Last week saw me dozing on flights, stumbling through airports, and taking the tube to a train to a bus to another bus to another train, to arrive in Oxford in time for the Conflict Research Society Annual Conference.

This was my first time attending the CRS conference, and it didn’t take me long to decide that this was one of the best conferences in which I have participated. The easy-on-the-eye setting at Pembroke College certainly didn’t hurt; it wasn’t only jetlag that, between sessions, had me scuttling out to bask in the sunny quads. And I couldn’t resist the utterly unnecessary Hogwarts analogies, when presented with the formidable array of desserts in the college dining hall

More to the point, however, the thematic, rather than disciplinary, focus to the conference, coupled with its modest overall size (only two days – quite the relief after some of the more monstrous conferences), meant that it was easy to meet, and to get to chatting, with other academics interested in similar topics. Perhaps most importantly, this was also a conference in which (post)graduate students, doctoral candidates, and junior and senior faculty intermingled readily. There was little of the sense of hierarchy that at other conferences can see attendees sorted or sorting themselves according to the letters after their names.

There’s also something refreshing about crossing the pond (the actual sleep-depriving, jet-lagging crossing notwithstanding), and getting a taste of how academia is done in other places. While we might study the same topics and read the same scholars, some of the frames of reference shift, some of the assumptions and fixations diminish. An important reminder that, as massive as it is, American academia is not the full extent of academia.

The paper that I was presenting includes a fairly detailed case study of the Zetas criminal organization in Mexico. From what I can see, mine was the only paper on Mexico at the conference. Despite ten years of raging violence, Mexico doesn’t quite have an agreed upon ‘conflict’ status yet. At the opening plenary, Prof. Anke Hoeffler drew a distinction between collective and interpersonal violence, with the implication being that the former refers to conflict or war, and the latter to crime. The levels of violence in Mexico, however, are almost inconceivable as interpersonal crime. Rather, part of the problem appears to be proliferation of highly armed collectives, willing to target each other and civilians.

Still, it is a testament to the sense of the community that the CRS has knit together, that some interloper, who doesn’t even study a proper conflict, was welcomed to the conference. And that the other attendees found plenty to ask about, and plenty to share.