The Annual Pierre du Bois Conference 2026 titled: "Love, Hate, and the Fate of International Organizations: The Psychological Life of Global Governance (1900–Present)" will take place on 6-7 May 2026 at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
This event is convened by Carolyn Biltoft and Amalia Ribi Forclaz. It is supported by the Pierre du Bois Foundation and part of the ‘Global Governance, Trust and Democratic Engagement in Past and Present’ (GLO) Project.
Call for Papers
In the past two decades, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship has drawn attention to the emotional dimensions of internationalism. These affective approaches have revealed the range of more-than-political forces that move diplomats, animate public campaigns, and structure institutional memory.
This conference takes up a related, yet different starting point, drawing in part on Judith Butler’s framework in The Psychic Life of Power, wherein various actors develop “passionate attachments” to subject positions, institutions, or ways of governing. Moving from a strictly emotional to a more psychological frame, the conference asks participants to think with concepts such as projection and transference. Once understood politically, we can attend to the processes by which people cast inner conflicts, desires, or anxieties onto a symbolic screen—others, institutions, or nations—so that what is inward and uncertain appears outward, visible, and actionable. Thus, the conference asks: how doinstitutions designed to manage trade, war, health, or aid become sites of displaced desire, grievance, or fantasy—asked to carry demands they were never built to fulfill? And above all, how might thinking in those terms lead us to rethink the historical birth and transformation of these bodies, as well as their perceived successes and failures, past and present?
The conference is seeking researchers who could think historically about how international institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and their many specialized agencies have not only governed the international but have also absorbed the tensions of modern political psychology and subjectivity. Across media campaigns, petitions, and protests, IOs have been positioned as redeemers, betrayers, caretakers, and criminals. They have received letters from the wanton, the grief- and love-stricken, and from the earth’s most entitled as well as its most dispossessed. They have been objects of religious devotion or placed at the center of dark conspiracy theories. In short, they have become containers for forms of excess—objects of love, affection, disdain or fear.
By making this psychic life of IOs the central object of historical analysis, the conference breaks new ground. It offers an original conceptual framework for understanding how IOs carry, distort, and reflect back the impossible demands placed upon them by social reformers, activists, international civil servants, artists, and ordinary people. To ground this inquiry, the conference will draw on a wide range of concrete case studies, which may include:
- Individuals writing to governmental or non-governmental organizations to resolve or adjudicate personal losses or disputes.
- Appeals to organizations saturated with personal grief or moral urgency, asking the institution to provide justice, salvation, or meaning far beyond its procedural remit or even its mandate.
- Artistic or activist representations of IOs that depict them as almost divine actors—or as absolute villains—illustrating the psychological mechanisms of splitting and idealization.
- Varied sources that reveal how IO staff absorbed, managed, or deflected the idea that they should act not just as bureaucrats, but as agents of redemption.
We insist that such cases are not merely anecdotal or antiquarian but fundamental for rethinking the psychic and emotional role that global governance plays. We ask participants to frame their cases as diagnostic events—moments when the emotional and symbolic burdens placed on IOs become visible. In analyzing these episodes, we hope participants will work together to shed deeper light on why and how IOs have garnered and lost public support since their inception.
This conference thus offers a different way of seeing and thinking about international organizations—not as what they were designed to be, but as what they have been and how they continue to operate in the modern psyche: objects onto which we project our beliefs, disappointments, hopes, and fears.
Understanding these dynamics does not solve the institutional crises of legitimacy that IOs face, but it does clarify the nature of those crises. It teaches us that global governance is not only a rational problem of coordination; it is also a symbolic site charged with emotional and psychological assumptions. Until we fully understand those dynamics, we will continue to misread both the limits and the possibilities of international cooperation.
Applications
The conference will lead to an edited volume, and papers will be selected based on their thematic adherence to this framework.
Participants should be ready to submit a full draft one month before the event for pre-circulation. Abstracts should be submitted by December 14th, 2025, with notices of acceptance sent in January 2026.
Successfully selected participants will be fully covered for expenses, including all meals, as well as a stay in a prebooked hotel in Geneva.
To apply, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, as well as a 100-word biography of the participants affiliation within the same document to intlovehate.conference@gmail.com.