Where is the conference being held?

The conference will take place in Paris, FRA.

When does the conference start and end?

The conference begins on the start date and concludes on the end date.

What is the primary focus of this event?

The event focuses on the rise of Asia, the potential decline of imperialism, and the emergence of a new world order.

THE RISE OF ASIA 2027 : THE RISE OF ASIA 100 YEARS AFTER LAI: Is the Imperialism Dying and a New World Order Emerging?

Name: THE RISE OF ASIA 2027 : THE RISE OF ASIA 100 YEARS AFTER LAI: Is the Imperialism Dying and a New World Order Emerging?
Start: 2027-02-17T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-02-19T00:00:00Z
Location: Paris

Feb 17–19, 2027Paris, FranceIn-person

Registration open

The conference, "THE RISE OF ASIA 2027: THE RISE OF ASIA 100 YEARS AFTER LAI: Is the Imperialism Dying and a New World Order Emerging?", convenes in Paris, France to explore the evolving global landscape. This event focuses on the shift in international power dynamics, particularly the increasing influence of Asian nations and the potential decline of traditional imperialistic structures. It aims to foster discussions on the emergence of a new world order, examining historical contexts and future trajectories.

Committees & topics

Topics
World History: A Century After 1927 and the Long Arc of Global Power · Post-Colonial History: Sovereignty, Development, and Unfinished Independence · International Relations: Contested Theories in a Multipolar Transition · The Global South: From Bandung to BRICS+ · Imperialism: Forms, Legacies, and Contemporary Contestation · A New World Order? Transition After Unipolarity · Colonialism: Legacies and Reckonings · Neo-Colonialism: New Mechanisms of Dependence

Why it matters

The rise of Asia represents a fundamental reordering of global power, challenging long-held assumptions about international relations and economic dominance. This conference provides a crucial platform for understanding the multifaceted implications of this shift, from geopolitical realignments to economic transformations and cultural exchanges. The discussions will delve into whether the current international system, often characterized by historical power imbalances, is truly giving way to a more multipolar and equitable arrangement.

Understanding these dynamics is vital for policymakers, academics, and practitioners across various fields. The event's focus on the potential demise of imperialism and the birth of a new world order directly addresses critical questions about global governance, economic development, and international security. It offers an opportunity to analyze the roles of emerging powers and the responses of established nations, providing insights into potential areas of cooperation and competition in the coming decades.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the themes of this conference, participants should undertake a thorough review of contemporary international relations theories, particularly those pertaining to power transitions and the rise and fall of hegemons. Familiarity with the historical context of imperialism and its modern manifestations will be beneficial. Additionally, understanding the economic and political trajectories of major Asian economies is crucial.

Delegates should also consider how the concept of a "new world order" might manifest in different regions and sectors. This involves examining various perspectives on global governance, trade, and security, and preparing to discuss the implications for international institutions and diplomatic practices. Engaging with materials on topics such as Dynamic Analysis and Engagement Strategies can help in formulating nuanced arguments and participating effectively in the discussions.

Country perspectives

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

France

As the host nation, FRA provides a European perspective on global power shifts and the implications of Asia's rise.

Role in topic

FRA, as a historical colonial power and a current member of various international bodies, offers a unique vantage point on the themes of imperialism and the emerging world order. Its engagement with Asian nations, both economically and diplomatically, makes its perspective on these shifts particularly relevant.

Topics & background

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

World History: A Century After 1927 and the Long Arc of Global Power

The year 1927 marked a turning point in world history: the Shanghai massacre fractured the Chinese revolution, the Indian independence movement was gathering momentum under Gandhi and Nehru, and the European empires still controlled most of Africa and Asia even as their economic foundations cracked toward the 1929 crash. The interwar order was defined by the contradiction between the Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination and the persistence of colonial rule, a contradiction that would explode in the Second World War and the wave of decolonization that followed. The century since has seen three successive global orders: the late-imperial system that collapsed by 1945, the bipolar Cold War order that ended in 1991, and the unipolar moment of American primacy that is now visibly eroding. Each transition reshaped sovereignty, trade, and the distribution of industrial capacity, with the locus of global growth shifting from the Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades. Today historians debate whether the present moment represents a genuine systemic transition comparable to 1919 or 1945, or merely a rebalancing within an enduring liberal-capitalist framework. The rise of China and India, the assertiveness of middle powers, and the contestation of Western normative claims all suggest that the next chapter of world history will be written from multiple capitals rather than one.

