Wednesday 10th June 2026, University of Warwick campus

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the June Birmingham-Warwick Conference on International Relations and Politics in the Indo-Pacific: The Geopolitics of Memory in the Indo-Pacific.

Memory, whether inscribed in monuments, textbooks, films, digital media, or diplomatic discourse, serves as a potent political tool that legitimises contemporary foreign policies, justifies strategic partnerships, underpins institutional frameworks, and fuels regional disputes. This conference seeks to unpack the geopolitics of memory in the Indo-Pacific, surrounding the different regional, national, and localised experiences of war and other geopolitical events; and to explore how the past is remembered, how memory shapes present-day politics, and how present-day politics shape memory. Papers should seek to address at least one of the following thematic questions:

• How do international relations and domestic politics complicate interpretations of history at regional and/or national level/s?

• How are politics, policy and society shaped by interpretations of history?

• What are the key mechanisms and sites of memory being leveraged in competitions over history? What is remembered, what is marginalised, and what is forgotten?

• How do state and/or non-state actors attempt to penetrate and govern everyday historical consciousness to achieve their (geo)political goals?

• How are transnational and global memory movements, such as those related to post-colonialism, feminism and human rights, influencing and/or being co-opted into national and/or regional memory politics in the Indo-Pacific?

We encourage submissions adopting different theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives from scholars at all career stages.

Selected papers will be submitted to The Pacific Review as a special issue on the geo-politics of memory in the Indo-Pacific.

Submit abstracts to Dr. Max Warrack (max.a.q.warrack@warwick.ac.uk) and Professor Julie Gilson (j.a.gilson@bham.ac.uk) by Friday 30th January. The timetable will be announced and released by the end of February.

If you have any questions in the meantime, please reach out to Max and Julie.

We hope to see you all there for some food, drink, and discussion on the Geopolitics of Memory in the Indo-Pacific!