Where will the conference take place?

The conference will be held in Hong Kong, CHN.

What is the primary focus of the conference?

The conference focuses on "Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon," examining challenges to sovereignty across these domains.

When is the conference scheduled to occur?

The conference is scheduled for two days in the fall.

2026 Situations International Conference: Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon

Name: 2026 Situations International Conference: Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon
Start: 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z
Location: Hong Kong

Oct 22–23, 2026Hong Kong, ChinaIn-person

Registration open

The Situations International Conference, hosted in Hong Kong, CHN, will convene scholars and practitioners to critically examine the concept of sovereignty across human, environmental, and technological domains. The conference theme, "Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon," signals an urgent inquiry into the challenges and transformations impacting traditional notions of state and individual autonomy in a rapidly evolving global landscape. Participants will delve into how contemporary crises, from ecological degradation to the pervasive influence of technology, are reshaping the boundaries and exercise of sovereignty. The event aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together diverse perspectives to explore the multifaceted nature of these challenges and their implications for global governance and societal structures.

Committees & topics

Topics
Toxic Ecologies: Contamination, Sacrifice Zones, and Slow Violence · Ecological Sovereignty: Territory, Nature, and the Limits of the State · Bare Life Economies: Statelessness, Camps, and Populations Outside the Law · Necro-Economics: Markets, Abandonment, and the Politics of Letting Die · Migrant Labor Regimes: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Global Division of Work · Post/Transhuman Subjectivities: Enhancement, Embodiment, and the Boundaries of the Human · Algorithmic Governance and AI as Human Competitor · Digital Labor: Platforms, Data Work, and the Hidden Workforce of AI

Why it matters

The conference addresses a fundamental re-evaluation of sovereignty, a concept central to international relations and domestic policy. In an era marked by interconnected global challenges, understanding how sovereignty is being challenged and redefined is crucial for policymakers, academics, and civil society alike. The discussions will likely touch upon the erosion of national borders in the face of environmental crises, the complexities of individual autonomy in the digital age, and the ethical dilemmas posed by advanced technologies.

The focus on the "Pharmakon" — a term that signifies both remedy and poison — highlights the dual nature of many modern advancements and their impact on sovereignty. For instance, technological innovations can empower individuals and states, yet they can also introduce new vulnerabilities and forms of control. Similarly, environmental policies designed to protect the planet may impinge on national industrial sovereignty. This nuanced approach is vital for developing comprehensive and effective responses to global challenges.

By convening in Hong Kong, CHN, the conference is strategically located in a region that itself embodies complex questions of sovereignty and autonomy. This geographical context provides a compelling backdrop for discussions, offering a unique perspective on the interplay between local realities and global theoretical frameworks. The insights generated will be invaluable for navigating the intricate dynamics of power, governance, and identity in the 21st century.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for this conference should consider the interdisciplinary nature of the theme. A strong understanding of international law, political philosophy, environmental studies, and technology policy will be beneficial. It is advisable to research contemporary case studies where sovereignty is contested or undergoing significant transformation, such as disputes over shared natural resources, debates surrounding data governance, or the implications of artificial intelligence on national security.

Given the focus on "Sovereignties in Crisis," attendees should be prepared to engage with critical theories and alternative perspectives on state power and individual rights. Reviewing literature on post-sovereignty, global governance, and the ethics of technology will enhance participation. Consider how different national contexts, particularly those in Asia, perceive and respond to these crises, as this will enrich the discussions and provide diverse viewpoints on the challenges and potential solutions.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

China

Actively asserts state sovereignty, particularly in digital and territorial domains, while navigating complex environmental and technological challenges.

Role in topic

As the host nation, CHN's approach to national sovereignty, particularly concerning issues like data sovereignty and environmental governance, will be a significant point of discussion. Its policies and experiences offer a unique lens through which to examine the conference themes.

United States

Emphasizes individual liberties and technological innovation, often leading to debates on the balance between national security, corporate interests, and personal data sovereignty.

Role in topic

The USA's perspective on digital sovereignty, the regulation of technology giants, and its role in global environmental agreements will be central to discussions about the future of sovereignty in a technologically advanced world. Its influence on international norms and standards is considerable.

Germany

Advocates for a balance between national sovereignty and multilateral cooperation, particularly in environmental protection and data privacy within the European framework.

