Archives: Notícias

Event: “Elections in Argentina: uncertainties and prospects”

In view of the second round of Argentina’s elections, which took place on November 19, 2023 in a contest between Sergio Massa (Unión por La Patria) and Javier Milei (La Libertad Avanza), the Center for Interdisciplinary Ibero-American Studies and the Institute of International Relations of PUC-Rio organized an event to discuss this critical political moment for Latin America and the world.

The event, held at IRI 2, was called “Elections in Argentina: uncertainties and perspectives”, and featured debaters José Maria Gomes (PUC-Rio), Arthur Ituassu (PUC-Rio) and Graciela Rodríguez (Instituto Eqüit), as well as moderation by Maria Elena Rodríguez (IRI/PUC-Rio).

Public Notice No. 07/2023 for the Young Women Scientists Support Program

On November 7, FAPERJ announced the final results of Call No. 07/2023 of the Support Program for Young Women Scientists working in Science and Technology Institutions in the State of Rio de Janeiro, which aims to support scientific projects with innovative methodologies and new lines of research, developed by women scientists. In the area of Humanities, the projects of Isabel Rocha de Siqueira, professor and director of the Institute of International Relations at PUC-RIO, “Agenda 2030 and Development Projects: Mapping and Impact on Definitions and Impact Measurements in the Territory” and Paula Drummond, “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Latin America: Promoting Voices and Perspectives from the Global South” were selected.

IRI congratulates the teachers on their award and is proud to have them as part of our Institute!

Applications open for the 8th edition of the IPS Winter School

Applications are open for the 8th edition of the IPS Winter School, an event aimed at postgraduate students and early career academics, to be held in July 3-14th of 2023. The application deadline is May 31st.

The IPS Winter School is an annual event held over two weeks, with the aim of discussing issues and critical approaches proposed by International Political Sociology. The activities include courses, tutorials, workshops, roundtable discussions and informal debates in an environment favourable to the exchange of ideas, academic and professional experiences, as well as to socialization among participants and faculty.

Application form

IPS Winter School 2023 – Guest Faculty

From July 3-14th of 2023, the 8th Edition of the IPS Winter School will take place at the PUC-Rio campus. The event is aimed at postgraduate students and early career academics.

The IPS Winter School is an annual event held over two weeks, with the aim of discussing issues and critical approaches proposed by International Political Sociology. The activities include courses, tutorials, workshops, roundtable discussions and informal debates in an environment favourable to the exchange of ideas, academic and professional experiences, as well as to socialization among participants and faculty. In this edition, the School will welcome the professors and lecturers:

Didier Bigo (Sciences-Po Paris and King’s College London).
Anne-Marie D’Aoust (Université de Québec – Montreal)
Beste Isleyen (University of Amsterdam)
Jef Huysmans (Queen Mary University of London)
Michael Shapiro (University of Hawaii)
Doerthe Rosenow (Oxford Brookes University)
Rob Walker (University of Victoria)

Applications will open soon!

The seventh edition of the IPS Winter School

Between July 4th and 15th, IRI hosted the seventh edition of the IPS Winter School. Coordinated by Prof. João Pontes Nogueira (PUC-Rio) and organized with the collaboration of the Queen Mary University of London, in the person of Prof. Jef Huysmans, the School received 25 master’s, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers from several Brazilian and Latin American institutions to debate themes and critical approaches proposed by International Political Sociology. In this edition, the IPS Winter School was supported by the British Academy and CAPES.

Vicki Squire
Mike Shapiro and Sam Opondo
Jef Huysmans – workshop: Collaborative Research: connecting networks
João Nogueira and Jef Huysmans

The School is an event that takes place annually at PUC-Rio. This year some new activities were introduced, and greater emphasis was placed on training participants in specific aspects of academic work. Additional focuses on workshops focused on the skills of designing research projects, writing academic texts, publishing in international journals, and conducting collaborative research in international networks were highlighted. The School also offered the participants of this edition the opportunity to have individual mentoring meetings with the teaching team. In addition, the program included traditional substantive theoretical and methodological courses. There were also two round tables open to the public. Videos are available on Youtube.

