Entanglements and Detachments in Global Politics
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Author | Enrike van Wingerden,Andy Li,Alice Engelhard |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298211040164 |
| Subject Matter | Conference |
https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298211040164
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2021, Vol. 49(3) 431 –434
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/03058298211040164
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Entanglements and
Detachments in
Global Politics
Alice Engelhard, Andy Li
and Enrike van Wingerden
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
The question of how we can grasp entanglements and detachments as researchers who
are intimately entangled with the worlds we study was never solely an issue of academic
curiosity. This past year we struggled to keep up with the shifting grounds as the global
pandemic escalated political crises and generated ruptures and losses in our lives, socie-
ties and universities, in ways that touched some more than others. In the midst of this
disorientation, we have grappled with and failed to make sense of the politics of the
present. Having the space to think through these politics with you and with each-other
has meant much more to us than an academic exercise. It has held the space for us to
think, feel and make sense together, entangled within a power-laden and at times alienat-
ing university system that nevertheless contains the possibility for different, if not better,
realities.
The 2020 Millennium conference, ‘Entanglements and Detachments in Global
Politics’, held online 22–24 October, was a rich and generative series of conversations,
involving over 3,000 registered participants and 150 presentations. Our intention for the
conference and this special issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies is to
intervene in debates on relationality, which form a necessary, although conservative, cor-
rective to the atomic universe of traditional IR and its deadly international order. Where
relational approaches often retain a sense of neatness and order, if not in theory, then in
practice, we put forward the urgent need to move even further away from parsimony, into
the complex and messy stuff that constitutes our worlds. For some, the entanglement of
societies, species and environments has never been about making a comfortable theoreti-
cal point. They have always been aware that what is at stake in contesting separation is
Corresponding author:
Enrike van Wingerden, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political
Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: e.van-wingerden@lse.ac.uk
1040164MIL0010.1177/03058298211040164Millennium – Journal of International StudiesEngelhard et al.
research-article2021
Conference
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