Monthly Archives August 2026

Beyond 3-day Conferences: From Annual Rituals to Academic Communities

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In this blog, PhD researchers Luqman Ọpẹ́yẹmí Muraina and Marta Maria Nicolazzi consider ways in which academic conferences can be transformed from annual rituals with set rules and formats, to being cultivated as communities. They begin by critiquing usual conference arrangements and then propose reimagining academic gatherings not as ‘rituals of accumulation’ but as ongoing communities of practice and care.

Photo by Alexandre Pellaes on Unsplash

Across universities and academic associations, conference planning is a ritual. Each year, conference committees are formed, venues booked, calls for papers crafted, keynote profiles announced, and statements on sustainability and inclusion posted. Several conferences follow the same rushed routines, set within a performative atmosphere where speed trumps substance: parallel overpacked 10/15‑minute presentations, sprint clarifications in place of expanded dialogue, awards, and a gala.

Almost immediately, organisers announce the next host city and dates, and institutional energy reorients to the next edition. The ideas, collaborations, and relationships developed through the conference are often given little time or support to continue as scholarly exchanges during conferences are squeezed into packed sessions and hurried corridors.  How can we interrupt this cycle to cultivate enduring research communities rather than simply another conference iteration? Whilst we acknowledge the diversity of professional academic organisations, this blog primarily critiques ‘international and prestigious’ conferences. We also contend that our underlying arguments are also significantly relevant to smaller-scale academic organisations and meetings.

As PhD researchers and co-organisers of university conferences, and participants at multiple conferences, we argue that academic groupings should move beyond the conference as commodity and towards the conference as community. This shift requires recognising the deeper structures that shape academic gatherings and then redesigning conferences across three layers: formats, infrastructures and temporalities, within and beyond the conferences, that align with different ethics.

Our perspectives are inseparable from our positionalities, and our own bodies have registered the costs that annual formats impose on early-career researchers. Overpacked panels, 10-minute sprints, rushed clarifications in place of dialogue, a performative atmosphere where speed trumped substance are exactly the accelerations and inequities feminist critics describe, and we have lived them directly. Marta, for example, arrived at a conference in Rabat near the end of a demanding PhD year and ran a high fever by day three; a conference in Turin became overwhelming after a single day. Similarly, in a post-conference organiser’s meeting, Luqman proposed that the values underpinning the qualitative research conference theme – such as justice, equity, sustainability, reflexivity, positionality, and diversity – should be cultivated within the organising team, beyond immediate planning for the next conference.

Conference as a commodity: A Critique

The conference ritual persists for good reasons: conferences offer visibility, networking, recognition, and a concentrated dose of novelty. Yet many of the features that make conferences acceptable within a neoliberal university’s programme (e.g. density, speed, spectacle) also hollow out the conditions for dialogue, relational exchanges, and care. Taking several uncosted days to think slowly, exchange ideas, and be creative sits at odds with the logic of contemporary academic management, which seeks to cost and commodify every working hour.

The costs fall heaviest on those with the least protection and the greatest mobility demands:early‑career and PhD researchers. Illness, fatigue, and exhaustion are not side effects; they are evidence of systemic strain. The travel grind, compressed schedules, and 10-minute performances, whether as organisers or as attendees, yield what Rosalind Gill calls academia’s ‘hidden injuries’: stress, anxiety, and burnout masked as professionalism. Slow scholarship reminds us that thinking needs digestion, reflection, and care; events meant to nourish ideas too often leave bodies depleted.

Behind every polished programme also lies an invisible economy of unpaid or underpaid labour, including graduate assistants setting up rooms; convenors maintaining lists; ECRs paying fees and travel. Academic mobility is stratified by funding, citizenship, and visas; who can cross borders (and at what cost) is unequally distributed. Metrics intensify these inequalities, as audit culture reorganises universities around what ‘counts’ and pressures scholars to treat their abilities, professional identities, and reputations as forms of capital to be continually measured, developed, and promoted. This resembles Foucault’s account of the neoliberal subject as ‘an entrepreneur of himself’.

Researchers prioritise CV‑friendly venues over spaces that nourish community, what Swartz calls ‘destination conferences’, whereby academics converge in ‘international’ exotic far-away locations.  In addition, intimate choices, such as what to apply for and what to prioritise, tilt toward visibility and the accumulation of capital and knowledge. The result is an audit‑ready persona rewarded over intellectual risk or collective experiment.

Towards the conference as a community

Remaking conferences as communities requires action on three design layers: format, infrastructure, and temporality. Concerning formatting, this means fewer papers and more time for dialogue, formats that encourage listening.

