Where is the ISA Northeast 2026 Annual Conference taking place?

The conference will be held in Pittsburgh, USA.

What is the eligibility level for participants at this conference?

The conference is designed for college-level participants.

What is the format of the ISA Northeast 2026 Annual Conference?

The conference is an annual gathering, suggesting a traditional in-person academic conference format.

ISA Northeast 2026 Annual Conference

Name: ISA Northeast 2026 Annual Conference
Start: 2026-11-13T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-11-14T00:00:00Z
Location: Pittsburgh

Nov 13–14, 2026Pittsburgh, United StatesIn-person

Registration open

The ISA Northeast 2026 Annual Conference is a significant academic event for scholars, practitioners, and students in international studies. Hosted in Pittsburgh, USA, this conference provides a forum for intellectual exchange and networking within the field. It is specifically designed for college-level participants, offering an accessible platform for presenting research and engaging with contemporary global issues.

Committees & topics

Topics
The Politics of End Times, and the Ends of Politics · Meanings of "End Times" in International Relations · Affects of Crisis in Global Politics · Alternative Histories and Genealogies of International Relations · Practices of Withdrawal, Refusal, and Alternative Sovereignties · Ontologies, Cosmologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies and Ethics for Confronting Crises · Sacrifice Zones: Spaces and Times of Extraction, Militarization, and Experimentation · Practices of Memory and Counter-Memory

Why it matters

This conference serves as a crucial gathering for those engaged in international studies, fostering dialogue and collaboration among diverse perspectives. The discussions and presentations often touch upon pressing global challenges, contributing to a deeper understanding of international relations and potential solutions. By bringing together individuals from various academic and professional backgrounds, the conference facilitates the cross-pollination of ideas, which is vital for advancing the discipline.

The insights generated at such events can influence policy discussions and academic curricula. For emerging scholars, it offers an invaluable opportunity to present their work, receive feedback, and connect with established figures in the field. The focus on college-level participation ensures that new generations of international relations experts are integrated into the broader academic community, preparing them for future contributions to global diplomacy and understanding.

How to prepare

Participants should prepare for an environment focused on rigorous academic discourse. For those presenting, a clear and concise articulation of research findings is paramount. Engaging with the work of other scholars, particularly those from diverse geographical and theoretical backgrounds, will enrich the experience. Consider how your research connects to broader themes in international studies and be ready to discuss its implications.

Networking is a key component of this conference. Attendees should be prepared to engage in discussions, exchange contact information, and explore potential collaborations. Familiarity with current events and major theoretical debates in international relations will enhance participation in informal and formal sessions. Reflecting on how your work contributes to or challenges existing paradigms, as discussed in lessons like "Dynamic Analysis" and "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?", can provide a strong foundation for engagement.

Country perspectives

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

United States

As the host nation, the USA provides the physical and academic infrastructure for the conference, influencing the logistical and cultural context of the event.

Role in topic

The USA, through its academic institutions and think tanks, is a major contributor to international studies research and discourse, often setting trends and providing a significant portion of the participants and presenters.

China

Scholars from CHN often bring unique perspectives on global governance and economic development, contributing to a more multipolar view of international relations.

Role in topic

Research from CHN frequently focuses on its growing influence in international institutions and its approach to global challenges, offering critical insights into evolving power dynamics.

Russia

Academics from RUS typically offer analyses rooted in post-Soviet foreign policy and Eurasian security, providing alternative interpretations of international events.

Role in topic

RUS is a key actor in many global security discussions, and its scholars contribute perspectives on geopolitical competition, energy politics, and regional conflicts.

