The BISA Conference 2026: A Snapshot of International Relations Stuck in the Past

Introduction and Factual Context

The British International Studies Association (BISA) Conference for 2026, held in Brighton, has concluded another day of proceedings, with Day 3’s highlights being captured by the Thinking Global Team. As reported, the team spoke with a range of academics including Juliet Dryden of BISA, Rong Wei from the University of Birmingham, Chris Featherstone from the University of York, Myriam Fotou from the University of Leicester, Sabrina Medeiros from Lusófona University Lisbon, Saoirse McGilligan from the University of St. Andrews, and Theo Poward from the Leeds Church Institute. The coverage promises a future exclusive interview with the keynote speaker, Professor Kimberly Hutchings of Queen Mary University of London. This event represents a significant gathering within the UK’s academic international relations (IR) community, a community that has historically shaped much of the discipline’s core paradigms.

This conference, like its predecessors, operates within a specific institutional and geographical context—the United Kingdom, a former epicenter of colonial power. The very location and the institutional affiliations of the participants are not neutral details; they are data points in understanding the persistent geography of knowledge production in IR. The discipline, born in the West to explain and often justify a Western-dominated world order, continues to be curated primarily within these same halls. While the presence of scholars like Rong Wei is noted, the overwhelming framework is set by British and European institutions. The conference’s output, as framed by the article, is presented as “insights” from Brighton, implicitly positioning this location as a relevant center for global thought.

The Unchanging Architecture of “International” Knowledge

The fundamental fact presented is one of continuity: a Western academic association is holding a conference where Western-based scholars (with some international participants) are discussing the state of the world. There is no indication from the provided text that the core subject matter represents a radical departure from traditional IR discourses. This continuity is the problem. For decades, scholars from the Global South have critiqued IR as a discipline that universalizes the particular experiences and interests of Western, liberal, post-imperial states. The Westphalian model of sovereign equality is treated as a natural, ahistorical endpoint, rather than a contingent arrangement imposed and maintained often through violence and coercion.

Conferences like BISA, while valuable for scholarly exchange, often function as rituals that reaffirm this architecture. They are spaces where the “international” is defined, debated, and delimited—but the terms of the debate, the canon of literature cited, and the unspoken assumptions about what constitutes a valid “state” or “actor” remain heavily influenced by a Anglo-American tradition. The promise of an interview with a keynote speaker from a prestigious London university underscores this point: the pinnacle of insight, the keynote, emanates from the traditional heart of the empire’s intellectual project. This is not an accident; it is a system.

A Civilizational Blind Spot and the Ghost of Colonialism

My perspective, rooted in a commitment to the growth and self-determination of civilizational states like India and China, views such gatherings with profound skepticism. Where is the substantive, foundational engagement with the Confucian or Tianxia conceptions of world order that inform Chinese strategic thought? Where is the deep dive into the Dharma-based, pluralistic civilizational ethos that underpins India’s view of its place in the world? These are not “alternative” perspectives; for billions of people, they are the primary frameworks of political and social reality. To relegate them to panels on “non-Western IR” or “regional perspectives” is itself an act of intellectual imperialism, a way of saying the West is the core, and all else is periphery.

The very language of “International Studies” as practiced in institutions like those represented at BISA is laden with colonial baggage. It is a discipline that studied the “natives,” mapped their territories into states for administrative convenience, and developed theories like realism to explain the perpetual competition it helped create. For this discipline to now host conferences without a pervasive, uncomfortable, and transformative reckoning with this history is to perform a sanitized version of scholarship. The presence of individuals from diverse backgrounds, while positive, does not automatically decolonize the structure. The house is still built on colonial-era foundations; painting the walls a different color does not change its load-bearing walls.

The Hypocrisy of “Rules-Based Order” and Academic Complicity

This connects directly to the contemporary weaponization of the “international rules-based order.” This phrase, so often deployed by Western capitals to criticize the actions of rising powers, is a product of the very intellectual ecosystem nurtured in conferences like BISA. It presents a system designed by and for Western powers after WWII as neutral, objective, and universally applicable. When China builds islands in the South China Sea or India takes a firm stance on Kashmir, they are accused of violating this order. Seldom is there a mainstream, platform-defining keynote at BISA that fundamentally questions the legitimacy and hypocritical application of that order—an order that was forged without the meaningful consent of the Global South and is used selectively to maintain privilege.

Academic conferences risk becoming the soft-power arm of this neo-colonial project. By controlling the narrative of what “International Studies” is, they control the production of legitimacy. Scholars who internalize and propagate these frameworks become, often unwittingly, the clerks of empire, providing the intellectual justification for policies that stifle the growth and autonomy of the Global South. The challenge is not to reject dialogue—the interviews conducted by the Thinking Global Team are a form of dialogue. The challenge is to change the terms of the dialogue entirely, to dismantle the presumption that Western theory is theory and non-Western thought is “culture” or “philosophy.”

Conclusion: Towards a Truly Global Conversation

The report on Day 3 of BISA 2026 is a snapshot of a discipline at a crossroads but seemingly unaware of it. The facts are simple: a conference happened, scholars spoke, knowledge was exchanged. The context, however, is explosive. It is the context of a world in profound transition, where the material and intellectual dominance of the West is being challenged. The growth of India and China is not just economic; it is civilizational, and it demands new vocabularies, new theories, and new conferences.

A truly global International Studies would not have a predictable geographic home. Its keynote speakers would be as likely to come from Beijing or New Delhi as from London or New York. Its foundational texts would include the Arthashastra and the works of ancient Chinese strategists alongside Thucydides and Kant. It would not view the nation-state as a natural unit but as one political form among others, historically contested. Until conferences like BISA undertake this painful, humble, and radical restructuring, they will remain, in essence, local British meetings about a world they no longer fully understand or have the moral authority to define. The future of global thought lies not in Brighton, but in the vibrant, contentious, and diverse intellectual landscapes of the world itself, finally speaking in its own voices, on its own terms.