While postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy or the geopolitical space of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Building on literature that has connected postsocialism and postcolonialism analytically and politically, particularly feminist work that has reclaimed postsocialism to understand the global legacies of socialism in the present, Claudia Aradau proposes in her talk to unpack dimensions of postsocialism as method and critique. Postsocialism as method attends to how socialist legacies endure and are transformed in the present while holding together contradictions and ambivalences. Postsocialism as critique is oriented to transversal solidarities and the epistemic vocabularies that can undergird these struggles. To trace these dimensions of method and critique, this talk is situated empirically within debates about borders and migration. Postsocialism is not intended to replace or displace other critical approaches but to pluralise our vocabularies and multiply political interventions.

CLAUDIA ARADAU is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and Principal Investigator of the Consolidator Grant SECURITY FLOWS (‘Enacting border security in the digital age: Political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’), funded by the European Research Council (2019-2024). Her research has developed a critical political analysis of security practices. As more and more problems and people become constituted as objects and subjects of security, her research has inquired into the effects this has for political subjectivity and democracy. Her current research focuses on how digital technologies reconfigure security and surveillance practices, and how algorithms and machine learning recast relations between security, democracy and critique. She received the 2023 Distinguished Scholar Award by the International Political Sociology Section of the International Studies Association. Her latest book, Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other (with Tobias Blanke) won the 2023 Best Book Award by the Science, Technology and Arts in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association.