Topics & background

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

The Politics of End Times, and the Ends of Politics

Apocalyptic and eschatological framings have shaped political thought since antiquity, but they have reentered international relations with new force in the twenty-first century. Climate breakdown, pandemics, nuclear brinkmanship, and the resurgence of great-power rivalry have generated a public mood in which the possibility of civilizational collapse is no longer confined to religious or fringe discourse. Scholars and policymakers now routinely speak of 'polycrisis,' 'existential risk,' and 'planetary boundaries,' while popular politics in many states absorbs and weaponizes apocalyptic narratives ranging from Christian dispensationalism in the United States to Russian Orthodox civilizational eschatology and Chinese narratives of national rejuvenation against decline. The theme also asks what it means for politics itself to have ends — both as goals and as termination points. Critical theorists have long argued that the liberal international order rests on a teleology of progress that is now visibly exhausted, while postcolonial and Indigenous thinkers have noted that 'end times' have already been experienced by colonized peoples whose worlds were ended by conquest, slavery, and ecological dispossession. The contemporary debate therefore sits at an intersection of crisis governance, political theology, and critical IR, asking whether anticipations of the end produce paralysis, authoritarianism, or new forms of political imagination. The issue remains unresolved in both theory and practice. International institutions struggle to govern long-horizon risks under short electoral cycles; states instrumentalize apocalyptic rhetoric for legitimation; and citizens navigate doomscrolling, climate grief, and security anxieties. How IR scholarship engages these phenomena — analytically, normatively, and methodologically — is itself a contested political question.

Key players

Meanings of "End Times" in International Relations

The phrase 'end times' carries multiple, overlapping meanings in IR. Theologically, it draws from Abrahamic eschatologies but also from Hindu cyclical cosmologies, Buddhist notions of mappō, and Indigenous prophecies of world-ending and world-renewing transformations. Secularized versions appear in Cold War nuclear discourse, in 'end of history' narratives following 1989, and in contemporary climate and AI-risk debates. Each register implies different political subjects, temporal horizons, and prescriptions for action. In the post-Cold War period, Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' thesis briefly framed liberal democracy as the terminus of political development, only to be displaced by narratives of clash, return of geopolitics, and now planetary crisis. Critical scholars have shown how 'end times' talk can naturalize particular orderings: securitizing certain threats while obscuring others, privileging Northern anxieties over ongoing Southern catastrophes, and licensing exceptional measures. Decolonial scholars argue that for many communities the world has already ended multiple times — through the Middle Passage, settler colonialism, and ecological extraction. Today, debates over what 'end times' means structure concrete policy: how to govern artificial intelligence, whether to treat climate change as an existential threat, how to interpret nuclear signaling, and how to weigh long-termist ethics against present injustices. Clarifying these meanings is a precondition for coherent international action.

Key players

Affects of Crisis in Global Politics

The 'affective turn' in IR, developed since the 2000s, examines how emotions, moods, and bodily intensities shape international politics. Crises — financial, pandemic, climatic, military — are not only material events but affective ones, producing fear, grief, rage, hope, numbness, and resentment that circulate through media ecosystems and political institutions. Scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and within IR Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison have shown that affect is constitutive of security, solidarity, and legitimacy rather than incidental to them. Recent crises have made this visible. The COVID-19 pandemic generated globally synchronized anxiety and mourning while exposing deep asymmetries in whose deaths were grieved. The climate emergency has produced 'eco-anxiety,' youth movements grounded in fear and hope, and reactionary backlashes rooted in nostalgia and ressentiment. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have circulated images and feelings that reshape public opinion, alliance politics, and humanitarian response. Populist and authoritarian movements have proven particularly adept at mobilizing humiliation, pride, and apocalyptic dread. The analytical and policy questions are how affect is produced, channeled, and governed across borders; whether international institutions can take emotion seriously without instrumentalizing it; and how scholars should methodologically engage feeling without reducing it to data. The stakes include the durability of democracy, the possibility of solidarity across difference, and the conditions for collective action on long-horizon threats.

Key players

Alternative Histories and Genealogies of International Relations

Mainstream IR has long told its disciplinary origin story through Westphalia (1648), the interwar 'great debates,' and Cold War theorizing centered in the Anglo-American academy. Over the last two decades, historians and critical scholars have dismantled this narrative. Work by Brian Schmidt, David Long, Robert Vitalis, and others has shown that early twentieth-century IR was deeply entangled with imperial administration, race science, and the governance of colonial populations — Vitalis's 'White World Order, Black Power Politics' traced how race was foundational to the discipline before being written out. Parallel projects have recovered suppressed lineages: the Haitian Revolution as a constitutive event of modern international order; the Bandung Conference and Non-Aligned Movement as sites of theorizing sovereignty and solidarity; Indigenous diplomacies predating and persisting alongside European state systems; Islamic, Confucian, and African political thought on order and justice; and feminist genealogies recovering women theorists erased from canonical histories. The English School, postcolonial IR, Global IR (advanced by Amitav Acharya), and decolonial approaches have each pushed for pluralizing the discipline. These debates have practical stakes for how international order is conceptualized today: who counts as a legitimate sovereign, which precedents inform contemporary norms, and whose knowledge is treated as theory versus mere area expertise. The contestation also shapes curriculum, hiring, and the geography of knowledge production in IR.