A sense of an ending: the war in Ukraine
World politics in disarray: trends, dangers, possibilities

This year, the guest faculty was formed by Audrey Alejandro (London School of Economics), Kyle Grayson (Newcastle University), Jef Huysmans (Queen Mary University of London), Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London), João Pontes Nogueira (PUC -Rio), Sam Ovindo (Vassar College), Michael Shapiro (University of Hawaii), Vicki Squire (University of Warwick), Ritu Vij (University of Aberdeen) and R.B.J. Walker (University of Victoria).

Click here to know more about the IPS Winter School.

Where is the sea in IR? Cint call for papers

Where is the sea in International Relations? Is it possible to envision the sea on its own terms instead of from the standpoint of land? On this special edition of Contexto Internacional: journal of global connections we are proposed to dive in those questions. The sea has been relegated to a secondary position in the discipline of International Relations. In this narrative, the sea appears as an interweave, a conductor that allows communication between two or more telluric entities, a space where the production of life, community, and politics does not occur. This special edition proposes re- discussing this logic, restoring the sea to the theoretical debate, thinking of it as a space with its own temporalities and spatialities that also inform the ways of thinking about international politics. We by no means reject the idea that the sea is also shaped by terrestrial space. We invite efforts to theorize a co-constitution between sea and land which contributes to articulating modernity/coloniality in both ontological and epistemological terms.

Existing studies of the sea are restricted to observing it from an “already territorialised” look, which means to say: from the look of a subject shaped by a statist – and static – ontology that takes rigidity and fixation as virtues and goals of the epistemological process. The sovereign gaze favours rest over movement and crystallises the seaman’s fluidity, making it “terrestrial”. In its most traditional perimeter, the discipline did not perceive or did not want to perceive those concepts and categories mobilised from movement, flow, circulation, crossroads and/or encounters are ontologically and epistemologically much more potent than the mere imagination of rigidity of territorialisation. 

This special edition aims to remove the sea from the attic of the discipline of international relations to treat it not as the subject of a “terrestrial academic look”, but as an ontological and epistemological possibility to question the borders, lines, and mobilities that support dominant narratives about modernity/coloniality. The sea deserves a prominent place, its own place in academic research.

We are interested in full-length manuscripts which think about the sea theoretically. Possible topics include:

  • Routes of Sovereignty.
  • Fluid Sovereignty.
  • Black Atlantic and Black Pacific.
  • Critical Ocean Studies and Blue Humanities.
  • Migration and Intervention in the Sea 
  • Hydrofeminism and the Sea.
  • Piracy and Privateers.
  • Artificial Islands.
Deadline for abstract submissions: July 31st ,2022
Deadline for complete papers:  October 31st, 2022

Authors should submit their abstracts (up to 300 words) until July 31st, 2022 to Contexto Internacional online system. The preselected authors will have until October 31st, 2022, to submit the complete paper, which will be then go through CINT’s peer-reviewing process. All articles must follow CINT’s Authors’ Guidelines.

Special Guest Editors: Flávia Guerra e Francisco Eduardo Lemos de Matos.

Contexto Internacional is a peer-reviewed journal of International Relations published in English and based at the Institute of International Relations, PUC-Rio, Brazil. Its aim is to offer a forum for conceptually innovative research in International Relations broadly defined. Contexto is particularly keen to promote and encourage the development of International Relations in/of/from the Global South. Submissions that contribute to an understanding of the plurality of perspectives present in the field of IR and that advance a dialogue on the connections between situated knowledge and global affairs are therefore preferred. All articles are subject to a double-blind peer review process. Submissions must be original and must not be under review elsewhere while under consideration by Contexto. Submissions in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish are accepted and will be reviewed in the language of submission. However, if the review process results in a decision to publish, it is the responsibility of the author alone to translate the article into English. For further information about the journal and the online submission process please consult the journal website. 

