ISA's 49th Annual Convention - San Francisco 2008
Theme: Bridging Multiple Divides
March 26th-29th, 2008, at the Hilton San Francisco: San Francisco, California, USA
Jack S. Levy, President -
Kelly M. Kadera &
Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Program Chairs
Bridging Multiple Divides
The landscape of international relations research is diverse and vibrant, with a wide variety of ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. IR scholarship is empirical and normative, conservative and liberal, systemic and individual, activist and academic, material and ideational, positivist and post-positivist. While these different viewpoints give us great leverage for studying international relations, they often create artificial barriers between scholarly communities. Our theme for the 2008 ISA meeting seeks to bridge multiple divides in the international relations community by creating dialogue and integrative research between scholars from different communities and viewpoints. We encourage the submission of papers, panels, and roundtables that create synergies between disciplines, subfields, theories, and methods and that foster greater self-reflection about our research and teaching.
Numerous divides separate scholars of international relations. Critical theorists concern themselves with ontological questions while empiricists search for causal patterns. Some positivists prefer rich, detailed examination of single cases, while others formulate generalized patterns across large groups of like phenomena. Traditional field boundaries artificially separate students of comparative and international politics, despite their overlapping substantive interests. Similarly, disciplinary boundaries isolate political scientists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, geographers, biologists, applied mathematicians, and others sharing an interest in the study of international relations.
Yet each divide creates opportunities to build bridges. We encourage panels and roundtables that address this challenge by bringing together scholars from different research communities. Important global problems, such as terrorism, might be examined by panels mixing policy analysts, formal theorists, large-N empiricists, and historians. Likewise, our understanding of globalization can be enhanced by bringing together constructivists, feminists, political economists, and neoliberal institutionalists. Students of the changing nature of warfare might share ideas with scholars working inthe just war tradition, and students of human rights might join a dialogue with international lawyers and international organization specialists. An examination of signaling and bargaining behavior could bring together modelers, experimentalists, and case study researchers. Political scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists could jointly address how trust is established and maintained in relationships. Geographers and environmentalists might team up with conflict scholars interested in resource-based explanations of political violence. Comparativists and IR scholars could combine efforts to discuss the determinants of state failure, the origins and termination of civil war, and other topics of mutual interest. Constructivists and empiricists might exchange ideas about how arguments of the former might be examined through the methodologies of the latter. Panels could engage formal theorists from different modeling backgrounds (e.g., game theory, bounded rationality, dynamic modeling, spatial modeling, and the theory of moves) working on similar substantive issues.
We also encourage innovative bridge-building that moves beyond the standard research panel format. For example, we would be eager to see submissions of papers coauthored by individuals from different viewpoints; a roundtable exploring the historical development of several different research communities or the intellectual autobiographies of leading scholars from diverse backgrounds; panels that include two discussants who come from distinct perspectives; and sponsorship of panels by sections that normally have relatively little contact with each other (e.g., Peace Studies and the Scientific Study of International Processes, or the English School and International Organization). Another non-traditional format might include participants from various types of institutions (U.S. research universities, non-north American schools, small liberal arts colleges, co-educational, public, private, and so on) who are willing to share and discuss their innovative strategies for teaching international relations.
Some of the dialogues described above already take place at our annual meetings, but they tend to be sporadic. We want to facilitate these dialogues on a grander scale, and to make them the defining theme of our 2008 annual meeting. It is only fitting that we convene in San Francisco, a city defined by its multiple bridges, physical and cultural.
