MediaLaws is pleased to share the call for papers for the “19th Pan-European Conference on International Relations” organised by Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon, (1-4 September 2026).
This edition, titled “Even better than the real thing? Questioning knowledge production, positionality, and authenticity in IR”, invites scholars to reflect on how knowledge in International Relations is produced, contested, and legitimised – from questions of authenticity and truth to the impact of AI, disinformation, and the different perspectives that shape research.
As scholars whose job is to produce texts and teach about them, we often serve as arbiters of what counts as knowledge in International Relations. At a time when global politics is marked by disinformation, epistemic inequality, and the erosion of shared truths, the foundations of how we know the world, and who is authorised to speak about it, are under ever-growing scrutiny. IR, like other fields of knowledge, has more recently faced the challenge of genAI’s impact on knowledge production. Both scholars and the general public have come to question what is real (?) knowledge produced by humans, and whether it is the appropriate output produced by stochastic parrots. Even though many argue that genAI can be useful, significant ethical and epistemological concerns remain. What have peers produced, and with how much genAI, and what have students produced, and with how much genAI? To put it bluntly, if the subaltern has to free their minds from the gaze of the coloniser or the former coloniser, what can one say about the gaze of genAI?
Deadline for abstract submission: 19th February 2026
Notification of acceptance: 26th March 2026
For more information, click on the link.