Key players

Post-Colonial History: Sovereignty, Development, and Unfinished Independence

The post-colonial era began in earnest with Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 and accelerated through the 1955 Bandung Conference, which assembled twenty-nine Asian and African states to articulate a shared agenda of sovereignty, non-alignment, and development. By 1975 nearly all formal European empires had been dissolved, but the new states inherited borders drawn by colonial cartographers, economies oriented toward primary exports, and institutions designed for extraction rather than governance. The subsequent decades saw repeated attempts to translate political independence into economic autonomy: the New International Economic Order proposals of the 1970s, the structural adjustment era of the 1980s and 1990s under the IMF and World Bank, and the more recent turn toward South-South cooperation, BRICS expansion, and infrastructure financing alternatives. Each phase exposed how durable the asymmetries inherited from empire have proved to be in trade, technology, finance, and knowledge production. A century after the 1927 moment in Asia, post-colonial states now constitute a majority of UN membership and a growing share of global GDP, but debates over reparations, restitution of artifacts, climate justice, and reform of the UN Security Council show that the post-colonial project remains unfinished. The question before this committee is whether the current redistribution of power finally completes that project or simply reorganizes its hierarchies.

Key players

International Relations: Contested Theories in a Multipolar Transition

The discipline of international relations emerged in the wake of the First World War, institutionalized around the question of how to prevent great-power catastrophe. Its dominant traditions—realism, liberalism, and later constructivism and critical theory—have all been products of and responses to particular Western experiences, from the Concert of Europe to the Cold War to the unipolar 1990s. Each theoretical lens generates different predictions about the present transition. Realists read the rise of China, the war in Ukraine, and renewed great-power competition as a return to balance-of-power politics and warn of a Thucydides-trap dynamic between Washington and Beijing. Liberals point to dense economic interdependence, climate cooperation, and the resilience of multilateral institutions as evidence that the rules-based order can be reformed rather than replaced. Constructivists and post-colonial scholars emphasize that what is at stake is not only the distribution of capabilities but the legitimacy of the norms—sovereignty, human rights, development—through which power is exercised. The practical questions before policymakers concern alliance architecture in the Indo-Pacific, the future of the WTO and Bretton Woods institutions, the governance of artificial intelligence and outer space, and whether new groupings such as BRICS+ and the SCO will complement or displace existing bodies. International relations as a field is itself being decentered as scholars from Asia, Africa, and Latin America press for theoretical pluralism.

Key players

The Global South: From Bandung to BRICS+

The term Global South gained currency in the late twentieth century as a successor to Third World, designating the broadly post-colonial states of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania that share legacies of colonial extraction and peripheral positions in the global economy. Its intellectual lineage runs through the 1955 Bandung Conference, the 1961 founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, the 1964 establishment of the Group of 77 at UNCTAD, and the 1974 call for a New International Economic Order, each asserting that development is a question of international structure rather than merely domestic policy. After the debt crises of the 1980s and the unipolar 1990s diminished Southern bargaining power, the 2000s commodity boom and the rise of China revived collective initiatives: South-South trade and investment expanded sharply, the BRICS grouping was institutionalized from 2009, and the BRICS+ enlargement of 2024 brought in additional Middle Eastern and African members. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent vaccine inequities, debt distress in dozens of low-income countries, and the climate-finance shortfall have sharpened Southern critiques of the existing order. The Global South today is neither a bloc nor a coherent ideological camp; it contains rivals, autocracies and democracies, creditors and debtors. Yet on questions of UNSC reform, climate justice, sovereign-debt restructuring, and the regulation of digital infrastructure, a recognizable Southern agenda is reshaping multilateral diplomacy.

