What is the format of the ICPSG?

The event is an international conference, suggesting a format that includes presentations, discussions, and networking opportunities.

When does the conference take place?

The conference is scheduled for late January.

International Conference on Political Science and Globalization (ICPSG) 2027

Name: International Conference on Political Science and Globalization (ICPSG) 2027
Start: 2027-01-28T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-01-29T00:00:00Z
Location: Istanbul

Jan 28–29, 2027Istanbul, TurkeyIn-person

Registration open

The International Conference on Political Science and Globalization (ICPSG) convenes in Istanbul, a city bridging continents, to explore the intricate relationship between political science and the forces of globalization. This event offers a platform for scholars, researchers, and practitioners to present new findings, exchange ideas, and foster collaborations on critical global political issues. The conference aims to deepen understanding of how global interconnectedness shapes political systems, policies, and international relations. Participants will engage in discussions covering a broad spectrum of topics, from the impact of globalization on national sovereignty and governance to the evolution of political ideologies in a globalized world. The conference provides a unique opportunity to analyze contemporary challenges and opportunities arising from the interplay of local politics and global dynamics.

Committees & topics

Topics
The Discipline of Political Science: Methods, Boundaries, and Relevance · Systems of Government: Comparative Constitutional Design · The Analysis of Political Activity: Behavior, Participation, and Power · Comparative Politics: Methods and Substantive Frontiers · Democracy and Regime Types: Backsliding, Hybrid Regimes, and Authoritarian Resilience · Identity Politics, National and Social Movements · International Political Economy and Globalization · International Relations: Theory and the Contemporary Order

Why it matters

In an era defined by rapid global change, understanding the nexus between political science and globalization is paramount. Events like the ICPSG are crucial for dissecting complex global phenomena, such as the rise of transnational movements, the shifting balance of power among nations, and the challenges to traditional statecraft. The insights generated at this conference can inform policy-making, academic discourse, and public understanding of the forces shaping our world.

The location of the conference in Istanbul, TUR, adds a significant layer of geopolitical relevance. As a city with historical ties to both Eastern and Western civilizations, Istanbul provides a unique vantage point for examining the multifaceted impacts of globalization on diverse political landscapes. This geographical context encourages a comparative approach to political analysis, highlighting the varying ways in which different regions and countries navigate global pressures.

Furthermore, the conference's focus on political science ensures a rigorous academic approach to these topics. By bringing together experts, the ICPSG facilitates the development of new theoretical frameworks and empirical research that can advance our collective knowledge. This intellectual exchange is vital for addressing pressing global challenges, from climate change and economic inequality to international security and human rights, all of which are deeply intertwined with political processes and global interconnectedness.

How to prepare

To maximize engagement with the International Conference on Political Science and Globalization, attendees should focus on a comprehensive preparation strategy. Given the event's broad scope, a strong foundational understanding of international political economy, global governance, and comparative politics will be highly beneficial. Familiarity with current events and major geopolitical trends will enable more informed participation in discussions and Q&A sessions.

Attendees should consider how the concepts of "Dynamic Analysis" can be applied to the evolving nature of global political landscapes, helping to anticipate shifts and understand complex interactions. Similarly, insights from "Understanding Motivations" can offer valuable perspectives on the drivers behind state and non-state actions in the international arena. These analytical tools can enhance one's ability to critically assess presentations and contribute meaningfully to the discourse.

For those presenting or looking to network effectively, preparing questions and discussion points in advance is crucial. Applying principles from "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?" or "The Power-Interest Grid" can help identify key actors and their influence within the topics being discussed, thereby enriching interactions. This strategic preparation will not only enhance individual participation but also foster more productive collaborations and knowledge exchange at the conference.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Türkiye

As the host nation, TUR offers a unique perspective on globalization, balancing its historical role as a bridge between continents with its contemporary geopolitical aspirations and challenges.

Role in topic

TUR's strategic location and its complex relationships with both European and Asian powers make it a critical case study for examining the impacts of globalization on national identity, foreign policy, and domestic politics. The country's experiences with regional conflicts, migration, and economic integration provide rich material for discussions on political science and globalization.

United States

The USA's role as a dominant global actor means its domestic political developments and foreign policy decisions have profound implications for globalization, influencing international norms, trade, and security.

Role in topic

Discussions at the conference will likely analyze the USA's shifting approaches to multilateralism, trade agreements, and its impact on global governance structures. Its internal political dynamics, such as debates over nationalism versus international cooperation, offer insights into the challenges globalization poses to established powers.

China

CHN represents a rising global power whose economic and political influence is reshaping the global order, presenting alternative models of development and governance in a globalized world.

Role in topic

The conference will provide a forum to explore CHN's Belt and Road Initiative, its growing presence in international institutions, and its unique approach to state-led globalization. Analyzing CHN's political system and its interactions with other nations is central to understanding contemporary globalization.

Germany

As a leading economy within the European Union, DEU's experience with regional integration, multilateralism, and its response to global challenges like climate change and migration offers a significant European perspective on globalization.

