The National and the International

Eighth Annual Conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies

University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
6-7 October 2023

Since the birth of the modern state, political struggle has been waged on the double battlefield of the national and the international. In the nineteenth century, at a crucial point in the consolidation of the European system of nation states, Marx argued that capitalism trended towards global expansion and subsumption. The tensions between the national and the international increasingly took centre stage, continuing well into our own time and, while the past decades have seen further international economic integration, nationalism still penetrates all aspects of political and cultural life. On a theoretical level, however, the pairing of national and international is currently challenged by alternative spatial notions such as “localities,” “extra-territoriality,” “environment,” “sphere of influence,” “alliance,” and “empire.”

For the eighth annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, we therefore invite researchers and activists from the broader critical tradition to engage with the notions of the national and the international anew, as both theoretical suppositions and material realities. 

We welcome participants from all disciplines and invite contributions on a range of topics. Examples might include (but are not limited to):

• Conceptualisations of “the national” and “the international” across space and time
• Social reproduction and the internationalisation of care work
• Feminist internationalism throughout history
• The local as a site of political practice
• Migration and global inequalities
• The development of international finance
• War, peace, and (inter)national politics
• New state capitalism and the relation between the nation-state and transnational institutions
• The workers’ movement beyond territorial boundaries
• The development of legal regimes in international corporate law
• Elite conceptions of cosmopolitanism
• Post-colonial approaches to state formation and nationalism
• Critical logistics studies
• Aesthetic approaches to state, border, and transnational problems

By adding new perspectives on the complex interaction of national, international, and transnational forces and movements, we hope to further critical discussions on the transgressions of capital, as well as on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this register of Marxist analysis.

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) through this form by 1 June 2023 15 June 2023 at 10pm CET. Abstracts and presentations may be in Danish or English.