Voices: The EISA Podcast

What happens to the global financial order when the world starts losing faith in the US dollar - and in the United States itself? In this episode, host Polly Pallister-Wilkins speaks with Tobias Pforr (University of Copenhagen) and Fabian Pape (University of Edinburgh) about how the Second Trump administration is undermining the dollar’s hegemony. Tobias Pforr is a political economist and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Employment Relations Research Centre in the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. His research bridges political economy, philosophy, and public policy, and he has held positions at the European University Institute, the University of Reading, and the University of Warwick. Fabian Pape is a political economist and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, researching the US Treasury market as a source of geopolitical and financial power. Drawing on their recent article, co-authored with Johannes Petry, Senior Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt, “Dollar Diminished: The Unmaking of US Financial Hegemony Under Trump” (2025), they discuss how eroding trust in US leadership threatens the dollar’s dominance as a trade, reserve, and investment currency, what this means for the liberal international order, and why this moment differs from past crises. The conversation also touches on what an “interregnum” in global finance might look like, and the implications for Europe and global stability.

Why has Denmark - once known for its humanitarian ideals - become so unwelcoming to refugees? In this episode, Michelle Pace, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, joins us to discuss her new book "Un-Welcome in Denmark: The Paradigm Shift and Refugee Integration" (Manchester University Press, 2025), co-authored with Sarah El‑Abd. A leading voice on Europe-Middle East relations, migration, and democratization, Pace has published widely in journals such as Mediterranean Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, and Third World Quarterly. Her books include Knowledge Production in Higher Education (MUP, 2023), The Routledge Handbook of EU–Middle East Relations (2021), and Syrian Refugee Children in the Middle East and Europe (2018). In conversation with Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Michelle Pace unpacks how Denmark’s “paradigm shift” in refugee policy reflects deeper European anxieties about belonging, identity, and moral responsibility.

In this episode, we speak with Dr Esther Marijnen, Associate Professor and Political Ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Esther’s work explores the uneasy entanglements of nature, military conflict, and authority - from the militarisation of conservation efforts to the ecological and social impacts left by colonial violence. Drawing on over a decade of field research in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and more recent work in Uganda and Europe, Esther introduces her current project Wounded Landscapes funded by the Dutch Research Council. The project examines how slow violence and historical legacies of conflict reconfigure both environments and the communities that inhabit them. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, they discuss how international conservation organisations engage with these “wounded” spaces, and what their interventions reveal about broader understandings of nature, justice, and repair.

What is the arms trade, and how does it shape our world? In our first episode of 2026, we explore why scholars of international relations should pay closer attention to the arms trade, and what its dynamics reveal about power, security, and global inequality. Joining us is Professor Anna Stavrianakis (Sussex), leading expert on the international arms trade, UK arms export policy, and militarism in North–South perspective. Anna teaches at the University of Sussex and serves as Director of Research and Strategy at Shadow World Investigations, an organisation that exposes corruption and abuse in the arms industry. She has provided expert evidence to UK parliamentary committees, collaborated with civil society groups such as Campaign Against Arms Trade, Control Arms, and the UK Working Group on Arms, and written extensively on the politics of militarism and the arms trade. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, she tells us how the global arms trade operates, who benefits from it, and how critical scholarship and activism can challenge its political influence.

In this episode, host Polly speaks with Daniel Quiroga-Villamarín (New York University), winner of this year’s EISA Best Dissertation Award for his dissertation Architects of the Better World: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919 - 1998), which he is currently developing into a monograph. Daniel’s research examines how the metaphorical use of architectural language in international law discussions often obscures the real, material spaces where international law is shaped, challenged, and debated. He argues that that the metaphorical language of architecture in international law - epitomised by Truman’s call for “architects of the better world” - conceals the material realities of where international order is produced, and instead traces the emergence of a concrete “international parliamentary complex” that reshaped global governance from 1919 to 1998.
Daniel Quiroga-Villamarín is a Hauser/Remarque Global Fellow in International Law and European History at New York University. He earned his PhD in International Law from the Geneva Graduate Institute and is the managing editor of the Journal of the History of International Law. Following his fellowship at NYU, he will join the University of Vienna as a postdoctoral researcher, supported by a SNSF two-year postdoctoral mobility grant, to pursue his lecturing qualification in Legal and Constitutional History.