In September 2015, Giardini-Naxos, Sicily was the venue for the 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations: "The Worlds of Violence". The two NPE team members and researchers Marjo Lindroth and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen visited this event and share their experiences and impressions.
In the end of September, we travelled to Sicily to attend the 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations. The conference was a large event – the largest in its history – drawing over 1300 participants. It took place in Giardini Naxos, close to the picturesque old town of Taormina. We suspect that the location and the warm Italian autumn might have had something to do with the appeal of the conference.
The four-day event hosted a variety of sessions and panels on classical and emerging issues in international relations. We were delighted to see so many sessions that engaged in critical theoretical and empirical research. The most interesting sessions included, for example, discussions on the violence of law, sites of global governmentality and theoretical perspectives on biopolitics and violence.
The session “The Biopolitics of Enmity, Victimhood and Resistance” was part of the section examining biopolitics and violence in international relations. We presented our paper titled “The Biopolitics of Resilient Indigeneity and the Radical Gamble of Resistance” in the session. All the papers in the session dealt – in one way or another – with the elusiveness of resistance in the context of biopolitics. The paper we presented in the conference will soon come out in the journal “Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses” in the special section “Indigenising Resilience” that we have edited.
Text and picture by Marjo Lindroth & Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen