Voices: The EISA Podcast

What is China's role in the global economy, and how should we understand its growing power in a world of shifting financial hierarchies and intensifying geo-economic competition? In this episode, we are joined by Johannes Petry to explore China's expanding economic influence and what it means for the global financial system, the institutions that govern it, and the future of global order itself. Johannes Petry is Senior Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded research project “Financial Empire” which examines China’s growing global financial footprint in a world of growing geo-economic contestations as part of a larger process of empire building. Petry's research agenda brings together three interlinked themes: the development and internationalisation of China’s financial system, the role of infrastructures in the politics of global finance, and the broader post-crisis transformation of the global economic order. He is co-author of BRICS and the Global Financial Order: Liberalism Contested?, which he published with Andreas Nölke at Cambridge University Press in 2024, and his work has been published in leading journals, including Review of International Political Economy, European Journal of International Relations, and New Political Economy, among others.

As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly moves onto the battlefield, the nature of war itself is being transformed. How are automated systems reshaping the conduct of war, and what happens when decision-making is partially or fully delegated to machines? To explore the role of automation in contemporary warfare and the ethical questions raised by the increasing use of AI in military contexts, we are joined by Elke Schwarz, Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary University of London. Her work sits at the intersection of ethics, technology, politics, and warfare, with a particular focus on emerging military technologies such as AI, autonomous weapon systems, drones, and robotics. She is the author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies (Manchester University Press), and her research on military AI and autonomous systems has been widely published in leading international journals and outlets. She also serves as Vice-Chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, is an Associate of the Imperial War Museum, and a Royal Society of Arts Fellow.

In this episode, we tackle a question that cuts to the heart of today’s global power struggles: Why is the Gulf so geopolitically important? To unpack this question, we are joined by Laleh Khalili, Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins she discusses the escalating tensions surrounding the US and Israeli war on Iran, the strategic implications of a potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the wider risks of oil price shocks and global economic disruption. Moving beyond headline geopolitics, the conversation situates these developments within broader histories of empire, extraction, and capitalist accumulation. Laleh Khalili explains how the Gulf has been shaped by long-standing imperial entanglements and what this means for how we should understand its international relations and political economy today. Laleh Khalili’s work has been central to analysing the infrastructures and logics of contemporary capitalism and war. Amongst other works, she is the author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula and Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy.

What happens to the global financial order when the world starts losing faith in the US dollar - and in the United States itself? In this episode, host Polly Pallister-Wilkins speaks with Tobias Pforr (University of Copenhagen) and Fabian Pape (University of Edinburgh) about how the Second Trump administration is undermining the dollar’s hegemony. Tobias Pforr is a political economist and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Employment Relations Research Centre in the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. His research bridges political economy, philosophy, and public policy, and he has held positions at the European University Institute, the University of Reading, and the University of Warwick. Fabian Pape is a political economist and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, researching the US Treasury market as a source of geopolitical and financial power. Drawing on their recent article, co-authored with Johannes Petry, Senior Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt, “Dollar Diminished: The Unmaking of US Financial Hegemony Under Trump” (2025), they discuss how eroding trust in US leadership threatens the dollar’s dominance as a trade, reserve, and investment currency, what this means for the liberal international order, and why this moment differs from past crises. The conversation also touches on what an “interregnum” in global finance might look like, and the implications for Europe and global stability.

Why has Denmark - once known for its humanitarian ideals - become so unwelcoming to refugees? In this episode, Michelle Pace, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, joins us to discuss her new book "Un-Welcome in Denmark: The Paradigm Shift and Refugee Integration" (Manchester University Press, 2025), co-authored with Sarah El‑Abd. A leading voice on Europe-Middle East relations, migration, and democratization, Pace has published widely in journals such as Mediterranean Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, and Third World Quarterly. Her books include Knowledge Production in Higher Education (MUP, 2023), The Routledge Handbook of EU–Middle East Relations (2021), and Syrian Refugee Children in the Middle East and Europe (2018). In conversation with Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Michelle Pace unpacks how Denmark’s “paradigm shift” in refugee policy reflects deeper European anxieties about belonging, identity, and moral responsibility.

In this episode, we speak with Dr Esther Marijnen, Associate Professor and Political Ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Esther’s work explores the uneasy entanglements of nature, military conflict, and authority - from the militarisation of conservation efforts to the ecological and social impacts left by colonial violence. Drawing on over a decade of field research in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and more recent work in Uganda and Europe, Esther introduces her current project Wounded Landscapes funded by the Dutch Research Council. The project examines how slow violence and historical legacies of conflict reconfigure both environments and the communities that inhabit them. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, they discuss how international conservation organisations engage with these “wounded” spaces, and what their interventions reveal about broader understandings of nature, justice, and repair.

What is the arms trade, and how does it shape our world? In our first episode of 2026, we explore why scholars of international relations should pay closer attention to the arms trade, and what its dynamics reveal about power, security, and global inequality. Joining us is Professor Anna Stavrianakis (Sussex), leading expert on the international arms trade, UK arms export policy, and militarism in North–South perspective. Anna teaches at the University of Sussex and serves as Director of Research and Strategy at Shadow World Investigations, an organisation that exposes corruption and abuse in the arms industry. She has provided expert evidence to UK parliamentary committees, collaborated with civil society groups such as Campaign Against Arms Trade, Control Arms, and the UK Working Group on Arms, and written extensively on the politics of militarism and the arms trade. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, she tells us how the global arms trade operates, who benefits from it, and how critical scholarship and activism can challenge its political influence.

In this episode, host Polly speaks with Daniel Quiroga-Villamarín (New York University), winner of this year’s EISA Best Dissertation Award for his dissertation Architects of the Better World: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919 - 1998), which he is currently developing into a monograph. Daniel’s research examines how the metaphorical use of architectural language in international law discussions often obscures the real, material spaces where international law is shaped, challenged, and debated. He argues that that the metaphorical language of architecture in international law - epitomised by Truman’s call for “architects of the better world” - conceals the material realities of where international order is produced, and instead traces the emergence of a concrete “international parliamentary complex” that reshaped global governance from 1919 to 1998. Daniel Quiroga-Villamarín is a Hauser/Remarque Global Fellow in International Law and European History at New York University. He earned his PhD in International Law from the Geneva Graduate Institute and is the managing editor of the Journal of the History of International Law. Following his fellowship at NYU, he will join the University of Vienna as a postdoctoral researcher, supported by a SNSF two-year postdoctoral mobility grant, to pursue his lecturing qualification in Legal and Constitutional History.

In this special Voices episode, we unpack the recent recognition of Palestinian statehood by several Western governments, including the UK, France, Portugal, Canada, and Australia. The move came shortly after a UN Special Committee report finding Israel’s actions in Gaza consistent with genocide. This historic decision has sparked intense debate about the timing, motivations, and consequences of recognising Palestine as a state. Emile Badarin (University of Oxford) and Victor Kattan (University of Nottingham) join host Polly Pallister-Wilkins to discuss these developments and examine the broader politics and legal aspects of recognition within the long struggle for Palestinian statehood. Emile Badarin is a researcher based in Oxford and the author of Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine (Bloomsbury 2025) and Palestinian Political Discourse: Between Exile and Occupation (Routledge 2016). His work explores coloniality, settler colonialism, and the international politics surrounding Palestinian recognition. Victor Kattan is Assistant Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham and has written extensively on the legal and historical dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict, including From Coexistence to Conquest (Pluto Press 2009) and The Palestine Question in International Law (BIICL 2008). He has also served as a legal advisor to the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department and advised the Palestinian leadership on international treaty accession and multilateral engagement.

In this episode, we welcome Alvina Hoffmann (SOAS), winner of EISA’s 2025 Best Article Award from the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR). In her award-winning article “What Makes a Spokesperson? Delegation and Symbolic Power in Crimea” (2024, vol. 30, Issue 1, pp. 27-51), Alvina unpacks questions about who gets to speak for others, exploring themes of symbolic power, authenticity, and the universalism of human rights. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Alvina draws on her research to explore the struggles and stakes involved in speaking on behalf of others through the lens of human rights politics in Crimea. She also talks us through the dynamics of delegation and representation that shape global diplomacy and shares insights from her ongoing work on elites and human rights in the UN. Apart from EJIR, Alvina’s work has appeared in International Political Sociology, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and Global Studies Quarterly. She is currently writing her first monograph, Speaking for the Universal: Human Rights Elites in World Politics, which offers a historical and sociological analysis of independent human rights experts at the UN. Join us for this timely conversation on who truly speaks for "the universal" and at what cost.

This month, we are flipping the script a little: Our new episode features our producer Judith Koch (University of Sussex), whose recent PhD research offers a fresh perspective on Brexit: rather than a sudden rupture, she interprets it as the latest chapter in a decades-long tension between the UK and Europe. What if Brexit wasn’t a bolt from the blue, but just the latest instance in a decades-long struggle between the UK and its European counterparts? In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Judith talks us through the longer history of Brexit, all the way back to the Suez Crisis of 1956. Her work reframes Brexit as the collapse of a unique dynamic that had long sustained UK-European relations, challenging the usual story of the UK’s 2016 decision to leave the EU. Her work has been published in Global Political Economy, and she is currently working on her book. She has been a political journalist with Germany’s ARD for over a decade and now provides media training and produces podcasts for academic and research organisation - including this one!