Key players

Imperialism: Forms, Legacies, and Contemporary Contestation

Imperialism, understood as the projection of political and economic control by one society over others, took its modern form in the nineteenth-century scramble for territory by European powers, the United States, and Japan. Classical theorists from J. A. Hobson to V. I. Lenin tied imperialism to the dynamics of industrial capitalism: the export of capital, the search for raw materials and markets, and the rivalries among monopoly powers that produced the world wars. By 1914, roughly 84 percent of the earth's land surface was under European or settler-European control. Formal empire collapsed between 1945 and 1975, but the analytical debate over imperialism did not. Dependency and world-systems theorists in the 1960s and 1970s argued that core-periphery extraction had been reconfigured rather than abolished, operating through unequal exchange, multinational corporations, and conditional lending. More recently scholars and governments have applied the label to a wider range of practices: extraterritorial sanctions regimes, military basing networks, intellectual-property and technology controls, and what some term data colonialism. A century after 1927, the question of whether imperialism is dying or merely mutating is genuinely open. Western military retrenchments in Afghanistan and the Sahel coexist with intensified competition over chokepoints, critical minerals, and digital infrastructure, while emerging powers face their own accusations of imperial behavior from neighbors and smaller states.

Key players

A New World Order? Transition After Unipolarity

The phrase new world order has been invoked at every major systemic transition: by Woodrow Wilson in 1918, by Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin in the closing months of the Second World War, and by George H. W. Bush in 1990 as the Soviet Union dissolved. Each iteration tied the redistribution of power to claims about new norms—collective security, human rights, market democracy. The post-1991 order was characterized by US primacy, the spread of liberal economic rules, and the expansion of NATO and the EU, alongside the entry of China into the WTO in 2001. That order has been progressively contested. The 2008 financial crisis weakened the Western model, the 2014 and 2022 Russian actions in Ukraine broke European security assumptions, the US-China trade and technology rivalry has fragmented global supply chains, and the wars in Gaza and Sudan have exposed inconsistencies in the application of international law. Parallel institutions—the AIIB, the New Development Bank, the SCO, expanded BRICS—now coexist with the Bretton Woods system rather than replacing it. Whether what is emerging is a multipolar order, a bipolar US-China rivalry, a non-polar fragmentation, or a reformed multilateralism remains contested. The committee will consider whether the rise of Asia signals a genuinely new world order or a recomposition of the existing one under new managers.

Key players

Colonialism: Legacies and Reckonings

Modern colonialism—distinct from earlier forms of empire in its scale, racial ideology, and integration with industrial capitalism—reshaped most of the world between roughly 1500 and 1960. The Iberian colonization of the Americas, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, settler colonialism in North America, Australia, and southern Africa, and the late-nineteenth-century partition of Africa and Asia each left distinct institutional, demographic, and economic legacies. Colonial rule typically combined extraction, forced labor or population transfer, racialized legal hierarchies, and the suppression of indigenous political authority. Formal decolonization between 1945 and 1975 dismantled most colonial states but did not resolve underlying questions of land, language, knowledge, and reparation. Truth and reconciliation processes in South Africa, Canada, and Australia, German recognition of the Herero and Nama genocide, Belgian and Dutch acknowledgments regarding the Congo and Indonesia, and the ongoing CARICOM reparations claim against European states have placed the legacies of colonialism back on diplomatic agendas. The restitution of cultural artifacts from European museums has become a concrete arena of negotiation. Contemporary debates extend to climate liability, where vulnerable post-colonial states argue that historic emissions by colonial powers compound present injustice, and to the status of remaining non-self-governing territories listed by the UN. The committee will weigh how international institutions should address the long tail of colonial rule.

