Date: September 16th, 2022
Venue: The Gallery, Helix, DCU Glasnevin campus (Dublin 9)
Event Schedule and speaker bios here.
Registration Compulsory: Please register for the conference (free) here.

International Institute for Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction (IICRR)  will organise a conference aimed at contributing to a better understanding of the ways in which criminality and politics interact in civil war with speakers from Dublin City University, Manchester University, UNAL, Colombia, Harvard University, the Constitutional Court of Colombia, LSE, University of Zurich, University of Paris Cité,  CUNY, Clarke University, and Ulster University.  . Our departure point is the understanding of politics and criminality as two historically differentiated domains of human activity, that play out in different forms vis-á-vis organised political violence. Different, but interrelated and overlapping. Thus, we want to capture their interactions, connections, and convergences. As importantly, we will not focus solely on irregular actors or rebels, and bring back the State and legal actors into this debate. The conference builds on the experience of a virtual workshop on June 10th 2021, which served as the basis for a special issue in the Journal of Political Power 15 (1) 2022 on ‘Political Power, Criminality and Conflict’, which explores some of these questions. This special issue was largely focused on the experiences of Colombia and the ex Yugoslavia; this conference aims at extending this debate to other experiences elsewhere and therefore to bring new insights into this theoretical and practical debate.

This will be a one-day conference bringing contributions focused on exploring the links between political power and criminality in conflict contexts, grounded on solid empirical evidence, and privileging critical engagement with theory and conceptual discussion. This conference aims at facilitating Global South-North and Global South-South exchanges. Some of the questions that will guide the theme of the conference were already outlined in the
special issue:

• How are conflict and criminality related to State formation in different contexts?
• What determines the political space of a criminalised actor in a particular context?
• When and how does the criminality of an actor undermine their political nature?
• What consequences do criminalisation processes have for the conduct of war, peacebuilding and larger processes of state formation?

The conference will also explore a proposal to develop an edited volume in 2023 on the basis of the presentations.

For questions, please e-mail José A. Gutiérrez at [email protected]