Future-making is an embodied social, cultural and political practice (Appadurai 2013). Anchored in the present, futures are the ground for struggles and debates. In contemporary contexts of violent conflict, powerful actors use narratives of security, peace and development to justify politics of the future that often not only shatter the future hopes of others but are also realized at the expense of the freedom, security and fundamental rights of less powerful actors (Hage 2016; Willow 2020). While insecurity and violence limit the possibilities of a peaceful and just future for all, they also inspire refusal and resistance, enabling marginalized and oppressed people and groups to imagine and invent new forms of belonging and living together beyond the political order of the nation-state and its violent boundaries. It is this paradoxical entanglement of “fearful anticipation” (Das 2007, 98) and hopeful striving for something new and largely unknown that makes conditions of conflict and violence an important ethnographic source to explore how alternative politics of the future emerge in the present and from positions and places of marginality and relative powerlessness.
In social movements, political activism and everyday life, people and groups engage in “prefigurative politics” (Graeber 2009) in a variety of ways. By linking present practices to imagined and desired futures, these politics provide laboratories for future-making that turn oppressive conditions into transformative processes. This ongoing work of planting and growing alternatives takes place in the margins and cracks of the colonial, capitalist and heteropatriarchal social and political order of our times.
Please note that the APeCS conference 2025 is an in-person event.
You can view or download the conference programme below.
Panel 1.
Vigilant Futures
Convenors:
- Ana Ivasiuc (University College Dublin)
- Erol Saglam (UCL and Istanbul Medeniyet University)
- Vita Peacock (King’s College London)
Vigilante formations draw on different articulations of temporality to justify their security practices and ethico-political orientations. Visions of a lost and idealised past, a decaying present, or endangered futures feed their perception of the necessity to ‘take things in their own hands’ both socio-politically and physically. Glorious pasts where social orders corresponded more snugly to such groups’ visions, or simply a past time imagined, perceived, or experienced as a safer and morally stable world affect the perception of present insecurities. Similarly, competing visions of the future–to be avoided or to be actively constructed against perceived threats–prompt vigilante groups towards action and are used to legitimise civilian-led surveillance as well as extrajudicial violence.
As responses to practices of vigilantism and the discourses that legitimise them, other actors may also enact practices that play on or produce various visions of the future to challenge the morality-security outlooks of vigilantes. Future-making practices are contested, negotiated, often ambivalent, and always political.
Our panel aims at critically interrogating the temporalities of vigilante discourses, seeking to connect various timelines–be they real, mythical, or grounded in a subjunctive mode of wishful thinking–invoked across vigilante practices. We welcome papers addressing one or more of the following questions:
- How do vigilante groups negotiate and produce desirable versions of a future to be defended/constructed?
- How do different temporalities enmesh in discourses and practices of vigilantism and their political reverberations?
- How are violent or conflictual future-making practices contested by different actors?
- What do vigilante futurities tell us about the temporalities of safety, security, and statecraft?
- How do different temporalities affect practices and politics of resistance to vigilantism?
Panel 2.
A Question of Complicity: Ethical and Emotional Challenges in Ethnographic Research Amid Violent Conflict
Convenors:
- Amalia Saar (University of Haifa)
- Nir Gazit (Ruppin Academic Centre)
- Erella Grassiani (University of Amsterdam)
Conducting ethnography in situations of violent conflict and war inevitably exposes researchers to extreme situations. Ethnographers might be working closely with members of warring factions, vigilante groups, and paramilitary organizations and can experience struggles with conflicting obligations: the imperative to empathize with their research participants and the commitment to stand with the oppressed and denounce racism and hate—both fundamental principles of anthropological research. Such fieldwork conditions present distinct emotional and moral challenges.
By the same token, agents of violence and civilian witnesses of violent deeds may also experience a dissonance between complicity and loyalty versus morality and justice in ways that may influence their participation in the research and the moral stance of the researcher. This is especially salient in contexts in which military forces and/or militias are intensively engaged with rival militants and civilian populations and the boundaries between the field of war and field of study often blur.
