EISA Standing Section Doing International Political Sociology at the EISA Annual Conference (Bologna, 26-29 August 2025)
The Standing Section on Doing International Political Sociology, co-chaired by Jef Huysmans (Queen Mary University of London) and Renata Summa (University of Groningen), had another successful presence at the Annual Conference of the European International Studies Association. The University of Bologna provided an excellent venue for intense discussions about contemporary world politics and the contributions of IPS.
The lead roundtable on The Promise of IPS in Times of Creative Destruction reflected on what IPS offers during a period marked by intense assertions of global-speak (including the global south/global north discourse), imperial politics, autarkic nationalisms with global aspirations, crises in democratic politics and multilateral institutions, and the forced displacement of populations. Unsurprisingly, this coincides with a widespread resurgence in framing the international as a question of great power polarities and geostrategic politics. At times, it appears that the fracturing and transversal approaches and tools developed in IPS over the past two decades are being overshadowed by the analytical lexicons of international relations and power politics, which it explicitly challenged for their failure to understand the complex diffusion and heterogeneity of social and political relations and the dynamics of forces. The roundtable contributions demonstrated how IPS's analytical repertoires provide valuable tools for explaining and understanding what is happening, challenging the resurging geostrategic and globalising approaches of International Relations.
Besides the lead Roundtable, the section organised the following panels:
Performing legality through aesthetics and technicalities in global governance
Security leftovers: exploring enduring (after-)lives of sites and objects of international politics
International political sociologies of memory and aesthetics
Everyday international politics in the urban space
Contested knowledge and expertise in humanitarian practice: navigating the limitations of humanitarianism
Grounding IR: the land question in international politics
Contesting migration in reception communities
How can we think critically about security in Europe in the present?
International political sociologies of counter-politics
Creative theorising in international political sociology