Cultivating conferences as communities also means building infrastructures of care that enable all participants to be present and known, not only those who can afford to outsource care work or whose bodies conform to ableist assumptions. Care is constitutive of knowledge, not auxiliary: without attention, responsibility and reciprocity, knowledge does not circulate. We must treat childcare, translation, visa restrictions, and accessibility as priorities that determine who can participate in scholarly life at all.

The temporal logic of conferencing is currently ritualistic: two or three days of acceleration, followed by dispersal and silence until the next cycle. Conferences increasingly follow the boom-and-bust rhythm of neoliberal cycles: intense investment and hype around a single edition, then abrupt withdrawal of attention until the next call for panels and papers. Once consumed, they leave little behind beyond a line on a CV and, at most, a connection for another research commodity. The dominant conference model has normalised the expectation that attendance is worthwhile primarily when accompanied by a presentation and not participation. This increasingly reduces conferences to platforms for showcasing research rather than spaces for listening, learning, dialogue, and sustained scholarly exchange. Already, a number of professional associations, such as Middle East Studies Association (MENA) and Federation of European Risk Management Associations (FERMA) are reconsidering the frequency of academic conferences, whether annual or longer intervals, to foster productive dialogue and allow attendees to build on the relationships and collaborations established at previous academic meetings.

If we are serious about community, we must treat continuity as integral rather than accidental. This could be done through quarterly reading groups, newsletters, peer‑mentoring circles, open salons, co‑authored reflections, federated conference model, and shared repositories.

There are also good examples of conferences that emphasise continuity and social justice. For example, scientific associations can curate Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) activities that diversify participation and explicitly address how whiteness structures inclusion. In the same vein, EADI’s (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes) Gender Justice Working Group uses social media to foster justice for women. Two different Development association working groups have also merged together to become the Joint EADI-DSA (Development Studies Association) political economy and political ecology of land, labour and food working group and co-organise seminars in-between conferences. Lastly, the Rural Geography Research Group (RGS-IBG) has established recurring online coffee meetings for postgraduate researchers focusing on conversation and peer support.

Beneath structure lies epistemology. The dominant format treats knowledge as performance while feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and relational epistemologies insist knowledge is situated, partial, and co‑produced. Haraway’s situated knowledges resists the illusion of neutrality and bell hooks frames knowledge‑sharing as a practice of freedom. Taking these insights seriously means shifting from stage to commons: ideas are lived with, interrogated, and revised; disagreement is practiced as care; the aim is collective transformation, not individual accumulation.

Based on studies about academic complicity in the genocide in Gaza, conferences must consistently link disciplinary expertise to global and social issues. For example, beyond issuing statements on major global pressures, as some associations have done, including the  International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) and EASA’s (European Association of Social Anthropologists) statements on Gaza, – conferences should produce collective outputs, such as manifestos, co‑authored reflections and repositories, calls to action, and commitments to translate conference discourse into institutional and societal change. Conference‑as‑a-community recognises scholarship as ongoing practice oriented to social change.

Conclusion

Taken together, our perspectives converge on a common argument: reimagine academic gatherings not as rituals of accumulation but as ongoing communities of practice and care. Concretely, this means designing formats that enable slow dialogue; building care infrastructures as epistemic conditions rather than optional extras; and committing to afterlives that keep communities alive between editions. Politically and epistemically, it means resisting the equation of speed with value and performance with knowledge. Organisational change is necessary, but insufficient without a companion shift in how we understand knowledge itself—relational, contested, situated and common.

Driven by neoliberalism and academic capitalism, the commodification of conferences represents the fundamental structure of contemporary higher education that cannot be sidelined. However, with less involvement from government higher education policy levers, conferences offer more space for rapid radical-transformation. If we can align formats, infrastructures, epistemologies, and temporalities with that understanding, conferences can cease to be a yearly commodity to living commons where scholarship is created, shared, received, questioned and transformed together.

AI usage: Generative AI (ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI) was used to improve the clarity and expression of parts of the blog, identify relevant literature, suggest potential publication outlets, and assisted with web searches to locate discussions on conference frequency (e.g., annual versus biennial meetings) and examples of year-round engagement practices adopted by academic associations. The core ideas, arguments, analysis, interpretation, and final manuscript were conceived, developed, reviewed, and approved by the authors, who take full responsibility for the content.

Biography

Luqman Ọpẹ́yẹmí Muraina writes as a student and researcher of Politics of knowledge and decoloniality and currently completing a PhD titled ‘Towards Decolonising Development Studies: Teaching Informed by Alternative Development Epistemologies in Nigerian Universities’.