This panel invites ethnographers to share experiences and dilemmas encountered during their fieldwork, whether emotional, ethical, or both. Discussion topics may include experiences of fear and personal danger, researchers’ spontaneous reactions to these situations, and how these responses influenced their research trajectories. We are especially interested in feelings of guilt, shame, or contempt that both researchers and informants may face and we welcome reflections on dilemmas of complicity, from immediate tactical decisions—whether to inform authorities or warn potential victims of pending violence—to broader questions of moral and political positioning.
By addressing these challenging aspects of fieldwork, we aim to examine how socializing with and potentially developing understanding, friendliness, or even partial identification with violent groups affects researchers morally and politically. When are we ourselves complicit and is it avoidable at all?
Panel 3.
The Future of Peacebuilding
Convenors:
- Michel Thill (swisspeace/University of Basel)
- Kim Schumann (University of Cologne)
- Pascale Schild (University of Bern)
War and authoritarianism hold increasing sway over local and global politics. As military approaches have gained ground in debates about conflict resolution and peace, the future of peacebuilding as a non-violent and inclusive means of achieving social justice is being called into question. In this panel, we seek to explore the limits, contradictions and possibilities of peacebuilding under the current conditions of political violence, occupation and state repression of civil society groups. We aim to examine the approaches to peace and conflict resolution that have dominated local, national and global peacebuilding interventions in recent years, and the ways in which they shape local and global peace and conflict processes around the world.
We invite papers that explore the blurred boundaries between civil society, the state, the military, armed resistance groups and rebel governments, the resulting tensions and contestations, and how these categories and concepts shape understandings and practices of peace in both top-down interventions and grassroots initiatives. We encourage participants––researchers, practitioners and activists––to address the need to localise and decolonise peacebuilding, to critically examine the limitations of dominant approaches and/or to explore alternative forms of knowledge and agency in contexts of violent conflict.
Questions to be discussed in the panel include:
- How do tensions and contradictions between civil and military approaches to peacebuilding manifest themselves in global, national and local public discourses and practices? What is new, what is old, and what can we learn for the future?
- How is peacebuilding a violent project or has become so? How can it be disentangled from colonial legacies and respond to the needs and future aspirations of those living with conflict, violence and insecurity? How can peacebuilding be reimagined to counter authoritarian and violent approaches to peace? How can inclusive peace be achieved as a means to social justice?
Panel 4.
Youth as the Future: Imagining, Practicing and Constructing Futures in Insecure Times
Convenors:
- Elena Miltiadis (Roskilde University)
- Mette Fog Olwig (Roskilde University)
‘Youth’ frequently emerges as a temporal category, defined by an individual’s age and
expressed as a social time of liminality (Cole & Durham, 2008; Dalsgard, 2014). Youth
also tend to be associated to the future (Cole & Durham, 2008), both because ‘youth’ is
seen as embodying the future (whether of a nation, or the world at large), as well as
because youth engage with futural temporal orientations in their daily lives, increasingly
facing conflict, violence, risk, uncertainty, and insecurity (c.f., Bryant & Knight, 2019; Cole
& Durham, 2008).
We welcome contributions that explore the intersections between youth and
future-making in uncertain times both in the way youth experience, imagine, and practice
the future, as well as in the ways ‘youth’ – as a social category – is framed through its
future-oriented temporality. Acknowledging the cultural, geographical, and temporal
variations in how ‘youth’ is defined, perceived, and experienced, we do not offer a fixed
definition of the term. Moreover, while youth participate in global communities, the
practices and possibilities of ‘youth’ vary across local and cultural contexts (Walker,
2020).
A focus on youth provides unique perspectives on practices of future-making in
contexts of conflict, violence, and insecurity and of social change. These encompass but
are not limited to: the relationship between ‘youth’, youths, and politics in the ways youth
engage in future-oriented political action as well as in the making of ‘youth’ as a powerful
political symbol; future-making in digital spaces; the affective dimension of future-making,
especially in contexts of conflict and uncertainty; how youth imagine and
practice the future when faced with conflicts, violences, and insecurities; and how
youths’ futures and their perception of them is shaped by structural forces, such as
colonial legacies, geopolitical inequalities, authoritarian politics, intergenerational
power relations and neoliberal economies.
