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Albert Cullell Cano

IRD Fellow
Department of International Relations

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About

About

Albert C Cano is a PhD candidate and a Fellow in the Department of International Relations at LSE. He’s also co-convener of the BISA Emotions in Politics and International Relations (EPIR) working group. His research applies critical, psychoanalytical, and negative approaches to conflict, peacebuilding, and world politics. Specifically, he investigates the post-conflict governance of trauma and violence and the ideological production of peace in the Northern Ireland and Colombian peace processes.

His research has been funded by an LSE PhD Studentship; the Phelan US Centre Summer Research Grant, which supported his 2024 fieldwork in the US on Irish American diasporic peacebuilding; and an LSE Global South Award supporting fieldwork in Colombia. He’s also held a visiting position at the School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, during field research in Northern Ireland.

At LSE, Albert has taught and guest lectured on conflict and peacebuilding, American grand strategy, and international security. He won an LSE Class Teacher Award in 2025 and an LSE Highly Commended Class Teacher Award in 2024, and was nominated for the 2024 LSESU Inspiring Teaching Award.

In the past he’s served as Editor and Associate Editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies for Vol 52 and 53, where he co-edited (with Shreya Bhattacharya and Eva Leth Sørensen) the Vol 52 Millennium Special Issue ‘Remapping the Critical: Imagining Anti-Hierarchical Futures in International Studies’, as well as co-written the Introduction to the Special Issue.

He holds an MSc in International Security from Institut Barcelona Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), during which he undertook an exchange programme in Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin. He also holds MAs in Contemporary Philosophy and Pedagogy, and BAs in Philosophy and English Studies, from the Universitat de Barcelona.

Research topic

Theorising the Death Drive in Liberal Peacebuilding: A Lacanian-Vernacular Analysis of Trauma, Surplus Violence, and Autoktonopower in the Northern Ireland Peace Process

In recent years, post-peace agreement societies have increasingly been governed through stabilisation policies aimed at preventing relapse into armed conflict. Northern Ireland is often treated as an internationally renowned ‘success story.’ However, segregation, political polarisation, and paramilitarism remain pervasive. Alongside this, a mounting mental health crisis and persistently high suicide rates further unsettle the dominant narrative of the peace process. While extant critical scholarship on liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding has shown how stabilisation measures prioritise a logic of conflict containment that permits the reproduction of ‘wartime’ orders during ‘peacetime,’ the structural conditions of this logic and its immanent effects require further exploration.

Drawing primarily on Lacanian psychoanalysis, and in dialogue with Althusserian structuralism and Mbembean necropolitics, I problematises success-based accounts of peace processes by showing how peacebuilding undermines the peace it nominally seeks to promote through its structural aim of order containment and becomes a death-driven structure. A peace process’s failure to address trauma healing, reconciliation, and integration is not simply a consequence of ‘good enough’ peacebuilding but a structural condition for its continued reproduction of the sociopolitical order born out of conflict. Out of the subtraction between the negative peace achieved and the positive peace deferred, a surplus of violence emerges: institutionalised trauma, post-paramilitarism, and exposure to mental distress and suicidality. I conceptualise the governance of this remainder as autoktonopower, namely the post-conflict management of trauma and the differential distribution of liveability in contained spaces or communities.

Academic supervisor

Mark Hoffman

Research Cluster affiliation

Security and Statecraft Research Cluster

Theory/Area/History Research Cluster

Expertise

Critical Theory, Poststructuralist IR, Lacanian IR, Liberal internationalism, Peacebuilding, Conflict resolution, Paramilitarism, Nationalism, Ideology, Northern Ireland, Brexit, UK politics, Colombia, Latin America.

Not available to supervise MPhil/PhD students

Albert has been funded by an LSE Studentship.