Where will the ISA 2027 Annual Convention take place?

The convention will be held in Atlanta, USA.

What is the primary focus of the ISA Annual Convention?

The convention serves as a major platform for scholarly exchange and research presentation in international relations, held annually in a significant city like Atlanta.

ISA 2027: 68th Annual Convention

Name: ISA 2027: 68th Annual Convention
Start: 2027-03-21T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-03-24T00:00:00Z
Location: Atlanta

Mar 21–24, 2027Atlanta, USAIn-person

Registration open

The ISA 2027 Annual Convention, hosted in Atlanta, USA, is a significant gathering for scholars and practitioners in international relations. This event serves as a crucial platform for presenting research, engaging in scholarly discourse, and networking within the global academic community. It is designed to foster intellectual exchange and advance understanding across various subfields of international studies.

Committees & topics

Topics
Amnesia and Reckoning in International Affairs · Revival of Sidelined Perspectives and Precursors · Collective Memory: Consolidation, Overturning, and Erasure · Inclusion and Omission of (Mis-)Information · Experiences of Multifaceted Effects: Compound Crises and Lived Impact

Why it matters

This convention is a cornerstone event for the field of international relations, providing an annual forum for the dissemination of new research and theoretical advancements. It brings together a diverse group of academics, policymakers, and students, facilitating discussions that shape future directions in global studies. The concentration of expertise allows for robust debate and the cross-pollination of ideas, which are essential for addressing complex global challenges.

The convention's location in the USA underscores its accessibility for a broad international audience, reinforcing its role as a central hub for international relations scholarship. The event's consistent recurrence and broad scope ensure that it remains a vital institution for professional development and intellectual growth within the discipline.

How to prepare

Prospective attendees should prepare by familiarizing themselves with the diverse range of topics typically covered at such a comprehensive international relations convention. Engaging with concepts like "Gender Dynamics Across Cultures" can provide valuable frameworks for structuring presentations and fostering productive discussions. Researchers might also consider how their work intersects with broader themes of global governance and international security.

For those presenting, a clear understanding of "Dynamic Analysis" can help in crafting compelling arguments and anticipating potential counterpoints. Furthermore, understanding "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?" can enhance the relevance and impact of one's research by identifying key actors and their interests in any given international issue. Effective "Engagement Strategies" are also crucial, not only for presenting research but also for networking and collaborating with other scholars.

Country perspectives

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

United States

As the host nation, the USA plays a central role in facilitating the convention and contributing to the discourse on international relations.

Role in topic

The USA provides the primary venue for this major international relations convention, offering a significant platform for global academic exchange. Its academic institutions and think tanks are often key contributors to the research presented.

Topics & background

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

Amnesia and Reckoning in International Affairs

The tension between forgetting and reckoning has shaped international politics since the post-1945 settlement, when the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals established that mass atrocities could not be quietly absorbed into the past. Yet for every reckoning there has been an equivalent amnesia: Cold War alliances often required overlooking the wartime conduct of newly useful partners, decolonization left metropolitan archives largely closed, and transitions from authoritarian rule in Latin America, Southern Europe, and post-Soviet states produced uneven mixes of amnesty laws, truth commissions, and silence. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Argentine trials of the juntas, and Germany's long Vergangenheitsbewältigung remain reference points for how states institutionalize confrontation with their own histories. The contemporary moment has reopened many of these questions. Demands for reparations for transatlantic slavery and colonial violence, the return of looted cultural property from European museums, Japan-Korea disputes over wartime forced labor and 'comfort women,' Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, and Russian state narratives erasing Soviet-era crimes all illustrate that historical injustices retain live diplomatic consequences. Scholars and practitioners now debate whether reckoning requires legal accountability, material redress, symbolic acknowledgment, or some combination — and what role international institutions should play when domestic politics blocks any of these.

