Where will the Twentieth Global Studies Conference be held?

The conference will take place in Paris, FRA.

What is the format of the Twentieth Global Studies Conference?

The conference is scheduled to be held in a physical format.

Twentieth Global Studies Conference

Name: Twentieth Global Studies Conference
Start: 2027-07-15T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-07-17T00:00:00Z
Location: Paris

Jul 15–17, 2027Paris, FranceIn-person

Registration open

The Twentieth Global Studies Conference convenes in FRA, offering a forum for scholars and practitioners to engage with the multifaceted dimensions of globalization. This event, held in a physical format, is designed to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration on critical global issues, reflecting a commitment to understanding the complex interplay of forces shaping our interconnected world. Participants will have the opportunity to present research, share insights, and contribute to ongoing discussions that define the field of global studies.

Committees & topics

Topics
The Social Question Revisited: Inequality, Ideology, and Interdependence · Networks of Economy and Trade · The Power of Institutions · Vectors of Society and Culture · Ecological Foundations · Biology and Life Sciences · Ecology

Why it matters

In an era characterized by rapid geopolitical shifts and evolving global challenges, understanding the dynamics of globalization is paramount. This conference provides a vital platform for examining these dynamics, from economic interdependence to cultural exchange and political cooperation. The discussions held here contribute to a deeper analytical framework for addressing issues that transcend national borders, such as climate change, international security, and social equity.

The gathering in FRA underscores the importance of diverse perspectives in global discourse. By bringing together participants from various academic disciplines and professional backgrounds, the conference aims to generate innovative solutions and foster a more nuanced comprehension of global phenomena. The insights shared at this event are crucial for policymakers, researchers, and civil society organizations striving to navigate and influence the trajectory of global development.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for the Twentieth Global Studies Conference should focus on developing a robust understanding of contemporary global issues and their historical contexts. Reviewing foundational theories of globalization and international relations will be beneficial. Consider how your research or professional experiences intersect with broader global trends and challenges, and be prepared to articulate these connections clearly.

Effective participation will involve not only presenting one's own work but also actively engaging with the diverse perspectives of other attendees. Utilizing frameworks such as "mapping-relationships" and "dynamic-analysis" can help in understanding the complex interdependencies discussed at the conference. Additionally, considering the "power-interest-grid" can aid in identifying key actors and their influence on global processes, enhancing the strategic value of your contributions.

Country perspectives

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

France

As the host nation, FRA provides a central European perspective on global governance and cultural exchange, often advocating for multilateralism and international cooperation.

Role in topic

FRA plays a significant role in shaping international norms and institutions, contributing to discussions on global security, economic policy, and cultural diversity. Its historical ties and current diplomatic efforts position it as a key player in global studies.

United States

The USA's perspective on globalization often emphasizes economic liberalization and democratic values, though recent trends show a growing focus on national interests and strategic competition.

Role in topic

The USA's economic and military influence profoundly impacts global structures. Its policies on trade, technology, and international security are central to understanding contemporary globalization, making its engagement critical for any global studies discourse.

China

CHN's approach to globalization is characterized by a focus on economic development, Belt and Road Initiative, and a growing assertion of its geopolitical influence.

Role in topic

CHN's rapid economic growth and increasing global footprint have reshaped international trade, investment, and power dynamics. Its development model and foreign policy initiatives are key subjects of study in understanding the future of globalization.

Topics & background

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

The Social Question Revisited: Inequality, Ideology, and Interdependence

The 'social question' — how industrial societies should organize work, welfare, and the distribution of wealth — first crystallized in nineteenth-century Europe amid mass urbanization and the rise of organized labor. Its twentieth-century answers ranged from social democratic welfare states in Western Europe, to New Deal liberalism in the United States, to state socialism in the Soviet bloc, to developmental states in East Asia. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent wave of globalization were widely interpreted as a settlement in favor of market liberalism, but the 2008 financial crisis, austerity politics, and the COVID-19 shock reopened debates over redistribution, public goods, and the legitimacy of elites. Today, inequality within countries has widened even as some inequality between countries has narrowed, producing a politics in which economic grievance, cultural anxiety, and ideological polarization are tightly entangled. Populist movements on the right and left challenge the post-1989 consensus; governments experiment with industrial policy, cash transfers, and minimum global taxation (the OECD/G20 two-pillar deal). The ILO, World Bank, and IMF have all acknowledged that rising inequality threatens growth and social cohesion, while interdependence through trade, migration, and digital platforms makes purely national answers harder to sustain. The contemporary social question is therefore as much about the international architecture — tax cooperation, labor standards, migration governance, the regulation of transnational firms — as about domestic welfare design. Delegates will weigh how states with very different ideological traditions can coordinate on shared problems of insecurity, mobility, and legitimacy without flattening the political diversity that defines them.