Panel 5.
Future-Making Under Occupation: Exploring Temporalities of Political Violence and Resistance in Everyday Life
Convenors:
- Bushra Punjabi (Independent Researcher)
- Pascale Schild (University of Bern)
How do people imagine time and the future under occupation? How are conditions of occupation entangled with temporalities, shaping how time is experienced and used to remake everyday life? Understanding future-making as social and political practices, this panel aims to explore everyday life in and under occupation from the diverse perspectives of occupied people and their occupiers, as well as those who are complicit and implicated in the conditions of occupation in various ways. Occupiers, including state and military institutions and their transnational allies, use temporal narratives and practices to erase memories and normalize occupations. Occupation imposes an “eternal present” marked by instability and uncertainty, undermining the ability of occupied populations to imagine safe and just futures. Moreover, bureaucratic delays and emergency laws that allow for illegal detentions, curfews, house raids, enforced disappearances, communication blackouts, checkpoints and widespread surveillance impose a rigid temporal regime that disrupts and fractures everyday life.
In response, occupied communities maintain counter-narratives of time, reclaiming past, present and future through practices that resist and navigate the instabilities and uncertainties of occupation. These practices, marked by vigilance, anticipation and radical hope, allow occupied people to cope with the constant threat of violence.
This panel invites papers that explore the temporalities of occupation and resistance in different contexts around the world. We seek to understand how occupied communities endure and imagine alternative futures despite ongoing attempts to reshape their realities. While occupiers seek to colonise lives through time, occupied people create alternative temporal practices rooted in hope, resistance and the struggle for a future free from occupation and violence. We encourage submissions that explore how occupation reshapes socio-political and symbolic practices and meanings of time, and how everyday resistance fosters resilience and the possibility for making futures beyond occupation.
Panel 6.
Dystopian Vision of Authoritarian Rulers Across South Asia and Growing Contestation by the People With Their Utopian Visions of Society
Convenors:
- Arati Kade (University of Amsterdam)
- Nidhish K. Sundar (University of Amsterdam)
This panel intends to explore the inner dynamics of power contestation behind the rise of exploitative and dystopian future-making practices and contestations in South Asia. This dystopian future-making is deeply rooted in exploitation, systematically reducing certain sections of people to second-class citizens and eventually worthless human beings. This form of future-building operates both globally and nationally. The Global South is framed as inherently inferior through cultural and civilizational narratives. This exploitative future- building renders these nations dependent on the Global North. They are relegated to roles as sources of cheap labour, raw materials, worthless human beings who need saving and care, or markets for low-cost consumption, reinforcing global hierarchies. Global elites often join hands with local elites to socially and materially subjugate local masses, consolidating power and wealth through systemic exclusion and exploitation. Nationally, these dynamics mirror similar patterns of social exclusion and cultural othering, entrenching social and material inequality and oppression within marginalized communities, while shaping futures that prioritize elite interests over the well-being of the majority.
However, these dystopian visions of society are powerfully contested by the people, who bring forth radical, utopian visions of social transformation based on the principles of liberty, justice, and equality. Marginalized communities have long resisted these exploitative systems through cultural, literary, political, and social movements. While these movements are not free from contradictions, they provide powerful alternatives to the exclusionary and exploitative narratives imposed by authoritarian regimes. With the rise of neoliberalism, the dynamics of both dystopian visions and the resistance to them have grown increasingly complex. Resistance efforts are often appropriated or co-opted by elites, creating new challenges for those envisioning alternative futures.
This panel invites papers that explore the role of neoliberal political economy and socio-cultural hegemonies in facilitating the rise of authoritarian regimes with their dystopian politics of the future. At the same time, it encourages papers that examine how people subjected to these dystopian politics express their resistance through counter-utopian future-making, as well as papers that explore the potential, contradictions and challenges of these counter-utopian politics of the future in South Asia.
Panel 7.