Key players

Revival of Sidelined Perspectives and Precursors

International Relations as a discipline and as a practice has long been criticized for privileging a narrow canon — largely Anglo-American, state-centric, and rooted in interwar European debates. Over the past three decades, scholars working in postcolonial, feminist, Global South, and non-Western traditions have recovered thinkers and traditions previously marginalized: the Bandung generation and the Non-Aligned Movement, African scholars such as Ali Mazrui and Samir Amin, Latin American dependency theorists, Islamic and Confucian conceptions of order, and indigenous diplomatic traditions. Parallel revivals have occurred within the Western canon itself, with renewed attention to figures such as Susan Strange, the English School's pluralist wing, and early peace research. This revival is not merely academic. As power diffuses and BRICS-plus formats, the African Union, and ASEAN articulate alternative visions of sovereignty, development, and security, sidelined intellectual precursors are being repurposed as diplomatic resources. China invokes Tianxia and 'community of common destiny'; India draws on Nehruvian non-alignment recast as strategic autonomy; African states reference pan-Africanism in debates on UN Security Council reform. The committee question is how seriously the international system can integrate these perspectives, and whether their revival genuinely pluralizes global governance or is selectively deployed to legitimate great-power competition.

Key players

Collective Memory: Consolidation, Overturning, and Erasure

States actively construct collective memory through textbooks, monuments, public holidays, museums, and official commemorations. These instruments stabilize national identity but also function as foreign-policy tools: Victory Day in Russia, Nakba Day in Palestinian and Israeli discourse, partition commemorations in South Asia, and the politics of Yasukuni Shrine visits in Japan all generate recurring international friction. Memory laws — criminalizing denial of specific genocides or, conversely, prohibiting certain interpretations of national history — have proliferated in Europe and beyond, turning historiography into a regulated domain. Recent years have seen accelerated contestation. Monuments to Confederate, colonial, and Soviet figures have been removed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Central and Eastern Europe, while new memorials canonize previously marginal narratives. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by explicit attempts to erase Ukrainian historical distinctiveness, and conversely by Ukrainian decommunization and de-Russification campaigns. Authoritarian states increasingly police digital archives and search results, while diaspora communities mobilize transnational memory campaigns. The core dispute is who has authority to define a shared past when memory is simultaneously a human right, a security interest, and an instrument of statecraft.

Key players

Inclusion and Omission of (Mis-)Information

Information order has become a central axis of international politics. The collapse of gatekeeping by traditional media, the rise of platform companies headquartered largely in the United States and China, and the weaponization of social media by state and non-state actors have transformed disinformation from a peripheral concern into a treated security threat. Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and subsequent European votes, Chinese influence operations across the Indo-Pacific, Iranian and Gulf-state campaigns, and the role of platforms in conflicts from Myanmar to Ethiopia to Gaza have all demonstrated how curated inclusion and strategic omission of information shape political outcomes. Regulatory responses are fragmenting the global information environment. The EU's Digital Services Act and AI Act push transparency and risk-mitigation obligations; the United States debates Section 230, TikTok divestiture, and First Amendment limits on content regulation; China and Russia entrench sovereign-internet models; and many Global South states navigate between platform dependence and concerns over neocolonial data flows. UNESCO, the ITU, and the Internet Governance Forum offer venues for multilateral coordination, but consensus on definitions of 'disinformation,' on the legitimacy of content moderation, and on the responsibilities of generative AI providers remains elusive.

Key players

Experiences of Multifaceted Effects: Compound Crises and Lived Impact

Contemporary global challenges rarely arrive singly. Climate change interacts with food and water insecurity, displacement, and conflict; pandemics expose supply-chain fragility and deepen inequality; sanctions regimes generate humanitarian externalities; and AI-driven labor disruption compounds existing patterns of marginalization. The COVID-19 pandemic offered the clearest recent demonstration, simultaneously triggering health, economic, educational, and governance crises whose effects were distributed sharply along lines of gender, race, class, and geography. The concept of 'polycrisis,' popularized in policy circles after 2022, captures this entanglement, though critics argue it obscures specific causal chains and responsibilities. For international institutions, the analytical and political challenge is to move beyond siloed mandates. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework on disaster risk, and WHO pandemic-treaty negotiations all attempt integrative approaches, but funding, data, and authority remain fragmented. Affected communities — small island states facing existential climate risk, frontline workers during pandemics, populations under sanctions, displaced people navigating multiple legal regimes — increasingly demand that their lived, multifaceted experiences inform policy design rather than appear only as ex post statistics. The committee's task is to consider how IR scholarship and practice can register compound effects without flattening them into single-issue frames.

Key players