IPSA Regional Dialogues

Following the IPSA’s mission of developing political science around the world two rounds of regional dialogues were organized with the Association members across the word, discussing the challenge of developing membership, publishing strategies and the ways in which political scientists have faced the authoritarian and illiberal politics relate to the thriving. Challenges that political scientists face around the world can be quite similar Academic Freedoms, Artificial Intelligence, Membership and Publications. In this roundtable we explore how the rise of illiberalism, anti-science attitudes, and polarization affect the political science communities. We will go through key practices of addressing the new topics in the professional com themes the associations and academic face around the world. The roundtable also shares a report on the best practices and cases that emerge in conversations with IPSA has engaged in different associations around the world in the period of the 2024-25. These deal both with the management and collaboration in the discipline, improving accessible and collaborative publishing and setting up task forces for addressing the AI, and with the deep established polarization or newly emerged authoritarian politics. On the one hand we discussed the ways in which associations could retain and grow their membership. We explore what kinds of publishing initiatives there have been in IPSA's member associations around the world. We also had a round of Regional Dialogues on the AI that presents many challenges for teaching and research but also opportunities for administration and research, but with uneven access and spread of use. Globally speaking, liberal democracy has been unevenly spread and so have the restrictions on academic discipline and sub-disciplines. Political polarization can also affect associations as well as academic freedoms and funding. Many associations have faced different forms of this for a long time, while now the difficulties for studying political science and its sub-fields are affecting many more countries in ways make visible the deed to call for academic freedoms globally.