper abstracts for consideration at the annual conference.  

Please submit short abstracts of 300 words by Friday 25 September 2026, to seewg.group@bisa.ac.uk. If accepted, extended abstracts (ranging between 1,500 – 3,000 words) should be submitted by Friday 9 October 2026. 

The workshop will take place virtually on Thursday 15 October 2026 (half day; exact time tbc).  

Photo by Oana Ciurcanu on Unsplash