Where will the conference on Governing Global Empires be held?

The conference will take place in Toronto, CAN.

What is the format of the conference?

The conference is an academic gathering focused on ideas and practices of political order within global empires.

Governing Global Empires: Ideas and Practices of Political Order

Name: Governing Global Empires: Ideas and Practices of Political Order
Start: 2027-03-05 00:00:00+00:00
End: 2027-03-06 00:00:00+00:00
Location: Toronto

Mar 5–6, 2027Toronto, CanadaIn-person

Registration open

The conference "Governing Global Empires: Ideas and Practices of Political Order" convenes in Toronto, CAN, to explore the multifaceted nature of imperial governance. This academic gathering will delve into how empires, both historical and contemporary, have conceptualized and implemented political order across vast and diverse territories. The discussions are expected to cover a broad spectrum of imperial experiences, moving beyond traditional narratives to include a wider array of imperial forms and their enduring legacies.

Committees & topics

Topics
Settler Colonialism and Notions of Territorial Sovereignty · Reform Movements and Anticolonial Resistance · Indigenous Forms of Governance · Public Opinion, Media, Institutions, and Networks in Imperial Governance · Liberalism and Illiberalism in Imperial Thought · Gender, Colonial Violence, and Racialization · Constitutions and the Law in Imperial and Postcolonial Orders · Eurocentrism, Anglo-centrism, and Evolving Concepts of World Order

Why it matters

Understanding the historical and ongoing impact of imperial governance is crucial for comprehending contemporary global political structures and international relations. The conference's focus on diverse imperial forms, including those beyond the conventional European colonial empires, offers a more nuanced perspective on how power has been exercised and resisted across different eras and geographies. This broader lens allows for a deeper analysis of the mechanisms through which political order was established, maintained, and challenged within imperial contexts.

Furthermore, the examination of imperial ideas and practices provides valuable insights into the origins of many modern state systems, legal frameworks, and even cultural identities. By analyzing the strategies employed by various empires to integrate disparate populations, manage resources, and project authority, scholars and practitioners can better understand the complexities of governance in an interconnected world. The lessons drawn from these historical experiences can inform current debates on international cooperation, sovereignty, and the challenges of global governance.

How to prepare

To prepare for discussions on governing global empires, participants should engage with literature that critically examines the theoretical underpinnings of imperial rule and the practical challenges of administering diverse populations. Familiarity with various forms of imperial organization, from direct rule to more indirect forms of influence, will be beneficial. Consider how different empires adapted their governance strategies to local contexts and the resulting long-term consequences.

Developing a strong understanding of the concept of political order within imperial systems is also key. This involves analyzing how empires legitimized their authority, managed dissent, and integrated or marginalized different groups. Participants might find it useful to review concepts such as those explored in the Model Diplomat lesson on "mapping-relationships" to understand the complex power dynamics at play, and "dynamic-analysis" to assess how imperial structures evolved over time. Furthermore, considering the "hidden-stakeholders" within imperial systems, including marginalized communities and indigenous populations, can provide a more comprehensive view of imperial governance.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Canada

As the host nation, CAN provides a neutral academic ground for the discourse on empires, while also possessing its own historical context related to colonial settlement and indigenous relations.

Role in topic

CAN, as the conference host in Toronto, offers a significant location for academic discourse on global empires, providing a platform for diverse international perspectives. Its own history as a former dominion of a major empire and its ongoing reconciliation efforts with indigenous peoples provide a relevant backdrop for discussions on imperial legacies and governance.

