Content area
Full Text
The International Political Science Association (IPSA) has established program guidelines for its 1997 World Congress, and is now calling for proposals for panels and papers. The Seventeenth World Congress will be held on August 17-21, 1997, under the main theme of Conflict and Order.
The conference is organized into groups of panels, generally following the divisions used in the Sixteenth World Congress in Berlin and in previous congresses. However, there will be three sessions (rather than two) per day to help reduce conflicts among panels. The program will contain 200 panels of up to four papers each, divided into 45 panels on the main theme, 50 panels of special (volunteer) sessions, 70 sessions organized by research committees and 8 by study groups, 8 panels on the state of the discipline, and 22 regional panels. In the Seventeenth Congress there will be an increased emphasis on volunteered papers and panels (nearly 50 percent more special sessions than in previous congresses) in order to involve the growing interest in political science around the world (see more detailed instructions on proposing panels below).
The main theme of the Congress, "Conflict and Order," focuses attention on the two dominant aspects of politics at the end of the millennium. Conflict and order constitute the poles of politics and their study is the essence of political science. Conflict and order are eternal as the subject of political science, but they are particularly topical as the old international order has fallen away, releasing conflict where it is most unexpected; order has broken down in the world system and in the sovereign order of states, raising problems for current human interaction and calling for new study and definition. Attention to the main theme has been organized by groups of subtopics, on The Utility of Conflict and The Limits on Order, Moral Order and Moral Conflict, Conflicts of State and National Order, Institutional Conflict...