LUCIR presentation and discussion
What we can learn from drama and the arts: scripts, stages, and performances in world politics
- Date
- Tuesday 10 March 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- 3.48
About this event
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a well-known authoritative private organization in forestry certification. Established in 1993, Alejandro Esguerra explores how timber merchants, indigenous communities and social environmental NGO’s labored for its founding and engaged in private institution making. In this talk, he explains how he applied a novel approach based in a dramaturgical methodology. Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective that operates with theatre metaphors such as script, stage, and performance to, in Esguerra’s case, study the social role of meetings and documents in institution making in world politics. Following this approach, Esguerra was not only interested in what was said during these meetings and in these documents, but in what they did; what scripts they followed and what was performed in and through them. This focus allowed him to develop the interpretive mechanism of translation—a social process in which knowledge about governance is continuously recontextualized. Esguerra’s talk is based on his recent book; The Politics of Beginning. The Origin of Private Authority in the Process of Translation (Michigan University Press 2025).
Featuring
- Speaker: Alejandro Esguerra – Senior Fellow at Leipzig University
- Discussants: Stefan Ćetković – Leiden University;
Hilde van Meegdenburg – Leiden University. - Host: LUCIR, tba.
About Alejandro Esguerra
Alejandro Esguerra is a senior fellow at the Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe), Germany, and a founding member of the Institute for Studies of Science at Bielefeld University (ISOS). He obtained his PhD in Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin and researched and taught at UFZ Leipzig, the Centre for Global Cooperation Research Duisburg, the University of Potsdam and Bielefeld University. He held international visiting positions at UMASS at Amherst, Cornell University, Örebro and Linköping University. Among his latest articles are Objects of Expertise, The Socio-Material Politics of Expert Knowledge in Global Governance (Global Studies Quarterly 2025) and Representing across scales. How do Indigenous youth activists translate claims to international institutions (together with Henrike Knappe and Lukas Ziebell, Globalizations 2025). His book is titled The Politics of Beginning: The Origin of Private Authority in the Process of Translation (University of Michigan Press 2025).
Join the event
This event is open to all Leiden University staff and students. While registration is not required, it is important to bring your LU-card to enter the Wijnhaven building.