Key players

Practices of Withdrawal, Refusal, and Alternative Sovereignties

Much IR scholarship presumes that political agency consists in voice, participation, and engagement with state institutions. A growing body of work — drawing on Indigenous studies, Black studies, anarchist theory, and feminist thought — has argued instead for the political significance of refusal and withdrawal. Audra Simpson's work on Mohawk refusal, Saidiya Hartman on fugitivity, and James Scott on statelessness in upland Southeast Asia have shown that opting out, ignoring, or actively rejecting state recognition can be sovereign acts in themselves. Contemporary examples include Indigenous nations refusing settler-state jurisdiction over land and resources, Zapatista autonomous municipalities in Chiapas, Rojava's experiment in democratic confederalism, Pacific Island assertions of oceanic sovereignty, and movements for reparative withdrawal from extractive economies. At the interstate level, withdrawal from international institutions — by the United States from the WHO and Paris Agreement under the first Trump administration, by African states from the ICC, by Russia from the Council of Europe — raises different but related questions about exit as a political strategy. The topic invites consideration of how IR should theorize sovereignty beyond the Westphalian template, how international institutions respond to entities that refuse recognition on standard terms, and whether withdrawal can be generative of alternative orders or merely reactive. It also raises hard questions about scale: which practices of refusal are viable for whom, and under what material conditions.

Key players

Ontologies, Cosmologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies and Ethics for Confronting Crises

Confronting overlapping planetary crises has exposed the limits of dominant IR frameworks built around states, rational actors, and material capabilities. The 'ontological turn' in anthropology and the rise of new materialisms, posthumanism, and Indigenous and Afro-diasporic cosmologies have pressed IR to reconsider what counts as a political actor — including ecosystems, rivers, ancestors, more-than-human beings, and infrastructures. Recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person in Aotearoa New Zealand and similar moves in Ecuador, Bolivia, and India illustrate how alternative ontologies are entering law and policy. Epistemologically, scholars including Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Walter Mignolo, and Sylvia Wynter have argued that the Eurocentric knowledge system underwriting modern IR is itself implicated in the crises it claims to diagnose. Methodologically, this has prompted experimentation with ethnography, narrative, visual methods, participatory research, and engagement with traditional and Indigenous knowledges. Ethically, it raises questions about responsibility across generations and species, about consent and reciprocity in research, and about the politics of who speaks for whom in global forums. The practical implications are visible in climate negotiations, biodiversity governance, AI ethics, and pandemic preparedness — domains where technical expertise alone has proven insufficient and where contested values, worldviews, and forms of knowledge collide. The question for IR is whether the discipline can pluralize its foundations quickly and seriously enough to be useful in these settings.

Key players

Sacrifice Zones: Spaces and Times of Extraction, Militarization, and Experimentation

The concept of 'sacrifice zones' — coined in the U.S. context to describe communities knowingly exposed to severe environmental harm — has been generalized to capture places and populations rendered expendable in the service of broader political and economic projects. These include uranium-mining and nuclear-testing sites in the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and the U.S. Southwest; fossil-fuel extraction zones in the Niger Delta and the Permian Basin; militarized borderlands; e-waste dumps; and pandemic and pharmaceutical trial sites in the Global South. Scholars including Traci Brynne Voyles, Rob Nixon (on 'slow violence'), and Macarena Gómez-Barris have mapped how such zones are produced through layered colonial, capitalist, and military logics. Temporal sacrifice is also at stake: nuclear waste timelines extending hundreds of thousands of years, carbon emissions locking in future climate harm, and debt regimes mortgaging the futures of indebted states. Militarization compounds these dynamics, with bases, test ranges, and conflict zones imposing long-lasting ecological and health burdens — visible in Okinawa, Diego Garcia, Vieques, and contemporary conflict theaters. Experimentation, from Cold War human radiation experiments to contemporary biometric and AI pilots in refugee camps, raises persistent questions about consent and the politics of the laboratory. International responses remain fragmented. Environmental justice norms have gained traction, the UN recognized a right to a healthy environment in 2022, and reparations claims are advancing in some forums. Yet the underlying political economy of sacrifice persists, and emerging transitions — including 'green' mining for critical minerals — risk reproducing old patterns under new names.

