Westminster (Politics and International Relations) Conversations

The Westminster (Politics and International Relations) Conversations are a programme of (term-time) monthly events open to all, from new students to members of staff and external attendees. The format is relaxed and moves away from the formal lecture presentation. Leading academic experts explain in an accessible way the background and context to their argument or analysis as well as presenting their key findings. For example, they might discuss with the audience how they came to the research area, the major ideas and thinkers they work with and the issues at stake in their research. The Conversations take place at 5.00pm, Fyvie Hall, 309 Regent Street. The talk and discussion will be followed by a reception to which everyone is invited. Please register with Eventbrite.

Forthcoming Conversations:

Wednesday 1st October 2025

Researching the International Politics of the Ocean: Colonialism, Resource Extraction and the view from the South

Professor Surabhi Ranganathan (University of Cambridge)

Surabhi Ranganathan's current work traces the co-constitution of international law and the ocean from 1945 to now, unsettling what we take as the givens in relation to the spatial zones, resource allocations and functional jurisdictions effected by the law of the sea. It extends the history and critique of international law into new areas, such as ocean depths and bottoms, global commons, marine infrastructures, and techno-utopian imaginaries, and, from the underexplored vantage point of oceanic law-making, throws new light on current preoccupations of international legal histories: statehood and territory, decolonization and the new international economic order, the Cold War, race and empire, and the emergence of new legal forms and institutions.

Wednesday 5th November 2025

Researching Critical Theories and Radical Politics

Professor Mark Devenney (University of Brighton)

Professor of Critical Theory, School of Humanities and Social Science and Co-Director, Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics. Mark's research covers two primary areas: first, contemporary political philosophy, and second improper forms of political action including occupations, theft, squatting, and terrorism. His research in the first area situates relations of property and propriety at the centre of theoretical work. This entails drawing out the implications of the works of Ranciere, Adorno and Laclau but with a focus on how new forms of property delimit the possibilities of living equal lives. This is complemented by work on the different ways of valuing life, whether actuarial, religious, ethical or otherwise. Mark Devenney has completed research on how the value of life is reflected in the uses and abuses of human bodies: torture; patenting; suicide bombing; genetic engineering and the ethics of life/death decisions.

Wednesday 3rd December 2025

Researching Security, Democracy and Digital Surveillance

Professor Claudia Aradau (King's College London)

Claudia Aradau is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies and Principal Investigator of the Consolidator Grant SECURITY FLOWS (‘Enacting border security in the digital age: Political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’), funded by the European Research Council (2019-2024). Her research has developed a critical political analysis of security practices. As more and more problems and people become constituted as objects and subjects of security, her research has inquired into the effects this has for political subjectivity and democracy. Her current research focuses on how digital technologies reconfigure security and surveillance practices, and how algorithms and machine learning recast relations between security, democracy and critique. She received the 2023 Distinguished Scholar Award by the International Political Sociology Section of the International Studies Association. Her latest book, Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other (with Tobias Blanke) won the 2023 Best Book Award by the Science, Technology and Arts in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association.

Wednesday 28th January 2026

Researching Europe’s long 1989: Analysing how the political, economic and social transformations of the 1980s and 1990s in Europe shape our present

Professor Christopher Bickerton (University of Cambridge)

Christopher Bickerton is a Professor in Modern European Politics at POLIS and an Official Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published numerous books and articles that span a number of different fields within social and political science. These include three research monographs, European Union Foreign Policy: From Effectiveness to Functionality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; paperback in 2015), European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics(Oxford University Press, 2021, co-authored with Carlo Invernizzi Accetti). His 2012 book on state transformation was awarded the Best Book prize by the University Association of Contemporary European Studies. In 2016, he published the best-selling The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide with Penguin, which was submitted for the Baillie-Gifford prize, the UK’s leading non-fiction literary prize. He is currently under contract with Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA for a history of Europe since 1989.

Wednesday 4th March 2026

Researching the War-Politics Nexus

Professor Vivienne Jabri (King's College, London)

Professor Jabri's talk will be based on her new book Worlds in Conflict: War and the Limits of Politics (MIT Press, 2025). Vivienne Jabri is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and Principal Investigator of the project, Mapping Injury, an ERC (adv) project funded through the UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee. Her research focuses on international political theory, critical social and political theory, postcolonialism, and feminist perspectives, with specific interest in the politics of conflict, violence, security, and justice. She has worked with the arts, developing research and co-curating an exhibition, Traces of War (2016) and, more recently, working on an arts and conflict project, Conflict and Injury: Injurious Acts I and II (2023), funded partly through the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation.

Wednesday 1st April 2026

Researching Feminist International Political Economy

Professor Shirin Rai (School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS, University of London)

Professor Rai is Distinguished Research Professor of Politics and International Relations and a Fellow of the British Academy. Professor Shirin Rai’s book Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring was awarded the Susan Strange Best Book prize at the 2025 BISA (British International Studies Association). Depletion provides a deep study into the human cost and realities of care work, and how they vary across the boundaries of class, race, and gender – not only in the UK but in communities across the world. The book also examines the social pressures on care workers across generations, and the physical strain of commuting to work and for care.

Previous Conversations:

Lee Jones (Queen Mary, University of London), The New Cold War? The West and China/Russia, 2 April 2025

Elke Schwarz (Queen Mary, University of London), Researching Ethics and Technologies of Violence in International Relations, 5 March 2025

Kiran Phull (King’s College London), Data Visualisation as a Critical Approach to Politics/ International Relations’, 29 January 2025

Elisa Randazzo (University College London), The Politics of the Anthropocene: Climate Change and Human Agency, 4 December 2024

Paul Rekret (University of Westminster), World Music/ World Politics: Methodological Questions for International Relations, 6th November 2024

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa (London School of Economics), Notes on Decolonisation and Abolition for IR research, 2 October 2024

Myriam Fotou (University of Leicester), Researching Death at the Border: the European Union and the Refugee Crisis, 17 April 2024

Ida Danewid (University of Sussex), Resisting Racial Capitalism, 13 March 2024

Nicholas Michelsen (King’s College London), Global Nationalists, the New Right and Changing International Order, 14 February 2024

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