Association for Global Political Thought Applying an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to global politics

About the Association

The Association for Global Political Thought is an intercollegiate network of scholarship on political ideas in the international society and global contexts, based at Harvard University, American University, and partner institutions. It convenes a seminar series each semester and hosts an annual conference for both emerging and established scholars around the world.

The purpose of the AGPT is to work with existing initiatives positioned within and beyond the discipline to explore the innovations in theory, method, and empirics necessary for renovating a field that some describe as analytically exhausted in the face of contemporary, global political predicaments. Recognizing the hierarchical practices of boundary-drawing that have historically characterized this field, the project seeks to contribute to work that pioneering scholars have for decades undertaken to interrogate the discipline's constitutive exclusions and limits.

The AGPT is an interdisciplinary and international project. Its members span multiple allied fields and synergetic methods: political philosophy and intellectual history, social theory and political economy, international relations and global governance, and areas of interest: North and South America, Europe and Africa, the Middle East, South, East, and Southeast Asia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. AGPT members hail from diverse schools and states, countries and continents, from from New York to New Delhi, from Tufts, Tartu, to Tokyo.

Conference Schedule

April 25-27, 2025 (American University)
April 26-27, 2024 (Princeton University)
April 8-9, 2022 (Harvard University)

Recent Conference

Annual Conference, April 2025 (American University)

All panels for this conference took place in the SIS Founders Room.

Day 1: Friday April 25th

Check in & coffee (9:00-10:00)

Panel 1 (10:00-11:30) Alternative Agents of Global Thought

Ayaka Simon Silas (Phoenix University Agwada, Nigeria): “In Search of African Theory of Democracy: Utilising the Tiv Cultural Philosophy of Ya-Na-Angbian”

Tomohito Baji 馬路智仁 (University of Tokyo) “Our Ocean, Our Sovereignty: Epeli Hau'ofa and Anticolonial Pacific Self-determination”

Rahul Sagar (NYU Abu Dhabi) “The Birth of Indian Liberalism”

Shoufu Yin 殷守甫 (University of British Columbia) “Globalizing the Genealogy of Diasporic State: Why and How”

Chair: Nayeli Riano (Georgetown University); Discussant: Amsale Alemu (Howard University).

11:30-12:45 Lunch at the Mary Graydon Student Center.

Panel 2 (13:00-14:30) Comparing Concepts: Cities and Cultures

Alexander Orwin (Louisiana State University), “Ignorant Cities and Ways of Life: How Muslim Philosophers Adapted Plato’s Bad Regimes”

Yidi Wu 吳一笛 (Boston University) “Sincerity and Eudaimonia: Human Perfection and Politics in Confucianism and Aristotle”

Tianhong Ying 應天宏 (Northern Michigan University): “Bridging Liberalism and Confucianism: How Confucian China Shapes the Secular Foundation of Locke's Liberalism."”

Sujin Heo 허수진 (American University), “Iberian Languages of International Ordering in Japan”

Chair: Yixin Bai 白逸欣 (Georgetown University); Discussant: Jiseob Yoon윤지섭 (Georgetown University).

15 Minute Coffee Break

Panel 3 (14:45-16:15) The Art and Archaeology of Knowledge

Ross Moncrieff (University of Oxford): “Comparing to Connect: Neo-Confucian and Jesuit Scholastic Philosophy Compared and the Presentation of Confucian Thought in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687)

Agnik Bhattacharya (University of California, Irvine): “Amir and Archaeologists: The Global History of Afghan Archaeology in Modern Afghanistan, 1919-1922”

Utku Cansu (Princeton University): “The Birth of Rhetoric from the Spirit of Music: Aesthetic and Moral Education as Political Reform in Nietzsche’s Political Thought”

Ankit Kawade (Johns Hopkins University) “A New Name for Manu” Ambedkar’s Critique of Nietzsche”

Chair: Olga Obolenets (New York University); Discussant: Theodore Lai (Georgetown University)

15 Minute Coffee Break

Panel 4 (16:30-18:00) The State & its Critics

László Kontler (Central European University): "Adventures of the State in Time and Space: Fénelon’s Télémaque in eighteenth-century Hungary"

Erin Hagood (Columbia University): “The Rebirth of Benjamin Constant in the Second Empire of Louis Bonaparte”

Olga Obolenets (New York University): “Education, Citizenship, and the Ancients in the Thought of Carl von Clausewitz”

Carlos Eduardo Pérez Crespo (Universidad Católica de Chile) “Constituent Power, Representation, and Monarchy: Carl Schmitt’s Study Notes on the Constitutional Debates of the French Revolution (1789-1791)”

Dandan Chen 陳丹丹 (SUNY-Farmingdale State College) “In Response to Constitutional Crisis: The Latent Carl Schmitt in Zhang Junmai’s Political Thought”

Chair: Botian Zheng 鄭博天 (Georgetown University); Discussant: K. Morgan McGlothlin (Georgetown University)

18:00-18:30: Dinner & Drinks will be served in the Founders Room before the keynote begins.

18:30-20:00: Keynote: Caroline Elkins (Harvard University), “Legalised Lawlessness” in conversation with Elizabeth Thompson (American University) and Amsale Alemu (Howard University).

20:00: Shuttle back to Glover Park Hotel-Georgetown.