Marta Maria Nicolazzi is sociologist, activist and researcher specialised in gender and migration. She holds a PhD from the Network for the Advancement of Social and Political Studies of the University of Milan; with a project titled “Bodies, Selves and Spaces: How Women Experience Milanese Public Spaces”.

“Neither climate impacts nor conflict just ‘happen’”: Insights from an Environmental Peacebuilding Workshop

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In this blog, Juliane Schillinger (Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and Board Member at the Environmental Peacebuilding Association) and Tom Ansell (The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre) discuss the outcomes of a workshop held in May 2026 at  ISS to explore commonalities and differences in the use of key concepts at the intersection of environment, climate, conflict, and peace. The workshop was convened as part of the launch of the new on Essential Concepts of Environmental Peacebuilding by the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, which contains more than 150 entries related to environmental conflict and peacebuilding, the workshop sought to find answers to a simple question: Are we all speaking the same language?

The intersection of environment, climate, conflict and peace attracts an increasingly diverse group of stakeholders, ranging from traditional security actors to environmental activists, humanitarians and development organisations, and from global policy conversations to local action. Researchers have been engaging in conversations around these themes from a variety of disciplinary and conceptual perspectives as well. The workshop attracted participants from each of these sectors, bringing diverse perspectives on environmental peacebuilding and climate security from their own sectors. Given this diversity, it is natural that such plastic terms as ‘security’ and ‘justice’ would be interpreted in various ways within the group. Do they mean the same to a traditional security expert, an environmental activist, or a humanitarian? Predictably, no!

A word cloud generated from key terms used by workshop participants across different discussions

Bringing all these perspectives together, though, can significantly enrich conversations and programmes designed to address the compound risks of environmental degradation, climate change and conflict. But they can also bring challenges, when diverging perspectives lead to miscommunication and misunderstandings when not everyone seems to be speaking the same language.

Why are we here?

To kick off the session, participants self-identified as being part of a stakeholder group (research, humanitarian/development, civil society, security) and freely responded to the prompt: “Why are you engaging at the intersection of environment, climate, conflict and peace? What are you hoping to achieve?” Five clusters of motivations emerged, often across sectors:

1) for advocacy purposes and to raise awareness of challenges and approaches at the intersection of climate and conflict

2) based on the strong presence of people working in civil society and social movements on the issue, and with the aim to show solidarity with affected communities and fellow activists

3) focusing on the resilience of and accountability towards affected populations, particularly in the context of disaster risk management and humanitarian practice in fragile and conflict-affected areas

4) to strengthen systems approaches that consider the intersection of environment, climate, conflict and peace holistically, and can create spaces for collaboration across sectors

5) motivated by the opportunities inherent to integrated approaches and how policy and technology could try to approach environment, climate, conflict, and peace together.

Next to humanitarian and development practitioners, many researchers were motivated by resilience strengthening and humanitarian concerns, with one summarizing their motivation as “[I want to] help people with ‘little’ agency to increase their adaptive capacity [to disasters]”. Overall, though, the group felt that the link between humanitarian action, climate, conflict, and the environment should still be made more explicitly in their day-to-day working lives.

The need for integrated and system-based approaches was the most common motivation among workshop participants, reflecting the desire to “avoid silo thinking”, and to work more holistically in contexts that are both fragile and climate-sensitive. One attendee expressly linked a causality between conflict and climate justice: “I work on climate justice. Conflict undermines it. The climate and energy transition can also generate conflict”.

Across all of the groupings, there was a general understanding that by interacting with climate and environmental concerns, they or their organisations could also contribute to longer-term and sustainable peacebuilding, and support advocacy on other environmental issues such as clean water. Some directly highlighted the role of environmental problems in dispute resolution in their work projects, and the wish to work closely with colleagues from other disciplines and sectors.

Perhaps indicative of the The Hague’s ecosystem, a couple of attendees expressed that they would like to try and ‘reclaim’ climate and environmental concerns from the military and security spheres. Others were more interested in building across sectors: “[I want to] link military and other security actors in cooperation / knowledge [sharing] with civil society and government actors, humanitarian, peace, energy transition, etcetera.”

 

For the analysts or for the campaigners?

Over the course of the workshop, participants took part in various interactive exercises to help the facilitators understand their (dis-)comfort in using terms and phrases related to the environment, climate, conflict and peace, such as “climate change causes conflict”, “security” in the context of the environment and climate, “environmental/climate justice”, and “decolonisation”. These discussions revealed that whilst most people in the room were ‘speaking the same language’ inasmuch as they broadly agreed on the meaning of the phrases, participants were quite divided on how and where the phrases should be used. Discussion around the statement “climate change causes conflict” ranged from calls for more nuance and differentiated assessments of causality to participants engaged in advocacy work highlighting that “it’s not a linear process, but the phrase is useful for justifying action and our work”, and “I work with activists, and simpler messages travel better”. One participant even noted that “the phrase is useful for proposals!”.

