The “Malvinas–Malvinas 44” conference, to be held on April 16 and 17, 2026, at the University of Manchester , is not simply an academic event: it is a carefully staged scene where the South Atlantic conflict is narrated—once again—from the imperial center. Under the guise of interdisciplinarity, the meeting brings together figures from the British establishment—retired military officers, war studies scholars, and defense officials—along with a handful of international voices, including some from Argentina.

The inaugural event says it all: the “keynote” – the inaugural event – shared between Lawrence Freedman and Virginia Gamba under the question “Why did diplomacy fail?” already contains the conceptual trap: the conflict reduced to a problem of failed perceptions, stripped of its colonial dimension.

Throughout the first day, names like Michael Kerr , Edward Hampshire , and Jake Widén paraded alongside British veterans such as Michael Rose and Dair Farrar-Hockley , in panels where the war was dissected as a technical case, surgically separated from the question of sovereignty.

But it is in the Argentine participation that the picture takes on its most uncomfortable tone. There we find Virginia Gamba , Professor Alejandro Diego (University of Buenos Aires, former conscript, participating via Zoom), Dr. Alejandro Amendolara (independent researcher), and the posthumous work of Osvaldo Daniel Ramírez (retired Armed Forces). They are joined by Dr. Andrea Roxana Bellot —an Argentine academic based in Europe—who not only presents but also chairs one of the panels.

The common denominator is significant: none of these contributions focuses on the legal issues surrounding the British occupation, but rather shifts towards approaches that explore memory, perceptions, discourses, or “points of no return.” Even the case of Alejandro Diego —a veteran—is framed within the idea of “disruptive solutions where each party is satisfied,” a formulation that, when read in context, borders on implicit acceptance of the status quo. The point is not to question individual trajectories, but to highlight a constant: the Argentine voice that enters these spaces generally does so within conceptual frameworks already established by Anglo-Saxon academia.

And therein lies the core of the problem. While the United Kingdom deploys a network that connects universities, think tanks , and associations such as the Society for Latin American Studies , setting the agenda and language, the Malvinas/Malvinas issue is progressively reconfigured as a global academic object, stripped of its colonial character.

In the final panels—featuring representatives of the illegal island government, such as Richard Hyslop , and British legal and defense experts—the discussion shifts toward the islands' "legal indeterminacy" or "institutional evolution," reinforcing a narrative that presents the conflict as a fait accompli. In this context, international law—UN resolutions, the mandate of the Special Committee on Decolonization (C-24), and calls for bilateral negotiations—is relegated to the background, almost like an inconvenient relic.

The objective of these meetings, then, is not merely academic: it is to produce consensus, shape interpretations and, above all, naturalize a colonial situation under the veneer of academic debate.

What is truly unsettling is not that the British are doing it—that's consistent with their strategy—but that part of the Argentine intelligentsia itself is participating in this scheme without questioning its framework. It is precisely there that one of the most silent—and most decisive—battles of the Malvinas/Malvinas issue is being fought today.

Juan Facundo Besson - María Salomón (Malvinas, South Atlantic and Antarctic Observatory - UNR)