BISA 2026 Roundtable: Integrating a youth lens across International Studies Always present, often overlooked, youth are not just ‘future promise’ but fundamental to the contemporary contours of IR as we face uncertain futures. This roundtable brings together scholars working across multiple sub-disciplines of international studies to reflect on how global challenges might be differently understood and addressed through integrating a youth lens. While much progress has been made in integrating critical intersectional and feminist approaches to international studies, including by drawing more attention to the role of race, class, gender and sexuality in shaping the international, less cross-cutting attention has been granted to age, especially children and young people. This roundtable invites a discussion from scholars across different sub-fields to both explore how youth perspectives shape the landscape of what is known, what a youth lens offers to interrogating and deconstructing knowledge in their field, and how youth-attentive scholarship offers new directions for the discipline in this moment of multiple crises and uncertainty. We are keen to include speakers from an array of topic areas, including but not limited to: • Peacebuilding • Development • Critical security studies • Conflict studies • Foreign policy • Environmental politics • Mass atrocities • Critical terrorism • Feminist IR To express interest to joining this panel, please email Sabrina White at S.L.White@leeds.ac.uk by Wednesday 29th October with a short paragraph about why you would like to be part of this roundtable discussion.
CfP BISA 2026 Panel: Shaping the international through a lens of accountability to children and young people How would centring accountability to children and youth shift our understandings of this current moment of global crisis and what comes next? Can seeing young people as ‘who counts’ offer new pathways for International Studies to meet emerging challenges? This panel explores what an accountability to children and young people lens adds to approaches to addressing global challenges. Accountability is often equated with punitive and/or technical administrative matters rather than questions of global justice, normative frameworks and sustainable peace. By centring children and young people as the ‘who counts’ in accountability in theory and practice, this panel explores the contested place and status of children and young people in the international. Amidst rapidly declining investments in peace and development and vast increases in investments in war and conflict, young people’s rights are rendered optional or deferred until an unspecified ‘later. Threats to promotion and protection of children’s rights and agency exacerbate how we can imagine the scale and impact of global insecurities. This panel reflects on normative, theoretical and empirical conceptualisations of accountability to children and young people, and draws on how particular formations and applications of youth accountability shape possibilities in countering adultist lenses and opening space for counter-narratives of, for and by young people. We seek paper contributions from across multiple subdisciplines in international studies, including but not limited to international development, sustainable development, critical security studies, peace and conflict studies, and global governance. Please submit abstracts for your papers to Sabrina White at S.L.White@leeds.ac.uk by Wednesday 29th October.
Are you going to #BISA2026? @drswhite.bsky.social, @jmarshallbeier.bsky.social Katie Hodgkinson and I have two CPFs for your consideration:
Roundtable: "Integrating a youth lens across Intl Studies".
Panel: "Shaping the intl through a lens of accountability to children & young ppl"