Role in topic

DEU's leadership in environmental policy and its strong stance on data protection within the European Union provide a crucial perspective on how sovereignty can be exercised and negotiated in a highly integrated regional bloc, especially concerning technological and environmental challenges.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Toxic Ecologies: Contamination, Sacrifice Zones, and Slow Violence

The concept of toxic ecologies emerged from late twentieth-century environmental justice scholarship and activism, which documented how industrial contamination, petrochemical infrastructure, mining tailings, and military waste accumulate disproportionately in poor, racialized, and colonized communities. Landmark cases — Bhopal (1984), Love Canal, Minamata, Chernobyl, and the petrochemical corridor along the lower Mississippi known as 'Cancer Alley' — established that toxicity is not an accident but a structural feature of global production. Rob Nixon's notion of 'slow violence' and the broader literature on 'sacrifice zones' frame these harms as long-duration, often invisible injuries to bodies and ecosystems. The contemporary terrain has widened. PFAS 'forever chemicals' have been detected in human blood and rainwater globally; e-waste streams flow from OECD economies to sites such as Agbogbloshie in Ghana; and the externalities of lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth extraction now underwrite the green transition itself. The 2022 UN recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (GA Res. 76/300), the Stockholm and Minamata Conventions, and ongoing negotiations toward a Global Plastics Treaty form the principal legal scaffolding, but enforcement remains fragmented and corporate liability across borders is weak. The core dispute is jurisdictional and distributive: who bears the cost of contamination produced for distant consumers, who holds polluters accountable when harm unfolds over generations, and whether the language of human rights is adequate to ecological injury that exceeds the human scale.

Key players

Ecological Sovereignty: Territory, Nature, and the Limits of the State

Ecological sovereignty names the tension between the Westphalian model — in which states exercise exclusive authority over a bounded territory and its resources — and ecological systems that cross borders, operate over deep time, and increasingly possess legal personhood of their own. The doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources (UNGA Res. 1803, 1962) was a decolonial victory anchoring state control over subsoil wealth, but it now collides with planetary boundaries, transboundary pollution, and climate obligations. The 1992 Rio Declaration, the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the 2023 BBNJ ('High Seas') Treaty each negotiate this tension differently. A parallel current pushes beyond the state. Ecuador's 2008 constitution recognized rights of nature; New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017; Colombia did the same for the Atrato; and Indigenous nations from the Sámi to the Yanomami assert sovereignties grounded in relational rather than territorial claims. The 2024 ICJ advisory proceedings on climate obligations and the ITLOS advisory opinion on marine climate harm have begun to articulate state duties to protect ecological systems beyond their borders. The core dispute concerns whether sovereignty can be reconciled with planetary stewardship, how Indigenous and more-than-human jurisdictions are recognized within state systems, and whether ecological emergencies justify forms of supranational authority that developing states fear will reproduce green colonialism.

Key players

Bare Life Economies: Statelessness, Camps, and Populations Outside the Law

Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's reading of Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt, the concept of 'bare life' describes human existence stripped of political status — life that can be governed, detained, or abandoned without the protections of citizenship. The twentieth century institutionalized this condition through refugee camps, internment, and statelessness; the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions were partial responses, but tens of millions remain outside their protections. Today's 'bare life economies' are the material infrastructures that have grown around these populations: encampments such as Dadaab, Cox's Bazar, and Zaatari; offshore detention and externalized asylum arrangements (Australia-Nauru, UK-Rwanda before its 2024 cancellation, the EU-Türkiye and EU-Libya frameworks); the carceral architecture of the US southern border; and the protracted limbo of the Rohingya, stateless Kuwaiti Bidoon, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and Palestinians under occupation and blockade. These spaces generate contracts, labor markets, biometric data flows, and humanitarian budgets — economies built on the management rather than the resolution of exclusion. The core dispute is whether the existing refugee and human rights regime can be reformed to close protection gaps, or whether the camp and the border have become permanent features of the international system, normalizing zones where rights are suspended.