The discussion also provided the opportunity for disagreements to surface on the securitisation of climate and the environment and the role of security actors in this space. A number of NGO and civil society representatives vigorously expressed that they would like to see fewer military and security voices in discussions around the link between climate and conflict. “Security implies safeguarding the status quo, not transforming systems to climate justice”, was one clear expression of this. Meanwhile, another participant highlighted that using the security language within a Dutch context was quite useful to motivative people and local actors to take precautions at a personal or local level.

Several participants preferred to speak of “environmental justice” or “climate justice” instead of security, because it provides a frame of reference that can speak to other forms of vulnerability, inequality, or injustice. This is not necessarily incompatible with using simplified language to motivate larger groups: “our [humanitarian] line is that those affected the most are often the least responsible”.

“Decolonisation”, meanwhile, was found to be useful to motivate action and show the ingrained power relations within subjects often held to be ‘power neutral’, such as materiality and technology. Nonetheless, some attendees found it a still-uncomfortable term to use within their work. Participants were, however, united by the idea that “decolonisation” can be used to shine a light on practices that still bring about environmental destruction, and also subjectivise people: “imperial and colonised pasts have effects that last centuries, especially when talking about geographies and natural resources”. Similarly, a majority of attendees liked using terms that highlight the human factor in global phenomena, whether climate or conflict related. Relying on technical or neutral language can neutralise responsibility – or shift focus onto personal choices rather than systemic trends or policies.

As for the initial question of whether we are all speaking the same language on environment, climate and security, the primary reflection from the discussions for environmental peacebuilding scholars and practitioners would seem to be whether it is actually useful for everyone to speak the same language, or if it is more useful for multiple languages to be developed: that can appeal to a range of uses from more nuanced research and policy discussions to more direct public advocacy.

For more information about the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, check out their website.

Opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Environmental Peacebuilding Organisation, nor the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

About the authors:

Juliane Schillinger is a transdisciplinary researcher at the intersection of the environment and conflict. As a Technical Adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, her work focuses on climate action and disaster risk reduction in fragile and conflict-affected settings, and on humanitarian engagement with climate security and environmental peacebuilding. She is a member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association’s Board of Directors and a The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre fellow.

Tom Ansell is Coordinator & Researcher at The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre. His work revolves around a ‘Societies in Crisis’ – led understanding of humanitarianism, with specific foci on humanitarian advocacy, Disaster Risk Reduction, and critical Vulnerability. He also Coordinates the International Humanitarian Studies Association. 

The shifting geopolitics of deep-sea mining in the Pacific Islands region: An industry poised to merge?

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As global competition for critical minerals intensifies, the world’s oceans are emerging as a new frontier in the race for strategic resources. Originally published by the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes’ (EADI) blog, Debating Development Research, ISS PhD alumnus Ben Radley and Imogen Eagles explore how deep-sea mining is becoming a focal point of geopolitical rivalry in the Pacific Islands, highlighting the tensions between resource security, environmental protection and the competing interests of states, industry and local communities.

Photo by GEOMAR on Wikimedia

The ocean’s seabed contains vast deposits of minerals deemed critical for green transition technologies, military defence systems and AI hardware, among other uses. According to some estimates, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone alone – an approximately 4.5 million square kilometre abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean – holds more copper, nickel and cobalt than all land-based deposits combined. With China’s recent tightening of export controls on several critical minerals creating global price shocks and disrupting Western supply chains, geopolitical contestation to access and exploit seabed minerals is heating up.

Governance of the seabed is divided between national and international waters. Countries retain full sovereignty over the right to explore and exploit natural resources in their Exclusive Economic Zones, which extend up to 200 nautical miles offshore. Beyond national jurisdiction, the seabed, ocean floor and subsoil – commonly referred to as ‘the Area’ – are governed by the UN International Seabed Authority (ISA). Established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the ISA has yet to introduce a mining code to allow commercial exploitation of seabed minerals in the Area.

This is due, alongside Global South concerns about how any economic benefit would be distributed among nations, to the extensive and potentially irreversible environmental and ecological damage the industry is widely expected to cause. Fragile seafloor habitats and the mineral substrates that underpin them would be physically destroyed, sediment plumes and toxic wastewater discharges would cause long-term biodiversity loss including possible extinctions, and key earth-system processes such as the carbon cycle would be disrupted. And there remains so little we know about the deep-sea. Just last week, scientists accidentally uncovered a deep-sea coral system the size of Vatican City, including 28 species they suspect are new to science. Responding to these concerns, at the time of writing, 43 countries have called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining.