Role in topic

DEU's commitment to international cooperation and its economic strength make it a key player in shaping global norms and policies. Its internal political debates on issues such as energy transition and immigration reflect broader globalized challenges faced by developed nations.

Topics & background

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

The Discipline of Political Science: Methods, Boundaries, and Relevance

Political science emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on older traditions of political philosophy from Aristotle through Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Marx. The founding of the American Political Science Association in 1903 and the establishment of dedicated faculties in Europe institutionalized the field, which by mid-century had absorbed the 'behavioral revolution' emphasizing empirical observation, statistics, and the systematic study of voting, institutions, and decision-making. The core dispute within the discipline concerns method and purpose: whether political science should aspire to be a predictive social science modeled on economics, a humanistic enterprise rooted in history and normative theory, or a pluralist field combining quantitative, qualitative, and interpretive approaches. Debates over rational choice theory, the 'Perestroika' movement of the early 2000s, and more recent contests over causal inference, formal modeling, and the replication crisis reflect this tension. Today political science confronts new pressures: the rise of computational social science and big data, demands for policy relevance amid democratic backsliding, and questions about Western-centric assumptions in a multipolar world. National research traditions in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and increasingly China and India shape how the discipline evolves globally.

Key players

Systems of Government: Comparative Constitutional Design

Modern systems of government trace their lineage to the constitutional experiments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the English parliamentary settlement of 1688, the United States Constitution of 1787, and the French Revolutionary constitutions. These produced the principal templates still in use—parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential systems—each combining executive, legislative, and judicial powers differently. The twentieth century added authoritarian variants (fascist, communist, single-party developmental states) and the post-1945 wave of decolonization, which generated hybrid constitutions across Africa and Asia. The central dispute concerns which institutional configurations best balance accountability, stability, and effective governance. Juan Linz's influential critique of presidentialism, debates over federalism versus unitary rule, and disagreements about electoral systems (proportional representation versus majoritarian) animate comparative constitutional design. Post-communist transitions in the 1990s and Arab Spring constitution-drafting in the 2010s tested these models in real time, often with mixed results. Current debates focus on executive aggrandizement, the erosion of legislative checks, judicial capture, and the resilience of federal arrangements under populist pressure. Constitutional reform processes in Chile, Tunisia, and elsewhere, alongside the consolidation of party-state systems in China and Russia, illustrate the live stakes of institutional choice.

Key players

The Analysis of Political Activity: Behavior, Participation, and Power

The systematic analysis of political activity—voting, protest, lobbying, party membership, and civic engagement—took shape with the behavioral revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, exemplified by the Michigan school's electoral studies and Almond and Verba's 'Civic Culture' (1963). These works shifted the discipline from formal institutional description toward survey research, statistical inference, and individual-level explanation. Subsequent generations added rational-choice models of turnout, resource and grievance theories of protest, and network analyses of mobilization. The core analytical disputes concern what drives political participation: socioeconomic resources, psychological attachments, rational calculation, social identity, or contextual mobilization. The decline of mass-party membership in advanced democracies, the rise of digital activism, and the explosion of populist movements have all forced revisions of older models. Scholars also debate whether non-electoral activity—protest, boycotts, online campaigning—is supplementing or supplanting conventional participation. Contemporary work focuses on misinformation, algorithmic curation of political content, polarization, and the measurement of political behavior at scale through digital trace data. Election integrity controversies, declining trust in institutions, and the global protest waves of 2019–2024 have made the analysis of political activity unusually salient for both researchers and policymakers.

Key players

Comparative Politics: Methods and Substantive Frontiers

Comparative politics, as a self-conscious subfield, grew out of mid-twentieth-century efforts to extend political analysis beyond Western Europe and North America. The structural-functionalism of Almond and Powell, Barrington Moore's 'Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy' (1966), and Theda Skocpol's 'States and Social Revolutions' (1979) established macro-historical comparison as a core method. The 'third wave' of democratization beginning in 1974 generated an enormous literature on transitions, consolidation, and breakdown. The principal disputes concern method—small-N case studies versus large-N statistical work versus mixed designs and natural experiments—and substantive theory, including modernization theory, dependency, varieties of capitalism, and historical institutionalism. The 'comparative method' has been repeatedly reformulated, most notably by Lijphart, King-Keohane-Verba, and more recently through the credibility revolution and renewed attention to causal identification. Current frontiers include democratic backsliding, the comparative political economy of climate transition, ethnic conflict, state capacity, and authoritarian resilience. The expansion of cross-national datasets (V-Dem, Polity, Afrobarometer, Latinobarómetro) has transformed empirical possibilities while raising new debates about measurement and conceptual stretching.

