What are the effects of military interventions on a personal, global and transnational level, what justification is there and what is the breadth and scope of that intervention? Those are some of the topics speakers will tackle at the 15th annual York Centre for International and Security Studies (YCISS) conference, titled "Violent Interventions".
The YCISS conference will be held tomorrow, Feb. 7, from 9am to 5pm, and Friday, Feb. 8, from 9:30am to 3pm, at 280 York Lanes, Keele campus.
Against a backdrop of recent and prospective interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon and Darfur as well as past interventions in places such as India, Congo, Zimbabwe and Guatemala, the conference seeks to interrogate practices, processes and perspectives of violent interventions.
The interdisciplinary conference will explore the logic, breadth and scope of violent interventions while investigating the methods, sites and justifications of and for violent interventions on a global, transnational and personal level.
It will get underway at 9am tomorrow, with opening remarks by YCISS director Robert Latham (right) , a political science professor at York, and conference co-organizers and York PhD candidates Mark Ayyash and Chris Hendershot.
Four panel discussions will follow the opening remarks. The panels explore various aspects of violent interventions looking at "Can There be Justice in ‘Just War’?", "Violence, Language and the Political", "Militarized Processes, Militarized States…Militarizing Africa" and "Can the ‘Subaltern’ be Heard?". The discussions will run from 9:15am to 3pm.
The panels are comprised of York graduate students and YCISS researchers, as well as external graduate students and lecturers along with a military lawyer from Germany, Ulf Häußler, who will discuss "Legitimizing the ‘Militarizing’ of Processes of Interventions: Chapter VII of the UN Charter".
The first day will end with a keynote address, from 3:15 to 5pm, by Michigan State University English Professor Salah D. Hassan, who will talk about "Never-Ending Occupations".
On the second day of the conference, Feb. 8, three more panels will tackle the topic of violent interventions looking at "Aesthetic Images, Normative Imaginings and Bodily Consequences", "Rethinking Canadian Intervention" and "Borders, Bodies and Controls". The panel discussions will run from 9:30am to 1pm.
A roundtable discussion, from 1 to 3pm, on "Theorizing Violence and Violent Interventions" will wrap up the conference and include York Professors Malcolm Blincow, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Elizabeth Lunstrum and Radhika Mongia, from the departments of anthropology, political science, geography and sociology.
For more information about the YCISS conference, including program details, click here.