The US, however, is not among them. As a non-party to UNCLOS, the US is instead seeking to accelerate a pathway towards deep sea mining both domestically and in the Area. In April 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14285, Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources. The Order declared that seabed minerals “are key to strengthening our economy, securing our energy future, and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers”, and called on government agencies to expedite the process to establish a deep sea mining industry as an urgent matter of national security.

As of mid-2026, several companies were pursuing US authorisation to explore and potentially extract minerals from international waters. Among these, Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC) was furthest ahead, with its application for an exploitation license deemed in full compliance and the permitting process expected to conclude in early 2027. China, meanwhile, holds the largest number of deep sea mining exploration contracts granted by the ISA, is a major financial contributor to the ISA, and reportedly operates the world’s largest oceanographic research fleet.

The Pacific Islands region, comprising a diverse set of states and territories – several of which are US-owned – lies at the centre of growing geopolitical contestation over deep-sea mineral deposits. Roughly three-quarters of the exploration licenses granted by the ISA are located in the Pacific. Most of these are in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, including those held by companies currently seeking US approval, where the quantity and quality of seabed minerals are widely recognised as unmatched globally. In addition, many Pacific Island Countries host significant deposits in their sovereign waters. The Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority, for instance, estimates its Exclusive Economic Zones to contain 6.7 billion wet tonnes of mineral-rich nodules.

Figure 1. Pacific Islands Region showing the Exclusive Economic Zones of several Pacific Islands Countries and the main locations of nodule deposits

*Source: Petterson, M.G. and A. Tawake (2019) The Cook Islands (South Pacific) experience in governance of seabed manganese nodule mining, Ocean and Coastal Management 167 (271-287))

Alongside the Cook Islands, Nauru, Tonga and Kiribati have been among the strongest Pacific Islands Countries proponents of deep sea mining, seeing it as an opportunity for development and economic diversification. The Cook Islands has granted four exploration contracts to three companies in its Exclusive Economic Zones (two with US interests and one Belgian joint venture) and is the sponsoring state behind an exploration licence with the ISA in international waters.

Tonga and Nauru, meanwhile, are working with TMC through two ISA exploration licenses in the CCZ, where Tonga and TMC share a subsidiary in Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd and the Nauru government sponsors the TMC subsidiary, Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. A recent investor presentation provided by US firm American Ocean Minerals, which holds ownership interests in the Cook Islands’ Exclusive Economic Zones, details how it plans to process deep-sea minerals mined in the Pacific on the US Gulf Coast via a transhipment port in American Samoa (Figure 2 below).

Figure 2. American Ocean Mineral’s DSM supply chain

Presentation of American Ocean Minerals investors
(Source: American Ocean Minerals investor presentation, 2026. Accessed 18 June 2026)

Most Pacific Island Countries, however, are resistant. The ocean is central to cultural identity in the region and plays an important economic role through the tourism and fishing industries. As one public figure leading community resistance to DSM in Papua New Guinea put it, “the ocean is a part of the earth, what we call graun, and we are part of graun”. Consequently, most of the region’s countries and territories have called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on DSM, with Vanuatu, Palau and Fiji some of the industry’s staunchest opponents.

At a Pacific Small Island Developing States Regional workshop held in Fiji in May 2026, with representation from across the region, Pacific civil society groups called for transparency and inclusion to ensure all voices are heard. This would include those promoting a precautionary approach or a full moratorium. The US’s own Pacific Island territories are among these; the leaders of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are pushing for a moratorium, and American Samoa is deeply concerned about the US’ fast-tracking of DSM in their waters.

Yet there is a concern held by civil society observers in the region that moratorium positions represent more of a ‘wait and see’ attitude from regional governments, as opposed to a firm stance against the industry. While academics and commentators have long foretold the onset of deep sea mining globally and in the Pacific Islands region, there is a growing sense that intensifying US-China geopolitics combined with industry promotion by some Pacific Islands Countries might drive deep sea mining exploration to commercial exploitation before the decade is out.

About the authors:

Ben Radley is a Reader in International Development at the University of Bath. His research centres on the political economy of mining, energy and labour in the context of green transitions, with a regional focus on Central Africa and the Pacific Islands.

Imogen Eagles is studying for a BSc in International Development with Economics at the University of Bath. On her placement year as a research assistant in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, she has supported work on deep-sea mining, Syrian refugees and women’s career experiences in the UK.