On 19 June, the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice welcomed guests to Queen’s University Belfast for its 2024 Postgraduate Research Conference.  Titled Movements and their Discontents: Approaches to Contentious Politics and Challenges to the Status Quo, the conference featured fifteen speakers from across the humanities and social sciences.  Attendees were treated to talks whose focuses spanned time and space, as panellists discussed their novel analyses of social movements, protest, and institutional responses.

The University of Warwick’s Professor of Philosophy Quassim Cassam offered a keynote discussion on ‘Liberation Philosophy’, setting the tone for a day of respectful and serious-minded discussion around cases as diverse as contemporary youth mobilisations in Zimbabwe, the nuances of cross-border policing in Northern Ireland, and global student movements both old and new.

As noted by Institute Director Professor Richard English, the event reflected the ability of young scholars to constructively discuss and debate the most challenging and pressing questions posed by their research.

This year’s conference was organised by Postgraduate Research Students Darren Colbourne, Kathryn Cribben, Brendan McKee and Patrick Thompson.