CfP- AGORA IV: ‘Emergent Ideas in the International Political Economy’, Copenhagen, December 6-7 2012

Workshop Theme

Debating whether ideas or interest matters has become old hat in the field of International Political Economy (IPE). Scholars developing work on ideational change and the role of norms and habit have argued for some time now that interests are ideas. This work has taken different forms, such as ‘agent-centered constructivism’, sociological institutionalism, discursive institutionalism, everyday IPE, critical realism, as well as scholars applying work from Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci, and Latour. The AGORA IV workshop provides a forum for stocktaking and moving forward with constructivist, critical, and post-structuralist IPE scholarship on ideational change. In particular, the workshop welcomes papers that study ideational emergence as a subject of investigation to unravel socio-economic and political change, be it at domestic, regional, international or transnational levels.

Organization

AGORA IV will be held at the Department of Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School on December 6 and 7 2012. The workshop is limited to a maximum of 10 presenters and is intended to be an interactive and friendly environment in which participants will receive constructive feedback on their work. We especially encourage proposals that are related to article-length or book-length scholarly research projects. The workshop will dedicate one hour to each participant's work: 5 minutes for presentation, 10 minutes of presentation of the argument by a discussant, and 10 minutes of critical engagement by a second discussant. The rest of the time is for Q&A.

About AGORA

AGORA is a worldwide network of scholarly institutes dedicated to the development of cutting-edge conceptual and policy-relevant work on pressing global governance issues. It is co-sponsored by Brown University (Providence, USA), the Copenhagen Business School (Copenhagen, Denmark), Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia), the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs (Oslo, Norway), the University of Texas at Austin (Austin, USA), and the University of Warwick (Coventry, UK).

Application process

Proposals should be no more than one page and are due by September 10. Please also attach a brief CV (no more than one page). Decisions will be made by September 24 and applicants will be notified by email. Please send applications to both Leonard Seabrooke (ls.dbp@cbs.dk) and Jason Sharman (j.sharman@griffith.edu.au).

Funding for travel/accomodation

Participants’ hotel costs and one dinner will be covered. Limited travel grants will be provided for non-AGORA paper givers to fly return to Copenhagen.

AGORA III: 'Statehood, Sovereignty, and Global Governance', Oslo, Norway, August 31-September 1^st 2011

Workshop Theme

The last two decades of research on globalization has produced important insights about how global flows of material and symbolic resources have made the world smaller and shaped national societies in significant ways. A central part of this research has concerned the emergence and institutionalization of global-level prescriptions – advanced by non-state actors – about how states should govern. In re-conceptualizing international politics as global politics, dominant ideas about states as always and necessarily dominant has been challenged, enabling a shift in focus from the problem of order to the problem of governance, and towards an exploration of authority beyond the state. There are merits in these claims, but they are poorly equipped to account for the role that state governments had in responding to the financial crisis of 2008-2009; how conceptions of statehood found in emerging economies such as China are impacting on the global south; how states fund and cooperate with non-state actors that can advance their interests; how purportedly non-statist global norms – such as human security – are defined in ways that make states their ultimate guarantor; and how state representatives are central to allegedly non-statist transnational regulatory and expert networks. Thus, the re-conceptualization from international politics to global politics and the empirical focus on non-state actors has come at a price.

This is in part, it seems, because political scientists tend to define the state through a set of distinctions that sets it apart from its environment, the three most important ones being state-market, state-society, and domestic-international (inside-outside). Claims about the strength, functioning, and autonomy of the state under conditions of globalization have thus been produced mainly through studies whose primary focus has not been on the state, but on its environment. The “bringing the state back in” literature from the 1980s certainly made an important contribution in terms of highlighting the centrality of the state, but it seems necessary to refine theoretical tools and to re-assess empirical claims under conditions of globalization.

The motivation for this workshop is that without conceptual tools that can grasp how the state is perceived as distinct from other entities yet inherently shaped by and implicated in them, empirical analyses of statehood and globalization will overlook how the state is central to global governance yet significantly transformed by it. The workshop invites papers that span different disciplines (political science, sociology, anthropology, law). Papers that address the following issues are of particular interest:

- Conceptual and theoretical discussion of the state and state sovereignty under conditions of globalization

- Empirical studies that deal directly with boundaries between the state and other actors, and the state and other spheres (i.e. market, society), including how conceptions of governance (effectiveness etc) are at stake in these processes.

- Empirical studies of the anatomy and operations of transnational regulatory network comprising both state and non-state actors (revolving door phenomenon between domestic-international, for example).

 Organization

The third AGORA workshop is hosted by the Centre for Global Governance at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and will be held in Oslo, Norway, on August 31-Sept 1, 2011. The workshop is limited to a maximum of 10 presenters and is intended to be an interactive and friendly environment in which participants will receive constructive feedback on their work in progress. We especially encourage proposals that are related to article-length or book-length scholarly research projects. We encourage applications from early career scholars. The workshop will dedicate one hour to each participant's work: 5 minutes for presentation, 10 minutes of critical analysis by an assigned discussant, and 45 minutes for open discussion. The entire workshop will be two days in length.

About AGORA

AGORA is a worldwide network of scholarly institutes dedicated to the development of policy-relevant work on pressing global governance issues. It is co-sponsored by Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia), the Copenhagen Business School (Copenhagen, Denmark) the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs (Oslo, Norway), the Watson Institute at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island , USA) and the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security & Law at the University of Texas (Austin, Texas , USA).

Application process

Proposals should be no more than two pages in length and are due by June 1.^st Please include a brief CV attached to your 2-page proposal. Decisions will be made by June 10^th and applicants will be notified by email. Please send applications to Ole Jacob Sending (ojs@nupi.no) and Leonard Seabrooke (ls.dbp@cbs.dk).

Funding for travel/accomodation

Participants’ airfare (economy fare) and accommodation plus a workshop dinner will be covered by AGORA.

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14-01-2011

AGORA II: Institutional Diversity in the Governance of the Global Economy: New Actors, New Perpsectives

With support from CSGR and Griffith University, scholars from CSGR attended the AGORA II workshop in Brisbane at Griffith University. This workshop was limited to twelve papers, including contributions from Louise Walker (CSGR); Leonard Seabrooke (CBS/CSGR); Jason Sharman (Griffith); Jeff Chwieroth (LSE), Kate Weaver (University of Texas at Austin); Kristen Hopewell (Michigan); Anja Jakobi (PRIF); Matias Margulis (McMaster); Daniel Mugge (University of Amsterdam); Brad Parks (LSE); and Wesley Widmaier (Griffith). The workshop was conducted against the tragic backdrop of the Brisbane flood. Still, it was an engaging and stimulating workshop for all concerned. AGORA III will be held at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs later in 2011.

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