The Department of International Relations, Ashoka University, invites submissions for the symposium “Securing Insecurity: Paradoxes of Precarious Protection” taking place on 4th-5th March 2027, at Ashoka University in Sonipat (near New Delhi), India. We particularly welcome submissions from postdoctoral scholars and early-career researchers.

Description:

Contemporary world politics is structured by profound contradictions. International institutions coexist alongside renewed assertions of national sovereignty, protectionism, and revanchist nativism. Capital, data, and technology move across borders with unprecedented speed, while human mobility is increasingly stratified, surveilled, and restricted. Supply chains create potent forms of interdependence, yet they have simultaneously become instruments of coercion, extraction, and geopolitical vulnerability. The most consequential threats confronting political communities, including climate change, pandemics, food and energy insecurity, ecological extraction, and supply-chain disruptions, are transnational, interconnected, and resistant to territorial containment. Yet the institutions and practices through which security is pursued remain predominantly state-centric, militarised, and territorially bounded. The result is a widening disjuncture between the planetary and transnational character of contemporary insecurity and the national frameworks through which it is interpreted and governed.

This symposium begins from a central conceptual proposition: insecurity is increasingly becoming a form of stability. Insecurity can no longer simply be treated as a temporary interruption of an otherwise stable political order. Persistent threats, emergencies, and vulnerabilities have become routine features of governance and everyday life. Order is maintained through the continuous anticipation, management, and displacement of insecurity. The paradox, therefore, is that contemporary security practices may stabilise the very conditions of insecurity they claim to resolve. The symposium seeks theoretical, empirical, and interdisciplinary contributions that examine the paradoxes through which insecurity is produced, governed, normalised, and contested. Rather than merely identifying additional objects of security, it invites scholars to ask how persistent insecurity has become politically productive, institutionally embedded, and materially uneven, and what this transformation demands from the study and practice of security.

Contributors may engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How do contemporary (in)security practices manage, redistribute, or stabilise insecurity rather than eliminate it?
• How can we understand the paradox of a state that remains materially powerful while becoming increasingly inadequate as the sole framework through which security is conceptualised?
• How are vulnerability and exposure to threat differentiated across gender, race, caste, class, disability, and geographical location?
• How do anxiety, alienation, and fear shape political responses to geopolitical, ecological, and technological transformation?
• Does the distinction between war and peace remain analytically useful under conditions of sanctions, proxy warfare, cyber operations, infrastructural disruption, and grey-zone conflict?
• How are threats made visible, sensible, and politically compelling through images, sound, spectacle, popular culture, and digital platforms?
• Can security be reimagined through care, solidarity, and interdependence rather than through threat, exclusion, and violence?
• What might post-security, demilitarised, decolonial, or utopian approaches contribute to a field so frequently structured by crisis, emergency, and anticipation?

Submissions:

Please submit your abstract (maximum 500 words) via the following form by 15th October, 2026. We expect to send out decisions by mid-November.

Some funding is available for travel, accommodation, and meals. Decisions on the allocation of funding will be made on the basis of availability and participants’ funding statements.

We look forward to your proposals,

Natallia Khaniejo and Ananya Sharma, Department of International Relations.