Keynote Abstract

According to many observers, the existing liberal international order faces profound challenges: the 'rise of authoritarian great powers', diminishing American influence, and the emergence of a variety of explicitly anti-liberal fundamentalisms, to name but a few. For IR as a discipline, the current situation poses crucial theoretical and political questions that echo the very origins of the field, when in the wake of the second World War an intellectual current that can be called the 'International Relations enlightenment' struggled with the limits of liberalism and its fate in the emerging world order. Revisiting and recovering the insights of this often misunderstood movement and its attempts to construct a revived liberalism provides fertile terrain for exploring the character and depth of contemporary challenges and the intellectual legacies and limitations that IR possesses in confronting them.

Keynote Speaker

Michael C Williams is Faculty Research Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on international political theory and international security studies, and his publications include Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (Cambridge 2011, with Rita Abrahamsen), Culture and Security (Routledge 2007) and The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge 2005).

Keynote Address

A podcast of the keynote address is available here.

9 July 2012: Final programme available online

6 July 2012: Registration ends

1 April 2012: Normal Registration opens

31 March 2012: Early Bird Registration closes

17 March 2012: Preliminary Programme is now available!

26 January 2012: Participants have now received their acceptances and the post-graduate bursaries have been awarded.

Mid-January 2012: The deadline for abstracts has now passed. Participants were emailed of their acceptance by mid-January.

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