Voices: The EISA Podcast

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.

In this special Voices episode, we unpack the recent recognition of Palestinian statehood by several Western governments, including the UK, France, Portugal, Canada, and Australia. The move came shortly after a UN Special Committee report finding Israel’s actions in Gaza consistent with genocide. This historic decision has sparked intense debate about the timing, motivations, and consequences of recognising Palestine as a state. Emile Badarin (University of Oxford) and Victor Kattan (University of Nottingham) join host Polly Pallister-Wilkins to discuss these developments and examine the broader politics and legal aspects of recognition within the long struggle for Palestinian statehood. Emile Badarin is a researcher based in Oxford and the author of Recognition Politics in Settler Colonial States: Normalizing Dispossession and Elimination in Palestine (Bloomsbury 2025) and Palestinian Political Discourse: Between Exile and Occupation (Routledge 2016). His work explores coloniality, settler colonialism, and the international politics surrounding Palestinian recognition. Victor Kattan is Assistant Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham and has written extensively on the legal and historical dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict, including From Coexistence to Conquest (Pluto Press 2009) and The Palestine Question in International Law (BIICL 2008). He has also served as a legal advisor to the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department and advised the Palestinian leadership on international treaty accession and multilateral engagement.

In this episode, we welcome Alvina Hoffmann (SOAS), winner of EISA’s 2025 Best Article Award from the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR). In her award-winning article “What Makes a Spokesperson? Delegation and Symbolic Power in Crimea” (2024, vol. 30, Issue 1, pp. 27-51), Alvina unpacks questions about who gets to speak for others, exploring themes of symbolic power, authenticity, and the universalism of human rights. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Alvina draws on her research to explore the struggles and stakes involved in speaking on behalf of others through the lens of human rights politics in Crimea. She also talks us through the dynamics of delegation and representation that shape global diplomacy and shares insights from her ongoing work on elites and human rights in the UN. Apart from EJIR, Alvina’s work has appeared in International Political Sociology, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and Global Studies Quarterly. She is currently writing her first monograph, Speaking for the Universal: Human Rights Elites in World Politics, which offers a historical and sociological analysis of independent human rights experts at the UN. Join us for this timely conversation on who truly speaks for "the universal" and at what cost.

This month, we are flipping the script a little: Our new episode features our producer Judith Koch (University of Sussex), whose recent PhD research offers a fresh perspective on Brexit: rather than a sudden rupture, she interprets it as the latest chapter in a decades-long tension between the UK and Europe. What if Brexit wasn’t a bolt from the blue, but just the latest instance in a decades-long struggle between the UK and its European counterparts? In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Judith talks us through the longer history of Brexit, all the way back to the Suez Crisis of 1956. Her work reframes Brexit as the collapse of a unique dynamic that had long sustained UK-European relations, challenging the usual story of the UK’s 2016 decision to leave the EU. Her work has been published in Global Political Economy, and she is currently working on her book. She has been a political journalist with Germany’s ARD for over a decade and now provides media training and produces podcasts for academic and research organisation - including this one!

What do recent controversies over statues reveal about global politics and the legacy of empire? In this episode, Rahul Rao (University of St. Andrews) joins us to discuss his new book “The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire” (Pluto Press, 2025). In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Rahul Rao talks us through his work in which he explores how debates over statues – from Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond – uncover deeper struggles over race, caste, and decolonisation, and how these disputes have reshaped anticolonial political thought. Journeying through sites of contestation across South Africa, England, the US, Ghana, India, Australia, and Scotland, he examines how societies grapple with justice, cultural memory, and belonging through the icons they choose to honour or remove. Rahul Rao´s research spans international relations, postcolonial and queer theory, and South Asian politics. His award-winning work focuses on the global politics of identity-especially gender, sexuality, race, and caste.