Topics & background

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

Settler Colonialism and Notions of Territorial Sovereignty

Settler colonialism describes a distinct mode of empire in which migrant populations seek to permanently occupy and reconstitute territory, displacing or subordinating indigenous inhabitants rather than merely extracting resources or labor. From the Spanish encomienda system in the Americas to British settlement in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa, and French colonization in Algeria, settler projects rested on legal fictions such as terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery, which European powers used to claim sovereignty over lands already governed by indigenous polities. These doctrines were codified in jurisprudence (notably Johnson v. M'Intosh in the United States in 1823) and in international law through the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which carved up Africa according to European notions of 'effective occupation.' The core dispute concerns how sovereignty is constituted: whether it inheres in prior indigenous nations, in settler states that claim continuous occupation, or in some negotiated arrangement between them. Twentieth-century decolonization unsettled but did not resolve these questions; settler states often retained their territorial frameworks while indigenous peoples remained internally colonized. The 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognized rights to self-determination, lands, and free, prior and informed consent, but its implementation remains contested. Today, debates over settler colonialism shape disputes from Israel-Palestine and Western Sahara to land-back movements in Canada, Australia, and the United States, and resource conflicts in Amazonia. Scholars and activists increasingly frame settler colonialism as a 'structure, not an event,' challenging the territorial premises of many existing states.

Key players

Reform Movements and Anticolonial Resistance

Resistance to empire was as old as empire itself, but the 19th and 20th centuries saw the emergence of organized anticolonial movements that combined armed revolt, mass mobilization, intellectual critique, and transnational solidarity. Early reformist currents — the Indian National Congress (founded 1885), Egyptian constitutionalists, Young Ottomans, and Filipino ilustrados — initially sought equal rights and representation within imperial frameworks. The shock of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric of self-determination, and the Bolshevik Revolution radicalized these movements, while the League of Nations mandate system exposed the gap between liberal promises and continued colonial rule. The interwar and postwar decades produced a wave of mass resistance: Gandhi's satyagraha campaigns in India, the May Fourth and later communist movements in China, the Vietminh's war against France, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the Algerian war of independence, and liberation struggles in Portuguese Africa. The 1955 Bandung Conference and the subsequent Non-Aligned Movement linked these struggles into a global project, and figures such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Kwame Nkrumah, and Amílcar Cabral theorized colonialism, race, and revolution. UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960) declared colonialism a violation of human rights and accelerated formal decolonization. Today the legacies of anticolonial resistance inform debates over reparations, restitution of cultural property, neocolonial economic structures, and ongoing self-determination claims from Kanaky-New Caledonia to Western Sahara. Scholars continue to weigh whether decolonization succeeded in transferring sovereignty without dismantling colonial economic and epistemic orders.

Key players

Indigenous Forms of Governance

Long before European expansion, indigenous societies across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania developed sophisticated governing institutions: the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy with its Great Law of Peace, the segmentary lineage systems of the Nuer and Tiv, the kingdoms of Asante and Benin, the Mapuche parliamentary councils, the Aboriginal Australian Law and Country traditions, and the moot courts of Pacific Islander chiefdoms. These systems combined kinship, ritual, consensus deliberation, and customary law, and many engaged in extensive diplomacy and trade across vast regions. European imperial expansion sought to subordinate, co-opt, or extinguish indigenous governance. British 'indirect rule,' as theorized by Frederick Lugard, preserved customary authority while subordinating it to colonial administration; French 'assimilation' and 'association' policies oscillated between cultural erasure and pragmatic accommodation. In settler states, indigenous polities were often unilaterally dissolved, their treaties broken, and their members confined to reservations or homelands. Yet indigenous governance persisted, both formally — as in tribal councils in the United States or the Sámi parliaments in Scandinavia — and informally through customary law, language, and ceremony. The contemporary debate centers on legal pluralism, self-determination, and the relationship between indigenous and state authority. UNDRIP (2007), ILO Convention 169, and a growing body of national jurisprudence (e.g., Bolivia's 2009 plurinational constitution, New Zealand's evolving Treaty of Waitangi jurisprudence) have advanced recognition. Yet disputes over land, resource extraction, and political autonomy persist from Standing Rock to the Brazilian Amazon, raising fundamental questions about what constitutes legitimate political order.

