CFP: Everyday Multilateralism in Polarized Times | EISA-PEC 2026

[Luis Aue]

Dear all,

Ben Christian and I are organizing a panel entitled “Everyday Multilateralism in Polarized Times: Negotiation, Expertise, and Contestation” for the EISA Pan-European Conference (1–4 September 2026, Lisbon), and we warmly invite paper proposals. Please find the short panel description below. 

We especially welcome submissions from early-career researchers.

If you are interested, please feel free to get in touch or send us a paper title and short abstract (max. 150 words) by Wednesday, February 4. 

Best wishes,
Ben & Luis

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Everyday Multilateralism in Polarized Times: Negotiation, Expertise, and Contestation
 
This panel explores how multilateral governance is being reworked in an era marked by geopolitical polarization, overlapping crises, and intensified contestation of authority in global politics. Moving beyond narratives of either institutional decline or stability, the panel asks how multilateral institutions and negotiation arenas are practically sustained, adapted, and disrupted under conditions of persistent conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on International Political Sociology and related approaches, contributions foreground the everyday work through which multilateralism is assembled—through professional practices, material infrastructures, and organizational strategies.
 
The panel invites analyses of how actors navigate contentious multilateral environments, whether through diplomatic brokerage, the management of disagreement, or the governance of conflict within institutional settings. It also welcomes work that examines the often-understated political economy of global governance, including how resources, funding arrangements, and administrative capacities shape institutional resilience and fragility. In doing so, the panel encourages attention to how legitimacy and expertise are entangled with material dependencies, organizational constraints, and shifting power relations. Overall, the panel seeks to advance a practice-oriented understanding of contemporary multilateralism by bringing together research on negotiation, expertise, institutional survival, and the conditions under which global governance is contested and transformed.

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Dr Luis Aue

Researcher and lecturer

University Bielefeld

Postdoctoral fellow
ERC Project Socialist Medicine
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Recently published:

(with Katharina Krause): From Objects of Expertise to Objects of Experience: The Iterative Picturing of Contagion, Global Studies Quarterly, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf096. 

How Professions Maintain Coloniality: Interprofessional Strategies in the History of Travel Medicine, Review of International Political Economy, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2025.2535421.

Knowledge Regimes and the Postcolonial Hierarchies of International Health Quantification, in Knowledge and Expertise in International Politics. A Handbook, OUP,  2025, Ch. 44. 

Socialist Health Internationalism at Home: East Germany’s Tropical Medicine between Anticolonialism, Medical Racism, and Shortages, European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1163/26667711-bja10060.