What do recent controversies over statues reveal about global politics and the legacy of empire? In this episode, Rahul Rao (University of St. Andrews) joins us to discuss his new book “The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire” (Pluto Press, 2025). In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Rahul Rao talks us through his work in which he explores how debates over statues – from Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond – uncover deeper struggles over race, caste, and decolonisation, and how these disputes have reshaped anticolonial political thought. Journeying through sites of contestation across South Africa, England, the US, Ghana, India, Australia, and Scotland, he examines how societies grapple with justice, cultural memory, and belonging through the icons they choose to honour or remove. Rahul Rao´s research spans international relations, postcolonial and queer theory, and South Asian politics. His award-winning work focuses on the global politics of identity-especially gender, sexuality, race, and caste.

In this episode, we are joined by Noam Leshem (Durham University) to discuss his new book Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man’s Land. Noam Leshem explores the spatial politics of abandonment, highlighting how marginalised communities – like the Israeli Black Panthers fought against systemic discrimination faced by Mizrahi Jews in the 1970s united with marginalised Palestinians - found moments of solidarity in shared struggles against state neglect. Noam Leshem is associate professor of Political Geography at Durham University where he works closely with communities grappling with the impacts of violent conflict, emphasising creative methods and innovative collaborations. He is the current holder of a large grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK looking at the ability of displaced communities to determine the fate of cultural heritage collections when they are denied access to ancestral land that includes collaborations with museums and cultural institutions in the UK and Palestine. This project emerges out of earlier research focused on Arab urban space in Israel after the 1948 War that was the subject of his first book, Life After Ruin: The Struggles over Israel’s Depopulated Arab Spaces published by Cambridge University Press. Tune in to learn more about Noam Leshem’s unique perspective on resilience, radical uncaring, and the possibilities for political imagination in forgotten places.

What does a just energy transition look like, and how do politics and power shape the global transition to low-carbon energy? In this episode, we speak with Peter Newell (University of Sussex), a leading expert on the political economy of environment and development, whose career spans more than three decades of research at different universities, including the Universities of Sussex, Oxford, Warwick and East Anglia, and FLACSO Argentina, policy advising, and activism. From climate change governance to corporate accountability and trade policy, he has worked across multiple continents, including Argentina, China, India, and South Africa, to analyse how political and economic forces influence environmental decision-making. With extensive experience advising governments (UK, India, Ireland, Sweden, Finland), international organisations (UNDP, GEF, UNCTAD, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank), and NGOs (Friends of the Earth, Climate Network Europe), he explores the challenges and opportunities of a just transition to low-carbon energy with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins. A former Greenpeace UK board member and advisor to the Greenhouse think-tank, he has also edited the European Journal of International Relations and serves on the boards of Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Environment and Development, and Earth Systems Governance Journal. How do global power structures shape climate policy? What role do non-state actors play in driving or obstructing change? And how can governance be reimagined for more effective climate solutions? Tune in to learn why we must understand the energy transition through the lens of capitalism, ecology, and power.

In this episode, we are joined by Iosif Kovras, winner of the 2024 EISA Best Article in the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR) Award, who explores the transformative role of forensic technologies in reshaping how societies confront their violent pasts. Iosif Kovras, an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cyprus, and a leading voice in the fields of comparative transitional justice and human rights, focuses on questions of accountability, transitional justice, and the pursuit of truth in post-conflict settings. His current research explores the logic of the crime of disappearances in repressive and (post)conflict settings and is funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant. His extensive research agenda spans policies of accountability in post-conflict societies, the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and the complexities of enforced disappearances in repressive and conflict-ridden contexts. His forthcoming book, Accountability after Economic Crisis (Oxford University Press), examines how nations tackled the fallout of the 2008 financial meltdown through prosecutions, inquiries, and public apologies. Tune in to learn about groundbreaking insights from Kovras’s research on forensic technologies’ role in transnational justice mechanisms, how these technologies are driving societal reckoning, and the challenges of achieving justice and recognition.