Day 2: Saturday April 26th

Breakfast served starting at 8:15am

Panel 5 (9:00-10:45): Ordering International Law and Politics

Pablo Kalmanovitz (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México): “Carlos Calvo on jus ad bellum and state formation in Latin America”

David Ragazzoni (New York University): “The Forgotten Origins of Kelsen's Cosmopolitan Pacifism: ‘Dante Alighieri's Philosophy of the State’ (1905)”

Artur Simonyan (Tartu Ülikool & Freie Universität Berlin), “Novosiltsev Instructions: Framing the Counter-Revolutionary International Law”

Willy Nieto Minaya (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru): “The Monroe Doctrine and Peruvian Foreign Policy: Between Suspicion and Alignment (1900-1930)

José Joel Peña Llanes (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México & Universidad Anáhuac México) “Analysis of the Judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on arraigo and informal preventive detention: A comprehensive assessment of compliance and implications for Mexico”

Chair: Liliya Khasanova (Tufts University); Discussant (TBC): Caroline Elkins (Harvard University)

15 Minute Coffee Break

Panel 6 (10:45-12:15pm) International Networks and Global Movements

Erkjad Kajo (Università degli Studi di Pavia) on “The Albanian National Movement in Transnational Context: Rilindje's Political Thought in Exile (1878-1912)”

Sheng Zhang 張晟 (Johns Hopkins University) “When Crimea, Istanbul, and Kashgar Shared the Same Sky: How Jadid Movement Linked the Turkic World and Offered Alternative Path of Modernization for Xinjiang”

Kuangyu Zhao (Indiana University Bloomington): “A Sobering Lesson from the Motherland of Republics: Liang Qichao’s American Tour and Evolved View on Chinese Democracy”

Jiayu Deng 鄧家玉 (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) “The Struggle for the Malayan Democratic Republic: Nation-Building and Political Thoughts of the Communist Party of Malaya (1930- 1957)”

Chair: Irene Hyangseon Ahn 안향선 (American University); Discussant: Lisa Ford (George Washington University)

12:15-13:15: Lunch at the Mary Graydon Student Center.

Panel 7 (13:15-14:45) Ideological Entanglements in Global Economies

Madeline Woker (Sheffield University) “The Great Depression and the Search for a French Colonial New Deal”

Mingran Cao (Universiteit Leiden), “Economic Nationalism, Industrial Policy, and Cotton Plantations in Early Twentieth-Century China”

Sergio Infante (Yale University), “Bootleg Modernization, or, What Does It Mean to Have a Job?”

Lenon Maschette (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brasil) “Neoliberalism and Bolsa Família: A Theoretical Approach”

Gustavo Hessmann Dalaqua (Universidade Federal do Amazonas). “Revolution in Populism: Anticolonial Developmentalism in the Populist Republic”

Chair: Kanika Varma (American University); Discussant: Emily Matson (Georgetown University & Council on Foreign Relations).

15 Minute Coffee Break

Panel 8 (15:00-16:30) Civilisational Discourses in Global Thought

Nayeli Riano (Georgetown University): “Crepuscular Enlightenment”

Theodore Becker-Jacob (Princeton University): “Race, Culture, and the Unnatural State: Edward Wilmot Blyden's Natural Law Theory”

Philippe Xing (University of Cambridge), “Francis Galton, Empire and the Eugenic Science of Civilisation”

Gayathri Venugopal (Government Law College, Thiruvananthapuram), “Gendered spirits and Constitutional Closet in the Indian Jurisprudence”

Daniel Olúwáṣetèmi Òní (Pennsylvania State University): “The Poetry of The Future: Creolization, History, and the Form of the New between C.L.R. James and Wilson Harris”

Chair: Ji Young Kwon 권지영 (American University); Discussant: Lars Vetle Handeland (Lunds universitet).

15 Minute Coffee Break

Panel 9 (16:45-18:15) The Contested ‘Local’ and ‘Global’

Katy Brown (Maynooth University), “Perceptions of the ‘Mainstream’ and the Mainstreaming of the Far Right: from Ed Sheeran to Keir Starmer”

Wanda Dugiel (Szkoła Główna Handlowa w Warszawie), “Towards Deinstitutionalization of the World Trading System”

Malcolm Jorgensen 世傑 (MPIL, Heidelberg) “From International Legal Order to Geolegal Orders: The Politics of ‘Multipolarity’ in International Law”

Andrew Hurrell (Oxford University) “From Systems to Agents: Global Political Thought & Global IR in relation to the Changing Notion of the ‘Global’”

Chair: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (American University); Discussant: Nikhil Goyal (University of Toronto)

18:30 onward: Optional Dinner at the Mary Graydon Student Center. Alternative options will be shared.

Day 3: Sunday April 27th

Breakfast served starting at 8:15am

Panel 10 (9:00-10:30) Toward a Digital and Planetary Age

Claudia Favarato (Universität Bayreuth) “The Digipolitical and African Political Thought: A Theoretical Framework to Interpret the Political in the Digital Age”

Christopher Small (Universitat de Barcelona): “Stateless Action on Absent Grounds: An Ontological Search for the Political Agency of Nonbelonging”

Xavier Dwight M. Gentalian (De La Salle University, Philippines), “Rethinking Spaces of Political agency: A Phenomenological Study on Philippine Perceptions of Political Agency in Video Games vis-à-vis the Real World” (TBA)

Sarah Thomas (Catholic University of America) “Beyond Sovereignty: Reimagining Political Theology as Planetary”

Joseph Rodriguez (Duke University) “The Normative Value of Rights of Nature”

Chair: Elke Stockreiter (American University); Sujin Heo 허수진 (American University).

15 Minute Coffee Break

Closing Keynote Dialogue (10:45-12:30) “Violence, Law, and Politics in the Changing International Order”: Kelebogile Zvobgo (William and Mary College), Lisa Ford (George Washington University) & Andrew Hurrell (Oxford University).

12:30 onward: Participants are welcomed to stay for further discussion, disperse for lunch, or depart Washington D.C.