Key players

Practices of Memory and Counter-Memory

Memory politics has become central to international relations. Official commemorations, monuments, museums, textbooks, and diplomatic apologies shape national identities and interstate relations — from Franco-German reconciliation memory work to ongoing disputes over wartime memory in East Asia, Holocaust remembrance regimes in Europe, and contested memorialization of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. Scholars including Jenny Edkins, Duncan Bell, and Jelena Subotić have shown how memory is mobilized to legitimize foreign policy, justify intervention, and constitute political community. Counter-memory, a concept drawn from Foucault and elaborated by scholars of subaltern and Indigenous history, names the practices by which marginalized communities preserve and transmit accounts that contradict official narratives. The Black Lives Matter movement's contestation of Confederate and colonial monuments, the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns, truth and reconciliation processes from South Africa to Canada to Colombia, Armenian and Rohingya genocide recognition efforts, and Palestinian Nakba commemoration are all sites where counter-memory enters international politics. Russia's instrumentalization of WWII memory to justify the invasion of Ukraine, and contested Holocaust analogies in Gaza debates, show how memory itself is a contemporary battlefield. The international stakes include the politics of recognition and reparations, the regulation of memory laws (which in some states criminalize particular interpretations of the past), and the role of international courts and UN bodies in adjudicating historical claims. How memory and counter-memory are practiced shapes which futures are imaginable.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for ISA Northeast 2026 Annual Conference.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal 2026 Election

Trump's Legal Battles Impact 2026 Elections

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

United States November 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

ISA Northeast 2026 Annual Conference

Nov 13–14, 2026Pittsburgh, United StatesIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
The Politics of End Times, and the Ends of Politics · Meanings of "End Times" in International Relations · Affects of Crisis in Global Politics · Alternative Histories and Genealogies of International Relations · Practices of Withdrawal, Refusal, and Alternative Sovereignties · Ontologies, Cosmologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies and Ethics for Confronting Crises · Sacrifice Zones: Spaces and Times of Extraction, Militarization, and Experimentation · Practices of Memory and Counter-Memory

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.

United States

As the host nation, the USA provides the physical and academic infrastructure for the conference, influencing the logistical and cultural context of the event.

Role in topic

China

Scholars from CHN often bring unique perspectives on global governance and economic development, contributing to a more multipolar view of international relations.

Role in topic

Research from CHN frequently focuses on its growing influence in international institutions and its approach to global challenges, offering critical insights into evolving power dynamics.

Russia

Academics from RUS typically offer analyses rooted in post-Soviet foreign policy and Eurasian security, providing alternative interpretations of international events.

Role in topic

RUS is a key actor in many global security discussions, and its scholars contribute perspectives on geopolitical competition, energy politics, and regional conflicts.

Topics & background

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

The Politics of End Times, and the Ends of Politics

Key players

Meanings of "End Times" in International Relations

Key players

Affects of Crisis in Global Politics

Key players

Alternative Histories and Genealogies of International Relations

Key players

Practices of Withdrawal, Refusal, and Alternative Sovereignties

Key players

Ontologies, Cosmologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies and Ethics for Confronting Crises

Key players

Sacrifice Zones: Spaces and Times of Extraction, Militarization, and Experimentation

Key players

Practices of Memory and Counter-Memory

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for ISA Northeast 2026 Annual Conference.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Rahul Gandhi Defends Tamil Nadu's Autonomy

India's 131st Amendment Bill

West Bengal 2026 Election

Trump's Legal Battles Impact 2026 Elections

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

United States November 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

The Future of U.S. & China Conference 2026: A Shifting Global Order

Turkey's evolving role in a new global geopolitical and security order

2026 Jordan Center Masters and Undergraduate Research Symposium

Pakistan Conference @ Harvard 2026

2026 AGS Geopolitical Leadership Summit

Gathering for a New Lebanon

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

The Future of U.S. & China Conference 2026: A Shifting Global Order

Turkey's evolving role in a new global geopolitical and security order

2026 Jordan Center Masters and Undergraduate Research Symposium

Pakistan Conference @ Harvard 2026

2026 AGS Geopolitical Leadership Summit

Gathering for a New Lebanon

Frequently asked questions