Key players

Networks of Economy and Trade

The post-1945 trading order, built around GATT and then the WTO, expanded dramatically after China's 2001 WTO accession and the proliferation of global value chains. Production fragmented across borders: components might cross multiple frontiers before final assembly, and services trade — especially digital — grew rapidly. This deep interdependence delivered large efficiency gains but also concentrated chokepoints in semiconductors, critical minerals, shipping lanes, and payments infrastructure. A sequence of shocks — the US–China tariff conflict beginning in 2018, the COVID-19 supply disruptions, Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions, and Red Sea and Panama Canal disruptions — has pushed governments toward 'de-risking,' friend-shoring, and industrial policy. The WTO's Appellate Body has been paralyzed since 2019, regional agreements (RCEP, CPTPP, AfCFTA, USMCA) have multiplied, and export controls and investment screening have become standard tools of statecraft. Trade networks are being rewired, not severed, with intermediaries such as Mexico, Vietnam, and the Gulf states absorbing redirected flows. The debate now is whether the rules-based trading system can be reformed to accommodate legitimate security and climate concerns — carbon border adjustments, subsidy disciplines, digital trade rules — without collapsing into managed mercantilism. Developing economies fear being squeezed between rival blocs, while major powers compete to set the standards that will define the next generation of trade.

Key players

The Power of Institutions

Modern global governance rests on institutions designed in the mid-twentieth century: the UN system, the Bretton Woods organizations, and a dense web of regional bodies and treaty regimes. These institutions encoded the priorities and power balances of 1945 — most visibly in the composition of the UN Security Council and the weighted voting of the IMF and World Bank. For decades they channeled cooperation on decolonization, trade liberalization, human rights, and public health, even when great-power rivalry constrained their reach. In the past two decades, institutional authority has come under strain from multiple directions. Rising powers — China, India, Brazil, and others — demand greater voice; the United States has at times withdrawn from or paralyzed bodies (UNESCO, UNHRC, the WTO Appellate Body, the WHO under the first Trump administration); Russia's actions in Ukraine have tested the Security Council's relevance; and new institutions such as the AIIB, the BRICS New Development Bank, and the SCO have emerged alongside the older order. Domestically, courts, central banks, and electoral commissions face populist challenges to their legitimacy. Debate today centers on whether existing institutions can be reformed — UNSC enlargement, IMF quota revisions, WTO dispute settlement repair — or whether parallel structures will gradually displace them. The deeper question is what makes institutions powerful: formal authority, perceived legitimacy, expertise, or the convening capacity to coordinate states with divergent interests.

Key players

Vectors of Society and Culture

Cultural exchange has always shaped international politics, but the velocity and reach of contemporary cultural flows are historically unprecedented. Digital platforms, streaming services, migration, education exchanges, and tourism move ideas, aesthetics, and identities across borders at scale. The Korean Wave, the global reach of Hollywood and Bollywood, transnational religious movements, and viral social media phenomena all illustrate how culture functions as both soft power and contested terrain. States increasingly treat culture as a strategic asset. China's Confucius Institutes, France's Alliance Française and Francophonie, the British Council, Turkey's TRT World and Yunus Emre Institutes, and Gulf investments in sport and the arts all reflect deliberate cultural statecraft. At the same time, governments respond to perceived cultural threats through content regulation, platform bans (TikTok debates in the US and EU), restrictions on foreign media, and disputes over heritage repatriation. UNESCO conventions on cultural diversity and intangible heritage provide a normative framework but limited enforcement. The contemporary debate intersects with migration, language policy, indigenous rights, religious freedom, and the regulation of artificial intelligence in cultural production. Delegates will consider how to protect cultural diversity without endorsing cultural protectionism, and how to address asymmetries between dominant cultural exporters and smaller cultural ecosystems.

