Antrophological Turn in IR? Limits and Possibilities

Antrophological Turn in IR? Limits and Possibilities

Convener:  Ardhitya Eduard Yeremia Lalisang
Co-convener: Irfan Nugraha

This panel departs from a methodological and theoretical tension that many IR scholars who do fieldwork will recognize: the moment when what you encounter on the ground refuses to fit your analytical framework. Whether researching migration corridors, foreign investment zones, border communities, humanitarian interventions, or regional security arrangements, ground-up IR researchers repeatedly face the same problem — the people most affected by international forces do not experience the world the way IR theory says they should. Their agency is messier, their politics more ambivalent, their relationship to global structures more entangled than conventional IR categories can adequately capture. This panel creates a space for IR scholars who have confronted this tension to think through it together, in dialogue with anthropologists who have long worked at the same frontier.

The panel welcomes contributions from IR and anthropology scholars whose work engages with:
Ground-up, ethnographic, or everyday life approaches to international phenomena
Cases where conventional IR frameworks proved inadequate to capture community-level realities
Methodological reflections on doing fieldwork at the intersection of the local and the international