The first panel, “New Faces of Violence”, examined how contemporary violence transcends traditional legal and political frameworks. Beatriz Besen de Oliveira (USP) offered insights from her research comparing radical right-wing youth in Brazil and Germany. Her work traced how these movements construct a threatening “other,” informed by narratives of national decline, moral crisis, and resistance against pluralistic democracy. Karolina Wigura (FU Berlin / University of Warsaw) introduced the concept of “post-traumatic sovereignty”, explaining how nations — particularly in Eastern Europe — respond to historical trauma and the perceived erosion of statehood. Drawing from the war in Ukraine and Eastern European history, she argued that sovereignty is experienced not as a given but as a vulnerable, emotionally charged status, shaped by collective memory and a persistent fear of loss. Pedro Dallari (USP) then explored how contemporary conflicts challenge the international legal order, citing the erosion of norms around the use of force and the limitations of institutions like the UN Security Council. He reflected on how public opinion and civil society historically underpinned the international regime, and how this foundation is now destabilized by unilateral state actions and technological transformations in warfare.

The second panel, “More-than-Human Relationalities”, addressed non-anthropocentric modes of knowledge and political agency. Alexandre Nodari (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) reflected on the parallels between literature and shamanism, emphasizing fiction’s anthropomorphic nature and its limits in truly accessing other species’ modes of expression. He challenged the boundaries of language, fiction, and epistemology in human-nonhuman relations. Anne Broocks (FU Berlin) offered an ethnographic account of multispecies knowledge in the Amazon, showing how soils, forests, and humans co-create knowledge landscapes shaped by colonial histories, resource extraction, and local practices in Bolivia. The concept of “knowledge tipping points” illustrates moments when dominant understandings shift due to ecological, political, or economic pressures. Renato Sztutman (USP) closed the panel by advocating for a more-than-human politics. Drawing from Amerindian perspectivism, he argued for epistemologies that resist the binary of belief versus knowledge. His analysis of Guarani and Kaiowa communities illustrated how reclaiming territory is simultaneously a creative act of restoring cosmological and political life.