Key players

Democracy and Regime Types: Backsliding, Hybrid Regimes, and Authoritarian Resilience

The study of regime types accelerated after Samuel Huntington identified a 'third wave' of democratization beginning with Portugal's 1974 revolution. Between 1974 and the early 2000s, the global share of electoral democracies roughly doubled, encompassing Southern Europe, Latin America, post-communist Europe, and parts of Africa and Asia. Scholars developed elaborate typologies distinguishing liberal democracies, electoral democracies, competitive authoritarian regimes, and closed autocracies, with Freedom House, Polity, and V-Dem providing standard measurements. Since roughly 2006, most major indices record a sustained democratic recession. Backsliding has occurred not primarily through coups but through incremental executive aggrandizement in Hungary, Turkey, India, Venezuela, and the United States, among others, while consolidated autocracies in China and Russia have grown more assertive. The core dispute is whether this represents a temporary downturn, a permanent reconfiguration toward hybrid and competitive authoritarian forms, or a structural crisis of liberal democracy driven by inequality, identity conflict, and information disorder. Current debates focus on the mechanisms of backsliding, the effectiveness of international democracy support, the role of social media and foreign interference, and whether resilient democracies require specific institutional, economic, or cultural foundations. The 2024 'super-election year,' in which roughly half the world's population voted, has provided fresh empirical material for these debates.

Key players

International Political Economy and Globalization

International political economy (IPE) emerged as a distinct field in the 1970s, when the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange-rate system, the oil shocks, and rising interdependence forced scholars to integrate the study of politics and economics across borders. Susan Strange, Robert Gilpin, Robert Keohane, and others articulated competing liberal, realist, and structuralist accounts of how states and markets interact. The post-1989 expansion of trade, finance, and production networks—accelerated by China's WTO accession in 2001—produced the era now commonly labeled 'hyperglobalization.' The 2008 global financial crisis, the eurozone crisis, the 2016 Brexit and Trump shocks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine have together prompted a reassessment of globalization. The core dispute is whether the world is 'deglobalizing,' 'fragmenting,' or merely reconfiguring along new geopolitical lines through industrial policy, friend-shoring, export controls, and sanctions. Debates over the dollar's role, sovereign debt distress in the Global South, and the governance of digital trade and AI add further dimensions. Current issues include U.S.–China economic decoupling in strategic sectors, the green industrial policy race spurred by the U.S. Inflation Reduction Action and EU Green Deal, WTO dysfunction, reform of the international financial architecture, and how middle powers and developing countries navigate a more contested economic order.

Key players

International Relations: Theory and the Contemporary Order

International relations as an academic field was founded in the aftermath of the First World War, with the establishment of the first IR chair at Aberystwyth in 1919 and the interwar debate between liberal internationalists and the realists who followed E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. The Cold War institutionalized the discipline around questions of deterrence, alliances, and bipolarity, while the post-1989 'unipolar moment' shifted attention to liberal order, humanitarian intervention, and globalization. Constructivism, the English School, and critical and feminist approaches subsequently broadened the theoretical landscape. The core contemporary dispute concerns the nature and durability of the U.S.-led liberal international order. Realists emphasize the return of great-power competition with China and Russia, liberals stress the resilience of institutions and economic interdependence, and critical scholars highlight the order's colonial origins and uneven legitimacy. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, intensifying U.S.–China rivalry, conflict in the Middle East, and the rise of assertive middle powers have all sharpened these debates. Key issues include the future of NATO and Indo-Pacific alliances, nuclear stability amid arms-control collapse, the governance of new domains such as cyber, space, and AI, climate diplomacy, and the role of the BRICS+ grouping in articulating an alternative vision of world order. The discipline is also grappling with renewed interest in geoeconomics, war studies, and the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Political Science and Globalization (ICPSG) 2027.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

The Power-Interest Grid

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Frequently asked questions

International Conference on Political Science and Globalization (ICPSG) 2027

Jan 28–29, 2027Istanbul, TurkeyIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
The Discipline of Political Science: Methods, Boundaries, and Relevance · Systems of Government: Comparative Constitutional Design · The Analysis of Political Activity: Behavior, Participation, and Power · Comparative Politics: Methods and Substantive Frontiers · Democracy and Regime Types: Backsliding, Hybrid Regimes, and Authoritarian Resilience · Identity Politics, National and Social Movements · International Political Economy and Globalization · International Relations: Theory and the Contemporary Order

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Türkiye

As the host nation, TUR offers a unique perspective on globalization, balancing its historical role as a bridge between continents with its contemporary geopolitical aspirations and challenges.

Role in topic

United States

Role in topic

China

CHN represents a rising global power whose economic and political influence is reshaping the global order, presenting alternative models of development and governance in a globalized world.

Role in topic

Germany

Role in topic

Topics & background

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

The Discipline of Political Science: Methods, Boundaries, and Relevance

Key players

Systems of Government: Comparative Constitutional Design

Key players

The Analysis of Political Activity: Behavior, Participation, and Power

Key players

Comparative Politics: Methods and Substantive Frontiers

Key players

Democracy and Regime Types: Backsliding, Hybrid Regimes, and Authoritarian Resilience

Key players

International Political Economy and Globalization

Key players

International Relations: Theory and the Contemporary Order

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Political Science and Globalization (ICPSG) 2027.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

The Power-Interest Grid

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

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

Istanbul Security Conference® 2026

Morocco – International Diplomacy: An Academic Meeting in Istanbul

International Conference on Global Politics and International Relations ICGPIRS

8th International Conference on Globalization & International Relations

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Congress on Freedom Studies 2026

Frequently asked questions