Conveners
War Abroad: War and Peace Abroad: Security Assistance, Multilateral Operations, and Peace-Building
- Kersti Larsdotter (Swedish Defense University)
Description
With the winding down of large-scale boots-on-the-ground multinational missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has become apparent in both policy and academic circles that large-scale military interventions are but one option among others. Many other kinds of military interventions have been and are being launched and implemented, ranging from military assistance, to more ‘agile’ counterinsurgency, drone fighting, peacekeeping, and aerial interventions, among others. Recent work has investigated the politics of forming multinational coalitions for launching military interventions. Other contributions have explored the politics of implementation, looking at caveats and actual behavior of troops on the ground. A third strand has explored the implication of military interventions for the civil-military relations of the home country when those soldiers return home. Notwithstanding recent advances, within the field of security studies, there is little clarity about the conceptual, theoretical and empirical underpinnings of different kinds of military interventions with important implications for both scholarship and policy. This panel welcomes contributions on different types of military interventions and potential comparisons. Contributions are welcome from a variety of disciplines (history, political science, sociology, etc.) and may shed light on conceptual, theoretical and empirical aspects of the ongoing debate on military interventions within the security studies debate in dialogue with other neighboring fields such as peace and conflict research, war studies and military sociology.
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Yijun Xu (Free University of Berlin)11/06/2026, 10:45War AbroadPaper Abstract (Closed Panels)
Recent debates in peacebuilding have moved beyond the liberal peace paradigm to emphasize plural, locally grounded understandings of peace. However, despite this “local turn,” the field still lacks systematic tools for conceptualizing and comparing diverse visions of peace across actors and contexts. This article addresses this gap by proposing a new conceptual framework - the peace cube - as...
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Saurav Narain (Leiden University)11/06/2026, 10:55War AbroadPaper Abstract (Closed Panels)
Scholarly attention to the convergence between international conflict management and counterterrorism has expanded significantly, though with an implicit interpretation of the ‘use of force’ logic, and an emphasis on UN peacekeeping’s downsizing of protection and human rights norms in engagement with the concept (Moe, 2021; Geis and Moe, 2023). Furthermore, terrorism-related violence is on an...
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Ilker Kalin (Stockholm University)11/06/2026, 11:05War AbroadPaper Abstract (Closed Panels)
United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) are inherently multinational and rely on coordination among national contingents with diverse military cultures, doctrines, and rules of engagement. While existing research shows that mission composition and prior in-mission experience shape peacekeeping effectiveness, we know far less about whether coordination begins before deployment. This paper...
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Marie Robin (Université Paris Panthéon-Assas)11/06/2026, 11:15War AbroadPaper Abstract (Closed Panels)
How do rebels deliver justice when they reach power? This contribution examines post-conflict justice choices in Syria following the political transition of December 2024, focusing on how the new leadership under Ahmad al-Sharaa needs to address widespread human rights violations
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committed during the al-Assad era. These violations include crimes perpetrated both by the former regime (chemical... -