Key players

Necro-Economics: Markets, Abandonment, and the Politics of Letting Die

Necro-economics, building on Achille Mbembe's 'necropolitics' and Warren Montag's reading of Adam Smith, examines how market rationality and state policy together determine which populations are sustained and which are exposed to premature death. Where biopolitics describes the management of life, necropolitics describes the distribution of mortality — through war, sanctions, austerity, denial of medical access, and the structural neglect of populations deemed economically surplus. Foundational cases range from colonial famine and the transatlantic slave trade to Cold War proxy wars, the global response (and non-response) to HIV/AIDS, and the differential mortality of COVID-19. Contemporary registers include sanctions regimes whose humanitarian carve-outs often fail in practice (Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan, DPRK), the militarized borders of the Mediterranean and Sonoran Desert where death is foreseeable and policy-tolerated, the conduct of hostilities in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, and the pricing regimes that determined unequal access to COVID-19 vaccines and continue to shape access to insulin, oncology drugs, and GLP-1 therapies. The TRIPS waiver debate at the WTO and ongoing pandemic treaty negotiations at the WHA make these distributional choices explicit. The core dispute is whether mass premature death produced by lawful policy — sanctions, border enforcement, intellectual property, austerity — should be analyzed as a structural feature of the international order rather than as incidental harm, and what legal or institutional remedies follow.

Key players

Migrant Labor Regimes: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Global Division of Work

Modern migrant labor regimes were built in the postwar period through guestworker programs (the German Gastarbeiter system, the US Bracero Program, the Gulf kafala system) that allowed states to import labor without extending citizenship. These frameworks decoupled the worker from the political community, producing a workforce whose presence was structurally temporary even when it lasted generations. The 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families remains poorly ratified — no major receiving state in the Global North or the Gulf has joined — and the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration is non-binding. Approximately 169 million migrant workers (ILO, 2021) now move within complex corridors: South and Southeast Asia to the Gulf, Central America to the United States, sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and the Maghreb, and South-South flows within ASEAN and across Africa. Reforms in the Gulf following scrutiny of the Qatar 2022 World Cup, the EU's revised Single Permit and Seasonal Workers Directives, and bilateral labor agreements such as the Philippines' overseas worker framework illustrate both incremental progress and persistent vulnerability to wage theft, debt bondage, and deportability. Climate displacement and care-sector demographics are projected to deepen reliance on migrant labor across aging economies. The core dispute concerns the gap between the economic indispensability of migrant workers and their political exclusion: whether labor mobility can be governed through rights-based multilateral instruments, or whether states will continue to manage it through bilateral, securitized, and employer-tied arrangements.

Key players

Post/Transhuman Subjectivities: Enhancement, Embodiment, and the Boundaries of the Human

Post- and transhumanism designate overlapping but distinct projects: transhumanism seeks to extend human capacities through technology (genetic editing, neural interfaces, longevity science, cognitive enhancement), while posthumanism, in the lineage of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Sylvia Wynter, questions the very category of the human as a humanist, often Eurocentric construct. Both currents have moved from philosophy and science fiction into policy-relevant terrain with the maturation of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, mRNA platforms, brain-computer interfaces (Neuralink, Synchron), assisted reproductive technologies, and AI systems that perform cognitive labor at human or superhuman levels. Key inflection points include the 2018 He Jiankui case in China involving germline-edited infants, the 2021 WHO framework on human genome editing governance, the 2005 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, and the Oviedo Convention in the Council of Europe context. Debates over neurorights — pioneered by Chile's 2021 constitutional amendment and taken up by the OECD and UNESCO — extend human rights into mental privacy and cognitive liberty. Disability rights movements, meanwhile, contest narratives of 'enhancement' that pathologize existing forms of embodiment. The core dispute is who governs the redefinition of the human: whether enhancement will deepen global inequality by producing a stratified species, how informed consent and intergenerational ethics apply to heritable interventions, and whether universal human rights instruments remain coherent when the subject of those rights is itself being technologically reshaped.

