CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine brought food (in)security to the attention of the general public and it made it an additional subject of global anxiety. Although it quietly exited the news cycle after a couple of months, the issue of global food chain vulnerabilities is far to have been politically resolved, while its social and economic impact is also far from being fully understood. In fact, from food (and drinks) as markers of political / national identity or the role of food exchanges in international interactions to the study of socio-economic conflicts, the global governance of the environment and sustainable development, topics touching upon the politics OF food currently provide a rich and still largely unexplored terrain for both policy concerns and scholarly inquiry. We propose to dedicate this edition of SCOPE to exploring and debating particularly such topics, aiming to investigate how "food" is constructed, framed and used as a political concept.     

However, such substantive issues could not be fully grasped without addressing the implicit matter of politics AS food. The Weberian dilemma of politicians being able to live (and eat) from income generated through their political activity still seems to be significant for a large part of our institutional, legal and socio-economic infrastructures of political interaction, whether we approach the subject via political theory, political sociology, international affairs or the more specific lenses of corruption studies or populism research. But what changed since Weber? How does the landscape of the actors and process that feed from politics look like these days? What do we find interesting and new to research about them? Why? How do we conduct such research? Which are the opportunities and limitations of our current data and methodologies? And, if political science is "the science of democracy", how do all these impact the level of democracy worldwide?

Not least, beyond literally being our food for thought, the study of politics, policies and polities should also provide political researchers with the income that would literally allow them to eat. Yet, there is increasing evidence that younger scholars, as well as those from poorer and / or less democratic countries or institutions are particularly vulnerable to income fluctuations, as well as to political pressures that diminish their capacity to develop and even physically survive in this field. Such processes affect not only the quality of lives of individuals involved in political research or the quality of local scholarly communities but also the quality of research and policy outputs globally, as data and new knowledge is produced on and from a limited number of cases, a fact that distorts our view of the world and reduces the opportunity to generate adequate solutions to our problems, including to those arising around the issue of "food". 

With such questions in mind, SCOPE 2023 invites scholars across different disciplines to submit papers, panels or round table proposals that explore from various conceptual, empirical and methodological perspectives especially (but not exclusively) the following core topics: