The Imperial Interregnum in East and Southeast Asian Conjunctures
A call for papers, panels and position papers from scholars, organisers and movement intellectuals across the region.
Across East and Southeast Asia, we are living through an imperial interregnum that has yet to be wholly explained. While the US-led imperial order fragments amid the wars and conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Sudan and Myanmar, global capitalism continues to be governed by the configuration of imperial power consolidated after the Cold War. Nevertheless, the core powers can no longer guarantee the open trade and "stable" finance that underpinned Asia's growth miracles and the hyperexploitation of labour that sustained them, which reveals their growing incapacity to set the rules of accumulation. This conference sets out both to explain this interregnal condition and to find ways of acting from within it, bringing together researchers, scholars, and labour and community organisers drawing on broadly critical Marxist and historical materialist approaches.
Streams
Five thematic tracks. Find where your paper fits.
Submit
What to send, and where. Deadline 25 Jan 2027.
Publication
Selected papers travel on to four journals.
The Conjuncture
Why this conference, why now
Reading this conjuncture as a rearticulation of imperial power, this conference aims to grasp how the capitalist trajectories of East and Southeast Asian states might be explained by the positions they take in imperial hierarchies and rivalries and by the labour they discipline at home, thus holding the two in relation to one another. Three decades of export-led industrialisation across East and Southeast Asia drew hundreds of millions into wage work, without producing class power since growth fragmented it across borders and into informal, subcontracted, and migrant arrangements. China's expansion belongs to this continental labour history.
As transregional chains of finance, trade and production become ever more tightly intertwined with Euro-American capital, the apparent opposition between "rival camps" arguably gives way to their underlying integration within global relations of capitalist production and exploitation. This presents us with two questions: How far do the categories such as inter-imperial rivalry, antagonistic cooperation, and sub-imperialism take us, and what might we need that none of them offers? And if these categories are reproduced or contested in class struggle, how does the way movements, organisers, and intellectuals understand them shape the potentials within those struggles?
This attempt requires approaching our categories as conjunctural, themselves formed within historically specific processes of capital accumulation and struggles in and against them. Twentieth century Euro-American hegemony depended on a liberal cross-class compromise within the imperial core, itself rife with exclusionary practices. Free wage labour and a legislated system of bourgeois rights came to stand for capitalism, such that capitalist relations that developed according to different conditions elsewhere appeared as incomplete versions of Euro-American norms. Today's rival powers pursue capitalist development even as they reject, distort, or reorient liberal doctrines. This calls for a heterodox historical materialist critique of capitalist political economy in East and Southeast Asia, one that moves beyond depicting the region simply as aberrant or underdeveloped, as a collection of late developers and peripheries, or as a victim of external powers. It is necessary, instead, to articulate the specificity of capitalist transformation in Asia within broader shifts in global capitalism. This also means addressing what that specificity makes possible or forecloses for class struggle not only in East and Southeast Asia, but on a global scale.
Asia is a crucial site for grasping the imperial interregnum. Some on the left have found in China a communist antagonist to American empire, a model for a post-capitalist future, while others understand China only as an emergent oppressor. But both tend to detach China from the regime of accumulation that has shaped it so powerfully, as well as from the labour history it shares with the region. Accordingly, we invite work that analyses East and Southeast Asia dialectically, examining oppressive and emancipatory dynamics with equal analytical rigour, without Sinophobia and without dogma. We also invite researchers and organisers to ask what Asia actually offers as an infrastructure for practising Marxism, in order to build an internationalism that is both anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
While this conference may fall short of producing a Marxist theory of the imperial interregnum that many struggles across the world demand, we convene it nonetheless in the belief that what the region reveals about this conjuncture explains something about capitalism itself, and not only about Asia.
Five streams
Where your paper fits
Name the stream your proposal addresses. Submissions that don't will be routed to the most appropriate one. If you are unsure, write to us via the Contact section below.
Asian Readings of Marx
How might the specificity of Asia's current capitalist conjuncture serve as an empirical entry point for rereading Marx today? Underpinning this question is a recognition that while capitalist political economy is interconnected at a global level, it is nonetheless variegated across regions, and thus not homogenous. Asian readings of Marx that engage Marxist theory through the specificity of Asia's current capitalist conjuncture would illuminate not only contemporary conditions within Asia, but also contemporary capitalism per se. At their strongest, such interventions would engage the global through the regional, the universal, in other words, through the particular.
Labour Struggle
We invite scholar-activists to a collective reflection on radical labour ideas and practices. How can we centre Asia's labour struggles in producing movement theories and knowledge? What existing analytical concepts and frameworks should be challenged? How do we address the strategic intersections between labour movements and recent popular uprisings in Asia? What efforts have been made to reform trade unions? How does the labour movement exercise political power? What kind of movement infrastructure should be built? What new practices of transnational organising and solidarity are emerging? And, what is the role of the working class in anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements?
War and Conflict, Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism
Importantly, Marxist theory insists on imperialism's entanglement with the expansion and reproduction of capitalist relations, itself enforced by states, militaries, and warfare. Therefore, we ask researchers, organizers, cultural workers, and more to revisit and/or rework debates over inter-imperial rivalry, sub-imperialism, hegemonic cycles, and multipolarity against the backdrop of conflict in Asia. How are imperialism and anti-imperialism taking forms old or new, from Asia's contested Western frontiers (in Palestine, Yemen, and Iran, for instance) to US empire across the Transpacific? How do the actions of the US, China, Russia, and other states reflect or reshape imperial dynamics or anti-imperial struggle?
Social Reproduction Crisis
Social reproduction is not external to capital accumulation but constitutive of it; its crisis signals a systemic crisis. The familial assumptions underpinning capitalist reproduction have long been eroding, most acutely in parts of Asia: ultra-low fertility, rapid ageing, rising non-marriage, diversifying households. State policies still rely on old assumptions, and no new reproductive order has emerged. This stream asks: How have these policies redrawn the boundaries between private and public, informal and formal? How are the burdens of reproductive labour being redistributed along lines of gender, generation and citizenship? What forms of struggle, organising and institution-building are emerging in response?
Capitalist Contradictions, Dispossession and Struggles from Below
New capital cities, special economic zones, and infrastructure projects are remaking land and livelihoods across East and Southeast Asia under the imperial interregnum. State-led development, green transition, and military infrastructure projects have triggered recurring protests and political tensions, including resistance to dispossession in places from Rempang to Henoko. These projects are part of how capitalism addresses its internal crises in ways that produce dispossession in one place while allowing for accumulation in another. We invite scholar-activists to offer relational comparisons grounded in movement experience that address the following questions: How do contradictions within these conjunctures fragment resistance or reorient grievances to serve ruling elites? Which languages and infrastructures of solidarity can connect these struggles, even if only temporarily?
Across the five streams, we encourage a dialectical relation between analysis and organising, and we strongly encourage submissions from organisers and movement intellectuals alongside those from academia. We also seek comparative inter-Asian work and papers that connect struggles in East and Southeast Asia against capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, sexism, and racism with political movements elsewhere in the world.
Submissions
How to propose a paper or panel
We invite proposals for individual papers, or for pre-constituted panels of three to four papers, each with its own title and abstract.
- Proposal title
The working title of your paper, or of your panel session.
- Session abstract (organised panels only)
No more than 250 words, showing how the panel connects to the conference theme.
- Individual paper title and abstract
No more than 200 words, naming the stream it addresses and how it connects to the conference theme.
- Personal information
First and last name, email address, affiliation, position, gender, nationality and current location, not a full postal address.
Submissions are acknowledged automatically. All proposals are reviewed together in January 2027; accepted presenters are notified by late March 2027, and the programme book is released on 15 May 2027. Presenters go on to submit a position paper of 1,000 to 2,000 words to their stream coordinator by 1 June 2027. For questions about a specific stream, please write to us via the Contact section below and indicate which stream your question is about.
Publication
Where selected work travels next
Selected papers will be considered for publication in:
Organisers
Convened across the region
The conference is convened by Global Korean Studies, Sogang University and the Asia Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia (ARC UI), in collaboration with Asian Labour Review (ALR), Gyeongsang University, and Indoprogress.
Contact
Questions?
Ask directly below, or write to us at the address underneath.
Prefer email directly?
For a stream-specific question, choose the stream under Topic in the form, or name it in your email, and we will pass it to that stream's coordinators.