Key players

Ecological Foundations

The recognition that human economies depend on functioning ecosystems is now well established in science but unevenly reflected in policy. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced the UNFCCC, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UNCCD, creating a triad of regimes addressing climate, biodiversity, and desertification. Subsequent milestones — the 2015 Paris Agreement, the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the 2023 BBNJ (High Seas) Treaty, and the ongoing negotiations on a global plastics treaty — have widened the agenda from pollution control to planetary boundaries. Implementation has lagged ambition. Current Nationally Determined Contributions under Paris put the world on a trajectory well above 1.5°C; biodiversity loss continues at rates the IPBES describes as unprecedented; soil degradation, freshwater stress, and ocean acidification compound the pressures. Financing for nature and climate adaptation remains far below estimated needs, and disputes over loss and damage, fossil fuel phase-out language, and technology transfer dominate annual COPs. The foundational debate is whether existing economic and governance models can be reconciled with ecological limits, or whether deeper structural change — in trade, finance, agriculture, and energy systems — is required. Indigenous peoples, who steward a disproportionate share of remaining biodiversity, increasingly press for direct recognition and rights-based approaches.

Key players

Biology and Life Sciences

Advances in the life sciences — CRISPR gene editing, mRNA vaccines, synthetic biology, AI-driven protein design — have accelerated dramatically since the 2010s, with the COVID-19 pandemic both demonstrating the field's promise and exposing global governance gaps. The Biological Weapons Convention (1975) lacks a verification regime; the WHO's pandemic preparedness reforms and the negotiation of a WHO Pandemic Agreement remain contested; and the Nagoya Protocol's rules on access and benefit-sharing of genetic resources face new challenges from digital sequence information. Dual-use risks have grown sharper. The 2018 He Jiankui case in China highlighted the absence of global rules on human germline editing; gain-of-function research debates continue after COVID-19; and AI-assisted biological design tools raise biosecurity concerns flagged by the WHO, OECD, and national security agencies. At the same time, life-sciences capacity is unevenly distributed: most vaccine manufacturing, clinical trials, and genomic surveillance capacity sits in a small number of countries, fueling debates over equity exposed by COVID-19 vaccine nationalism. Governance questions span pandemic preparedness, biosecurity, bioethics, equitable access to therapies, and intellectual property. The convergence of biology with AI and data sciences raises further questions about sovereignty over biological data and the regulation of emerging applications in agriculture, defense, and human enhancement.

Key players

Ecology

Ecology as a discipline studies the relationships between organisms and their environments, but as a policy field it has become the science underpinning responses to climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation. The IPBES 2019 Global Assessment found that around one million species face extinction, many within decades, and that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The IPCC's AR6 cycle, completed in 2023, integrated ecological systems more deeply into climate assessments, emphasizing tipping points in the Amazon, boreal forests, coral reefs, and polar regions. Major multilateral instruments now frame ecological policy: the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's '30x30' targets, the BBNJ Agreement for marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030), and ongoing CITES and Ramsar processes. Yet enforcement, monitoring, and finance remain weak. The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund established in 2023 has so far attracted only modest contributions relative to estimated needs of hundreds of billions annually. Key controversies include the design and equity of protected areas, the rights and role of indigenous and local communities, the use of market mechanisms such as biodiversity credits, the regulation of trade in wildlife and timber, and the integration of ecological criteria into trade and investment rules. Ecology increasingly intersects with security, as environmental degradation contributes to displacement, food insecurity, and conflict.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Twentieth Global Studies Conference.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Akpabio vs Oshiomhole: 2027 Power Struggle

Antarctica: Overview of Geopolitical and Environmental Issues

India, South Korea Forge Five-Year Plan

‘No red lines’: Spain reveals EU supergroup’s plan to challenge US and China – POLITICO

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

The Power-Interest Grid

Mapping Relationships

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

France July 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Twentieth Global Studies Conference

Jul 15–17, 2027Paris, FranceIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
The Social Question Revisited: Inequality, Ideology, and Interdependence · Networks of Economy and Trade · The Power of Institutions · Vectors of Society and Culture · Ecological Foundations · Biology and Life Sciences · Ecology

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.

France

As the host nation, FRA provides a central European perspective on global governance and cultural exchange, often advocating for multilateralism and international cooperation.

Role in topic

United States

The USA's perspective on globalization often emphasizes economic liberalization and democratic values, though recent trends show a growing focus on national interests and strategic competition.

Role in topic

China

CHN's approach to globalization is characterized by a focus on economic development, Belt and Road Initiative, and a growing assertion of its geopolitical influence.

Role in topic

Topics & background

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