Vaccination Imbroglio in Brazil: Negligence, Political Disputes, and Technical Authority

The text “Vaccination Imbroglio in Brazil: Negligence, Political Disputes, and Technical Authority”, written by doctoral student Laís Ramalho has just been published by Pandemic Discourses, a digital collection of articles that aims to bring together views on the covid-19 pandemic from the Global South. At work, the researcher makes an overview of the main events related to vaccination in Brazil to discuss the overlaps between the technical and the political, power disputes, scientific authority and vaccine culture. The Pandemic Discourses collection is organized by The New School university, where the doctoral student studied her sandwich doctorate through the CAPES-PRINT program.

Go to article

CALL FOR PAPERS Tropical Utopia, Tropical Dystopia: Global South Science Fiction and Critical Approaches to International Politics

After a long time being disregarded as minor genre of literature, Science Fiction (SF) has been recognized by renowned critics, writers, movie directors, and artists as a provocative, intriguing, and potentially abundant field for the exercise of sociopolitical analyses. Since the 1970s, social scientists have been using SF works to raise awareness of crucial debates such as climate change, political freedom, minority rights, global economic challenges, peace, and warfare. In the 1990s, Social Sciences’ cultural turn reached the discipline of International Relations opening an avenue for the connection between traditional and new topics of concern in IR with features from popular culture studies. SF was among the topics evoked from popular culture by contemporary IR theorists. Originally calling the attention of authors under Marxism and Critical Theory, the subject of SF quickly spread among theorists affiliated with different perspectives such as Feminism, Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism, and Gender Studies. The first wave of SF & IR Studies was mainly delivered by scholars based on the Global North and focused on the Global North SF production. This pattern, however, has been challenged by a vibrant Global South SF production followed by the emergence of an increasing interest of Global South scholars in SF works and, particularly, in Global South SF. Innovatively, this Special Issue seeks to represent a vehicle – a ‘spaceship’ or a ‘time-machine’ – for the gathering and the promotion of a community of IR scholars interested in addressing Global South realities by recurring to Global South SF’s body of work, its particularities and its analytical potential.

We are seeking to gather reflections from and for the Global South related to Global South Sci-Fi, its authors, and its themes. We understand ‘Global South’ in its broader definition as the set of societies established within Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, as well as minorities within the Global North that have been historically subjected by local political, ethnic, and/or economic classes or strata. It is our goal to present an original collection of papers on Sci-Fi and International Relations in the Global South to promote different and diverse critical approaches to the multiplicity of problematic situations and issues that challenge Global South societies. For peoples who are familiar with ‘surreal’ situations of violence, inequality, and political regimes – as well as vast diversity and richness of cultural and intellectual traditions – we believe that it is time to bring for the discipline of International Relations the contribution of Sci-Fi works of art produced and analyzed by ‘Global Southerners’ to build cognitive bridges among ourselves and between the Earth’s North and its vast South.

In view of the above, a non-exhaustive list of indicative themes that would be of interest for this call are:

  • Connections between ‘mainstream’ science-fiction and colonialism and imperialism;
  • The role of science-fiction in building the imaginary around the Global South;
  • Science-fiction narratives (and counter-narratives) and their relation to the international, especially the Global South;
  • The emergence of Global South Sci-Fi and IR;
  • The “linguistic turn”, Sci-Fi, and the Global South;
  • Postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist approaches in IR and Science-Fiction;
  • Sci-Fi as a pedagogical tool for understanding Global South realities;
  • Sci-Fi, IR futurisms, and the Global South.