Key players

Algorithmic Governance and AI as Human Competitor

Algorithmic governance refers to the increasing use of automated decision systems in functions historically reserved for human judgment: welfare eligibility, predictive policing, asylum screening, content moderation, credit scoring, and military targeting. Early controversies — the Dutch childcare benefits 'toeslagenaffaire,' the COMPAS recidivism tool, Australia's Robodebt program, and Israel's use of AI-assisted targeting systems in Gaza — established that these systems can produce discriminatory and opaque outcomes at scale. The release of large generative models since 2022 has accelerated the debate by introducing systems whose general-purpose capabilities approach or exceed human performance in many cognitive tasks. A fragmented governance landscape has emerged. The EU AI Act (2024) is the first comprehensive horizontal regulation; the US has pursued a sectoral and executive-order approach; China has issued rules on recommender algorithms and generative AI with strong content controls; and the 2023 Bletchley and 2024 Seoul AI Safety Summits, the UN High-Level Advisory Body on AI, the Council of Europe's Framework Convention on AI, and the OECD AI Principles attempt to build international scaffolding. OHCHR has repeatedly warned that algorithmic systems implicate ICCPR rights to privacy, expression, non-discrimination, and effective remedy. The core dispute is whether AI should be governed as a product (safety, liability), as infrastructure (competition, access), or as a quasi-sovereign actor whose displacement of human judgment requires new constitutional categories — and whether a binding global instrument is achievable amid US-China strategic competition.

Key players

Digital Labor: Platforms, Data Work, and the Hidden Workforce of AI

Digital labor encompasses the work performed on, for, and through digital platforms: ride-hail and delivery driving, domestic and care work coordinated through apps, content moderation, and — increasingly visible — the data annotation and reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback work that trains large AI models. Scholars including Mary Gray, Antonio Casilli, and Trebor Scholz have shown that contemporary AI depends on a globally distributed, often precarious workforce concentrated in Kenya, the Philippines, Venezuela, India, and other lower-wage economies, frequently engaged through subcontractors such as Sama, Scale AI, and Remotasks. Investigations into the conditions of Kenyan workers labeling traumatic content for OpenAI and Meta brought the term 'ghost work' into mainstream policy debate. Legal responses are uneven. The EU's 2024 Platform Work Directive establishes a presumption of employment for platform workers; California's Proposition 22 and subsequent litigation moved in the opposite direction; the UK Supreme Court's 2021 Uber decision recognized drivers as 'workers'; and the ILO has placed platform work and the future of work at the center of its standard-setting agenda, with discussions toward a possible Convention on decent work in the platform economy. Data-protection regimes (GDPR, Brazil's LGPD) increasingly intersect with labor rights through algorithmic management transparency requirements. The core dispute is whether digital labor will be recognized as employment subject to existing protections, how value generated by user data and annotation work should be distributed across jurisdictions, and whether international labor standards can keep pace with business models designed for regulatory arbitrage.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 2026 Situations International Conference: Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

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Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

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Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

China October 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

2026 Situations International Conference: Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon

Oct 22–23, 2026Hong Kong, ChinaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Toxic Ecologies: Contamination, Sacrifice Zones, and Slow Violence · Ecological Sovereignty: Territory, Nature, and the Limits of the State · Bare Life Economies: Statelessness, Camps, and Populations Outside the Law · Necro-Economics: Markets, Abandonment, and the Politics of Letting Die · Migrant Labor Regimes: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Global Division of Work · Post/Transhuman Subjectivities: Enhancement, Embodiment, and the Boundaries of the Human · Algorithmic Governance and AI as Human Competitor · Digital Labor: Platforms, Data Work, and the Hidden Workforce of AI

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

China

Actively asserts state sovereignty, particularly in digital and territorial domains, while navigating complex environmental and technological challenges.

Role in topic

United States

Emphasizes individual liberties and technological innovation, often leading to debates on the balance between national security, corporate interests, and personal data sovereignty.

Role in topic

Germany

Advocates for a balance between national sovereignty and multilateral cooperation, particularly in environmental protection and data privacy within the European framework.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Toxic Ecologies: Contamination, Sacrifice Zones, and Slow Violence

Key players

Ecological Sovereignty: Territory, Nature, and the Limits of the State

Key players

Bare Life Economies: Statelessness, Camps, and Populations Outside the Law

Key players

Necro-Economics: Markets, Abandonment, and the Politics of Letting Die

Key players

Migrant Labor Regimes: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Global Division of Work

Key players

Post/Transhuman Subjectivities: Enhancement, Embodiment, and the Boundaries of the Human

Key players

Algorithmic Governance and AI as Human Competitor

Key players

Digital Labor: Platforms, Data Work, and the Hidden Workforce of AI

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 2026 Situations International Conference: Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

US Job Openings at 6.7M

Bhagwant Mann Launches Punjab Campaign Summit

Punjab Politics

Argentina Enters Ecuador Activist Case

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

China October 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

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International Conference on Politics and World History (ICPWH)

ICIEDPS 2026 - International Conference on International Relations, Diplomacy and Political Science

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Frequently asked questions