Key players

Neo-Colonialism: New Mechanisms of Dependence

The concept of neo-colonialism was crystallized by Kwame Nkrumah in his 1965 book of that title, in which he argued that newly independent African states remained subject to external control through finance, trade, and covert intervention even after the colonial flag had been lowered. Dependency theorists in Latin America developed parallel analyses of how peripheral economies were locked into subordinate positions in the world market. The 1980s debt crises and structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank gave the concept renewed empirical weight. Contemporary debates have expanded the term to cover several mechanisms: extraterritorial sanctions and dollar-system leverage; investor-state dispute settlement clauses that constrain regulatory sovereignty; resource-backed loans and infrastructure financing whose terms critics liken to debt-trap diplomacy; the dominance of a small number of firms in cloud computing, search, and social media platforms that host much of the Global South's digital life; and unequal climate arrangements in which low-emitting countries bear disproportionate adaptation costs. Accusations of neo-colonial behavior are now directed not only at former Western colonizers but at China, Russia, and Gulf states active in Africa and Asia. The committee will assess where the line lies between legitimate international economic engagement and structural dependence, and what reforms—debt architecture, technology transfer, data sovereignty, fair trade rules—could meaningfully address neo-colonial dynamics in 2027.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for THE RISE OF ASIA 2027 : THE RISE OF ASIA 100 YEARS AFTER LAI: Is the Imperialism Dying and a New World Order Emerging?.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Japan's Dilemma Over Hormuz Mine Clearance

India, South Korea Forge Five-Year Plan

North Korea's Nuclear Navy Developments

US Sanctions Gaza Flotilla Organisers

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

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

France February 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

THE RISE OF ASIA 2027 : THE RISE OF ASIA 100 YEARS AFTER LAI: Is the Imperialism Dying and a New World Order Emerging?

Feb 17–19, 2027Paris, FranceIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
World History: A Century After 1927 and the Long Arc of Global Power · Post-Colonial History: Sovereignty, Development, and Unfinished Independence · International Relations: Contested Theories in a Multipolar Transition · The Global South: From Bandung to BRICS+ · Imperialism: Forms, Legacies, and Contemporary Contestation · A New World Order? Transition After Unipolarity · Colonialism: Legacies and Reckonings · Neo-Colonialism: New Mechanisms of Dependence

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.

France

As the host nation, FRA provides a European perspective on global power shifts and the implications of Asia's rise.

Role in topic

Topics & background

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

World History: A Century After 1927 and the Long Arc of Global Power

Key players

Post-Colonial History: Sovereignty, Development, and Unfinished Independence

Key players

International Relations: Contested Theories in a Multipolar Transition

Key players

The Global South: From Bandung to BRICS+

Key players

Imperialism: Forms, Legacies, and Contemporary Contestation

Key players

A New World Order? Transition After Unipolarity

Key players

Colonialism: Legacies and Reckonings

Key players

Neo-Colonialism: New Mechanisms of Dependence

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for THE RISE OF ASIA 2027 : THE RISE OF ASIA 100 YEARS AFTER LAI: Is the Imperialism Dying and a New World Order Emerging?.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Japan's Dilemma Over Hormuz Mine Clearance

India, South Korea Forge Five-Year Plan

North Korea's Nuclear Navy Developments

US Sanctions Gaza Flotilla Organisers

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

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

France February 2027

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

International Conference in Support of the Lebanese Armed Forces and Internal Security Forces

International Conference on Counter Terrorism and Human Security (ICCTHS) - Paris

International Conference on Computer Science, Programming and Security (ICCSPS) – June 22, 2026

International Conference on Amnesty, Peace, Politics and Human Rights (ICAPPHR)

Democracy or Digital Dictatorship: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

La nouvelle géopolitique – La France, l'Europe et le monde

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

International Conference in Support of the Lebanese Armed Forces and Internal Security Forces

International Conference on Counter Terrorism and Human Security (ICCTHS) - Paris

International Conference on Computer Science, Programming and Security (ICCSPS) – June 22, 2026

International Conference on Amnesty, Peace, Politics and Human Rights (ICAPPHR)

Democracy or Digital Dictatorship: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

La nouvelle géopolitique – La France, l'Europe et le monde

Frequently asked questions