Authors should submit their abstracts (up to 300 words) until June 30, 2022 to Contexto Internacional online system (https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/cint-scielo). The preselected authors will have until September 30, 2022, to submit the complete paper (also to https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/cint-scielo), which will be then go through CINT’s peer-reviewing process. All articles must be written in the English following the norms available at CINT’s Authors’ Guidelines (https://www.scielo.br/revistas/cint/iinstruc.htm).

Tropical Utopia, Tropical Dystopia: Global South Science Fiction and Critical Approaches to International Politics

Special Guest Editors: Thiago Rodrigues (Fluminense Federal University, Brazil), Fernanda Barasuol (Grande Dourados Federal University, Brazil), Thiago Borne (Santa Catarina Federal University, Brazil)

Guidelines for the 2021 Institutional Development Plan

Taking PUC-Rio’s Institutional Development Plan (IDP) as a reference, the Institute of International Relations (IRI) started the process of drawing up its own Institutional Development Plan (IDP), which should be completed in the second half of 2021. This Plan must be prepared based on the guidelines set out below.

The activities of IRI/PUC-Rio are guided by the ternary structure that marks the Brazilian university and affirms the inseparability of teaching, research and extension activities. The IRI is also guided by the institutional objectives defined in PUC-Rio’s IDP, among which we highlight:

– The promotion of culture as an instrument for realizing the integral vocation of the human person;

– The development of teaching and the deepening of investigation and research, to create and spread a conscious vision of the necessary unity that must govern the multiplicity of knowledge;

– The training of competent professionals, qualified to fully perform their duties, with a sense of responsibility and participation;

– Insertion in the Brazilian reality, placing science at the service of the community and guiding its activities towards building a better world; and

– Exchange and cooperation with national and foreign educational, scientific and cultural institutions, in order to lend universality to the meaning of their mission.

These institutional objectives support eight guidelines of the PUC-Rio Pedagogical Project:

  1. Training for the knowledge society;
  2. Social and environmental responsibility;
  3. Scientific and technological development;
  4. Integration of Teaching & Research;
  5. Training for professional life;
  6. Interdisciplinary training;
  7. Internationalization; and
  8. Methodological innovation.

Based on PUC-Rio’s institutional objectives and pedagogical guidelines, the International Relations Institute (IRI) has the mission of promoting excellent academic and professional training, oriented towards the generation of relevant knowledge about the transformations in the international system and its repercussions on local, national, regional and global plans.

In this way, the IRI is oriented towards:

1) Training of excellence, which links academic solidity and critical thinking, aimed at understanding the dynamics of the international system and its impacts on Brazilian society;

2) Research and production of innovative and relevant scientific knowledge on the ongoing transformations in the international system, with emphasis on understanding the role and place of Brazil and other countries of the South in this system, with a view to achieving social, economic, technological and environmental, particularly in Latin America;

3) Public impact aimed at generating positive economic and social impacts for Brazilian society related to its international insertion, in particular through the contribution to public policies at the local, national, regional and international levels.

The IRI will be relevant to the extent that its capabilities effectively contribute, from the international dimension, to economic and social development and to the confrontation of inequalities in Brazilian society and asymmetries in the international system. IRI reaffirms its commitment to theoretical-methodological plurality and to interdisciplinary debate as a way of producing innovative, socially relevant and actionable knowledge, in addition to training professionals committed to social transformation and enhancing its public impact.

Based on its excellent activities in the fields of education, research and public advocacy, the IRI must thus face significant economic and social challenges and contribute to the creation of innovative solutions. Alongside internationalization, the contribution to economic and social development, the promotion of theoretical-methodological pluralism and interdisciplinary engagement constitute transversal dimensions that qualify IRI’s activities.

In view of the above, the Strategic Plans of IRI’s Graduate Programs must be structured from a matrix perspective that combines the ternary structure of its activities with the Institute’s mission, encompassing the following dimensions: academic (promotion of theoretical-methodological pluralism and interdisciplinary engagement); contribution to economic and social development; and internationalization, as specified in the guidelines above.

March 24, 2021. General Committee of IRI/PUC-Rio.