Key players

Public Opinion, Media, Institutions, and Networks in Imperial Governance

Empires were never governed by metropolitan elites alone; they depended on dense networks of communication, persuasion, and institution-building that linked colonies, capitals, and global publics. From the early modern period, printed pamphlets, missionary correspondence, and chartered-company newsletters circulated arguments about empire. By the 19th century, the telegraph, steamship, mass-circulation press, and humanitarian campaigns (notably the antislavery movement and the Congo reform campaign led by E.D. Morel) created a transnational public sphere in which imperial conduct was contested. Institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, missionary boards, and chambers of commerce served as nodes of imperial knowledge production and lobbying. Colonial subjects were not passive in these networks. Indian, African, and Caribbean intellectuals published in metropolitan newspapers, organized international congresses (the Pan-African Congresses from 1900 onward, the League Against Imperialism in 1927), and used the League of Nations' Permanent Mandates Commission to publicize grievances. Wireless radio, cinema newsreels, and later television shaped how distant publics perceived wars of decolonization in Indochina, Algeria, and southern Africa, while diaspora networks mobilized international pressure against apartheid and Portuguese colonialism. The contemporary salience of these dynamics is acute. Social media platforms, satellite broadcasters such as Al Jazeera, and global NGOs reshape the politics of intervention, recognition, and reparations. Debates over disinformation, platform regulation, and 'narrative sovereignty' echo older imperial struggles over who gets to speak about and on behalf of distant peoples.

Key players

Liberalism and Illiberalism in Imperial Thought

Liberalism and empire have an entangled history. Canonical liberal thinkers — John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant — wrote in and for imperial polities, and many endorsed colonial rule on grounds of civilizational improvement, even as they defended liberty at home. Mill's tenure at the East India Company and his arguments in 'On Liberty' and 'Considerations on Representative Government' famously excluded 'barbarians' from the principles of consent and self-government. Tocqueville endorsed the French conquest of Algeria. Liberal political economy underwrote free-trade imperialism, while liberal internationalism shaped the League of Nations mandate system, which subordinated colonial peoples to 'tutelage' by 'advanced nations.' Illiberal currents — racial science, social Darwinism, authoritarian conservatism, and fascism — also justified imperial rule, often more explicitly. The boundary between liberal and illiberal empire was porous: liberal constitutional regimes ran brutal counterinsurgencies (Britain in Kenya, France in Algeria, the United States in the Philippines), used emergency powers, and operated on racial hierarchies. Critics from W.E.B. Du Bois and Hannah Arendt to contemporary scholars such as Uday Singh Mehta and Karuna Mantena have argued that imperial violence was constitutive of, not aberrant to, modern liberal order. Today these debates animate discussions of the 'liberal international order,' humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, and the rise of avowedly illiberal regimes. Questions about whether liberalism can be decoupled from its imperial inheritance, and whether illiberal great-power competition revives older imperial patterns, are central to current international theory.

Key players

Gender, Colonial Violence, and Racialization

Empire was profoundly gendered and racialized. Colonial regimes produced and policed categories of race, sex, and respectability: regulating interracial intimacy, codifying marriage and inheritance law, and constructing 'tradition' through colonial courts. Ann Laura Stoler, Anne McClintock, and Mrinalini Sinha, among others, have shown how the intimate sphere — concubinage, domestic service, missionary education, hygiene campaigns — was a primary site of imperial governance. Racial hierarchies were materialized through pass laws, residential segregation, miscegenation statutes, and labor regimes from indenture to apartheid. Colonial violence was also gendered. Sexual violence accompanied conquest from the Americas to the Congo Free State to wartime Japanese occupation in Asia. Counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya, Algeria, and Vietnam systematically targeted women and family structures. At the same time, women — indigenous and settler, metropolitan and colonial — were both subjects and agents of empire: as suffragists invoking imperial citizenship, as missionaries, as nationalist organizers (the Aba Women's War of 1929, the Algerian moudjahidate), and as theorists of feminism and decolonization. Racialization, meanwhile, was not a fixed European export but a contested process that varied across the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and Pacific worlds. Contemporary debates over reparations, transitional justice for colonial atrocities (Germany-Namibia, Belgium-DRC, UK-Kenya), the recovery of testimony from 'comfort women,' and intersectional approaches to international law trace their lineage directly to these histories. Questions of how gender, race, and empire continue to structure migration, citizenship, and global labor markets remain central.