Theorizing Futures With Mbembe
Convenors:
- Miguel Díaz-Barriga (University of Richmond)
- Margaret Dorsey (University of Richmond)
This panel interrogates two poles of Achille Mbembe’s scholarship: that which invites us to think about utopic futures and that which theorizes necropower. More specifically, as the conference invites, this panel will use Mbembe as a threshold to explore “future making from below” as well as dissect the social forces steering the world to “the brink of destruction.” Mbembe’s notion of necropower can illuminate how social actors understand and engage social turmoil, both collectively and individually. Our panel explores how understandings of necropower, as the state’s right to exclude and kill, are articulated and challenged in both everyday life and collective organizing. In particular, we examine belonging in relation to Mbembe’s notions of necropower and a border-free world. How can we––through applying Mbembe’s notions of home, freedom, and utopia––engage the broader public and articulate the variety of collective responses to the world’s multiple crises? In other words, what are the possibilities and limitations of Mbembe’s work for understanding and imagining alternative futures?
Panel 8.
Digital Technologies for Inclusivity and Peace: Exploring Possibilities for Preventing Online Hate Speech
Convenors:
- Aysecan Terzioglu (Sabanci University)
- Irem Topcu (Sabanci University)
Social media has become an indispensable part of many people’s everyday life and social interactions. With its high-speed information flow, social media enables alternative conceptions of time and space, and plays an intricate role in people’s definitions of their own identity, subjectivity, and sense of belonging. However, through boosting circulations of hate speech and discriminatory discourse, social media has a troubling side as well. Underlining various socio-economic and ideological differences and increasing the polarizations between the “us and them” as dynamic contrasting mechanisms, it exacerbates the existing political and social problems, tensions, and inequalities. The recent global issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, refugee crises, and economic fluctuations, made the use of aggravating and hostile discourses more common, normalizing them among frequent users through mis/disinformation and hateful language. These discourses include symbolic violence with the potential of causing actual, physical violence through the online-offline continuum, thus demanding attention for non- discriminatory and democratic future-making practices.
This panel explores effective ways of targeting these discourses, through digital methods such as categorizing hate speech with the help of algorithms and artificial intelligence, in order to work towards having a more equalitarian, democratic, and inclusive digital sphere in the long run. How can digital technologies in general and social media, in particular, be used more towards solving political and social conflicts instead of aggravating them? What are the ways social media users, from individuals to NGOs, pursue inculcating peaceful dialogues and owning their (digital) space? This panel includes particular examples from the uses and studies of social media with the aim of peacebuilding, through eliminating offensive, discriminatory, and hateful speech.
Open Panel 9.
Future-Making in Times of Conflict, Violence and Insecurity
Convenors:
- Livnat Konopny-Decleve (University of Edinburgh)
- Pascale Schild (University of Bern)
Future-making is an embodied social, cultural and political practice (Appadurai 2013). Anchored in the present, futures are the ground for struggles and debates. In contemporary contexts of violent conflict, powerful actors use narratives of security, peace and development to justify politics of the future that often not only shatter the future hopes of others but are also realized at the expense of the freedom, security and fundamental rights of less powerful actors (Hage 2016; Willow 2020). While insecurity and violence limit the possibilities of a peaceful and just future for all, they also inspire refusal and resistance, enabling marginalized and oppressed people and groups to imagine and invent new forms of belonging and living together beyond the political order of the nation-state and its violent boundaries. It is this paradoxical entanglement of “fearful anticipation” (Das 2007, 98) and hopeful striving for something new and largely unknown that makes conditions of conflict and violence an important ethnographic source to explore how alternative politics of the future emerge in the present and from positions and places of marginality and relative powerlessness.
In social movements, political activism and everyday life, people and groups engage in “prefigurative politics” (Graeber 2009) in a variety of ways. By linking present practices to imagined and desired futures, these politics provide laboratories for future-making that turn oppressive conditions into transformative processes. This ongoing work of planting and growing alternatives takes place in the margins and cracks of the colonial, capitalist and heteropatriarchal social and political order of our times.