A day at work - Convention in Chicago

Can you tell us about the conference?

I attended the annual convention of the International Studies Association (ISA) in the beginning of March. It’s a big conference about international relations, peace and conflict studies, security studies and related fields which is arranged every spring somewhere in North America. This year it was in Chicago.

The conference always lasts for four days. Every day there are four 1 h 45 min time slots, and at each time slot there are about 80 parallel sessions with paper presentations, round table discussions and other events. There are several thousand participants in all. Many do not attend all four days, but I usually do. (This was the sixth time I went to ISA.) To participate, you submit an abstract of your paper about nine months ahead of the conference, and sometime in September you are notified whether your paper is accepted or not, i.e. whether you can attend the conference or not.

Agora is an installation of 106 headless and armless iron sculptures at the south end of Grant Park in Chicago. Designed by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, they were made in a foundry near Poznań between 2004 and 2006.

ImagePatrik Johansson

What was your role during the conference?

During 2024–2026 I am a member of the Executive Committee of the Peace Studies Section of ISA, and I participated in some activities related to that. First, the section’s business meeting, second, a session where Roger MacGinty at Durham University received the section’s distinguished scholar award, and third, the section’s reception the same evening.

I also participated in a session where I and four other researchers presented ongoing research. Some such sessions are submitted as a coherent package, often with several researchers who are involved in the same project. Other sessions are put together by the organizers out of individually submitted paper proposals addressing a similar theme. My panel this year was put together by the organizers and was called was “Expanding Peace: New Perspectives and Conceptual Innovations”.

What was your paper about?

My paper relates to the Varieties of Peace framework, developed at Umeå University a few years ago. In this project we worked on systematizing how peace can vary not only in degree (more or less) but also in kind (that there are different types of peace). In my conference paper I presented a cluster analysis of data from the Positive Peace Index (PPI).

Very briefly, cluster analysis is a way to sort a large number of cases into groups depending on how similar or dissimilar they are. I started with 1,572 cases or peace (or “country-years”; 163 countries * 12 years, minus country-years with an ongoing armed conflict) and ended up with six groups, or clusters, of cases, each representing a different type of peace. The types are tentatively labeled liberal democratic peace, mixed dynamics peace, authoritarian prosperity peace, regional development peace, authoritarian control peace, and challenged peace.

Where there any discussion on the current situation in the world?

Yes, in different ways. Since much of the conference content is proposed and put together several months in advance, very recent events rarely make it onto the formal agenda. The conference program (250 pages) mentioned Trump about ten times, Gaza about thirty times, and Ukraine nearly a hundred times. Discussions about Gaza often related to international law and human rights, and Ukraine was frequently addressed in the context of great power relations and international order.

But of course, there were also conversations about the second Trump administration’s attacks broadly on US democracy, rule of law, international aid, civil society etc, but also specifically on academic freedom, climate research, DEI considerations and more. Academics in the US and beyond are organizing to support each other and their students, to save important data from being destroyed, and to resist the authoritarian takeover that is happening right now. And importantly, similar attacks on academic freedom in Sweden cannot be ruled out (to use a popular turn of phrase), so we should prepare for resisting that.

What is the value of attending academic conferences?

Different conferences are good for different purposes. Presenting and getting comments on your own research is often an important reason to go. Related to that is learning about what others are doing in your field or in other fields you are interested in. Often there are also roundtable discussions where a few people have prepared short statements to initiate a discussion about various topics, including research, current events, and teaching.

Another valuable aspect of conferences is networking, meeting old colleagues and friends and making new ones. This time, for example, I met several people who were at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago when I did my postdoc there ten years ago. In addition to catching up, we had useful conversations not least about courses we teach, about literature, and about engaging students.