Key players

Constitutions and the Law in Imperial and Postcolonial Orders

Law was a primary instrument and idiom of empire. Imperial powers exported, imposed, and adapted legal systems — common law, civil law, Islamic law as codified under colonial administration, and 'customary law' often invented in collaboration with selected local authorities. Constitutional documents structured the gradations of imperial belonging: from the British North America Act and the Government of India Acts to the French Constitution of 1946, which transformed the empire into a 'Union française.' International law itself was forged through imperial encounters, with doctrines of recognition, protectorate, mandate, and trusteeship organizing differential sovereignty. Decolonization produced an extraordinary wave of constitution-making. Newly independent states drafted constitutions that often combined inherited colonial structures with aspirations for social transformation: India's 1950 constitution, Ghana's republican constitution of 1960, the Indonesian Pancasila order, and later the South African constitution of 1996. Many of these texts incorporated bills of rights, affirmative-action provisions, and recognition of customary or religious law, while wrestling with the borders, citizenship regimes, and administrative architectures bequeathed by empire. Contemporary debates engage the persistence of colonial legal forms (emergency powers, sedition laws, land tenure regimes), the role of constitutional courts in protecting minority rights, the rise of plurinational and indigenous-recognition constitutions, and the reform of international law itself — from investor-state dispute settlement to the International Criminal Court — against charges of neocolonial bias.

Key players

Eurocentrism, Anglo-centrism, and Evolving Concepts of World Order

The dominant 20th-century vocabulary of international order — sovereignty, balance of power, international law, human rights, liberal internationalism — was largely codified by European, and after 1945 increasingly Anglo-American, thinkers and statesmen. The 'expansion of international society' narrative associated with the English School (Hedley Bull, Adam Watson) traced how European norms became global, while critics from the Subaltern Studies collective, the TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) movement, and scholars such as Edward Said, Antony Anghie, and Siba Grovogui have argued that this universalization was itself an imperial project that erased non-European traditions of order. Alternative conceptions of world order — the Sinocentric tributary system, Islamic notions of dar al-islam and dar al-harb, the Mughal and Ottoman imperial orders, Pan-African and Pan-Asian projects, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the New International Economic Order of the 1970s — have been recovered as resources for thinking beyond Eurocentric frameworks. Bandung, the G77, and the call for a 'right to development' challenged the assumption that international order should be authored from London, Paris, or Washington. Today the question is sharper than at any point since decolonization. The rise of China and India, the assertiveness of middle powers, BRICS-plus expansion, debates over UN Security Council reform, contestation of dollar hegemony, and competing visions of digital and AI governance all reflect a multipolar moment in which Anglo-centric assumptions are openly contested. Whether the result will be a pluralized international order, a fragmented one, or a renewed hegemonic settlement remains an open question.

Key players

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Canada March 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Governing Global Empires: Ideas and Practices of Political Order

Mar 5–6, 2027Toronto, CanadaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Settler Colonialism and Notions of Territorial Sovereignty · Reform Movements and Anticolonial Resistance · Indigenous Forms of Governance · Public Opinion, Media, Institutions, and Networks in Imperial Governance · Liberalism and Illiberalism in Imperial Thought · Gender, Colonial Violence, and Racialization · Constitutions and the Law in Imperial and Postcolonial Orders · Eurocentrism, Anglo-centrism, and Evolving Concepts of World Order

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Canada

As the host nation, CAN provides a neutral academic ground for the discourse on empires, while also possessing its own historical context related to colonial settlement and indigenous relations.

Role in topic