What does it mean to take love and care seriously in the "deathworlds" of International Relations? How can these concepts reshape how we understand and navigate worlds marked by loss and violence? This episode shifts the focus of International Relations’ traditional preoccupation with war, violence, and insecurity to the themes of love and care. Host Polly Pallister-Wilkins is joined by Roxani Krystalli (University of St Andrews) and Philipp Schulz (University of Bremen), who explore the roles of love and care in reshaping worlds after loss, including ecological and interpersonal grief, as part of a collaborative project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Foundation. Roxani’s work bridges feminist peace and conflict studies with the politics of nature and place. Drawing on her experience as both a researcher and a humanitarian practitioner, she focuses on gendered harms, justice, and peacebuilding – themes her recently published book “Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question” (2024, Oxford University Press) explores. Philipp investigates the gendered dynamics of armed conflict and violence, with a particular focus on masculinities and queer experiences in conflict settings. His work also examines sexual violence against men and issues surrounding forced migration.Tune in for a groundbreaking perspective that challenges conventional approaches to International Relations, bringing attention to themes often dismissed as “lovey-dovey” yet essential for understanding and remaking worlds in the wake of loss and violence.

What are the politics of human mobility through the lenses of visibility and invisibility? What does it mean for movement to be seen - or unseen - and who controls that? Joining us in this episode is Anna Finiguerra (King’s College London), whose Phd thesis “Ecologies of Visibility: Assembling the Politics of Mobility through Multiple Practices of Knowledge Production” won this year’s EISA best dissertation award. Anna Finiguerra’s research rethinks traditional frameworks of (in)visibility in studies on migration by examining events like the construction of the Gateway to Europe and migrant self-narration at the same site. Her work challenges traditional perspectives on how knowledge about migration is generated and how it is rendered visible and opaque in fundamentally different ways than if we were only to consider migration in terms of borders, and checkpoints. Anna Finiguerra, now a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ESRC-funded project "Practice, Assemblage, and Emergence in the Governance of Freight Shipping" at King’s College London, brings a unique perspective informed by her work on mobility, materiality, and knowledge.

Why do women still die when they don’t have to? Despite global advancements and available resources, preventable deaths among women persist. Women continue to shoulder the weight of healthcare work and the socio-economic impact of health crises. Sophie Harman, prize-winning Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary London, is – as her new book flags – sick of it. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins they discuss Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women’s Health which maps out how women’s health is manipulated for political gain, from health-washing to attacks on maternity hospitals and the exploitation of health workers. As we navigate a year of crucial elections, this book offers a candid reflection on the state of women’s health in global politics and a vision for reclaiming equality in health. Sophie Harman brings her extensive expertise to the discussion. With seven academic books and numerous articles on global health politics, she has been a voice in major media outlets and a consultant for the World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). She has also co-written and produced the feature film Pili (2027), highlighting the real-life struggles of HIV/AIDS in Tanzania. Tune in for a groundbreaking contribution that reveals the causes for why politics is still jeopardising women’s health around the world.

Dependency Theory provides a crucial framework for understanding the persistent inequalities shaping our global society which extend beyond borders, influence global conflicts, financial systems, and work at the intersections of gendered and racialised oppression. In this episode, Dr Felipe Antunes de Oliveira (Queen Mary University of London) is in conversation with host Judith Koch (University of Sussex) to discuss Dependency Theory which is rooted in Latin American thought. Felipe's unique dual perspective as a scholar of Latin American Political Economy and International Relations Theory on the one hand, and as a career diplomat on the other hand deeply informs his critical approach to development discourses. Felipe worked at the Department of South American Politics of the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations from 2012 until 2014, he acted as advisor to the Brazilian Executive Director at the IMF from 2019 to 2020, and is currently on a secondment to the Brazilian Ministry of Finance working as Coordinator General of International Economic Cooperation. His latest book, "Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias" (2024, University of Pittsburgh Press) proposes a way to overcome the problematic binary distinction between development and underdevelopment. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation!

This episode explores the experiences of migrant academics. We are joined by Olga Burlyuk (University of Amsterdam) and Ladan Rahbari (University of Amsterdam), editors of "Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe" (2023, Open Book Publishers) who have curated this essential collection of narratives by migrant academics. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, they tease out the multifaceted experiences of migrant academics, shedding light on various forms of precarity. From challenging hiring practices and systemic sexism and racism to economic disadvantages and the often 'culturally accepted' yet problematic divisions of labour within academic spaces, these narratives are both eye-opening and crucial for the academic community. In their own words, Olga Burlyuk and Ladan Rahbari emphasize the importance of recognizing that academia, despite its status and prestige, is not immune to precarity. They remind us of the systemic power imbalances that permeate all social strata, including the academic environment. Don't miss this wake-up call for academia to strive for a more just and inclusive space.