ISA 2025 Conference in Chicago Highlights SIS Faculty and PhD Student Research
The annual conference for the International Studies Association (ISA) provides an opportunity for international affairs scholars to present their research, engage in academic and policy discussions about key topics, and connect with colleagues from across the United States and the world. This year, 18 SIS faculty and 11 PhD students attended the ISA 2025 conference in Chicago to showcase their research and participate in roundtables and panel discussions. Here are a few highlights:
Guy Ziv, Roundtable on his book Netanyahu vs. The Generals: The Battle for Israel’s Future
SIS Professor Guy Ziv kicked off the discussion with an overview of his book, which explores why Israelis continue viewing Prime Minister Netanyahu as “Mr. Security” when so many former and retired security officials have gone public about his lack of preparedness and unqualified experience when it comes to Israel’s national security. Ziv explained that this is largely because the once- sacrosanct status of the generals no longer exists following military debacles and changes in the makeup of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), so their statements and warnings don’t resonate the way they once did. Netanyahu has also been successful in painting many generals as part of the liberal elite, which has allowed him to engage in a purge of sorts of the security establishment and exclude generals from the decision-making process.
The roundtable panelists—scholars from the United States, Israel, and India who study civil-military relations—then took turns responding to Ziv and discussing their takeaways from and questions about the book. Several noted that the trends the book points to have gotten even more extreme since October 7th (after the book was published), such as conspiracies about the military and the increasing loss of trust between Netanyahu and the generals. Manaswini Ramkumar, a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University who got her PhD at SIS, compared Netanyahu to Modi in India and discussed civil-military relations in the context of democratic decline in both India and Israel.
Jordan Tama, “From Insulation to Politicization: How Leaders and Civil Society Have Shaped the Politics of US Foreign Aid Policy”
On a panel about politicization and foreign policy, SIS Professor Jordan Tama presented his paper "From Insulation to Politicization: How Leaders and Civil Society Have Shaped the Politics of US Foreign Aid Policy," an especially timely topic given the recent dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Exploring the question of what strategies can leaders or groups employ to insulate a policy issue from politicization and when those strategies are more or less likely to succeed, Tama focused on USAID as a case study to show that the most effective strategies include: building a non-partisan coalition of civil society groups that supports the policy, supporting government reforms designed to enhance policy effectiveness or efficiency, and minimizing the public salience of a policy area. On the other hand, insulation strategies will be less effective as polarizations and populism rise, because both of those fuel politicization and thereby lead more members of the public to support dramatic policy and institutional changes.
Tama explained how supporters of foreign aid effectively insulated it and prevented major aid spending cuts during the 1990s through 2010s with these three strategies, but have failed in the 2020s which have featured more severe and successful politicization efforts—even before the most recent dismantling of USAID by the Trump administration.
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Roundtable on Facts and Explanations in International Studies…and Beyond
SIS Professor Patrick Thaddeus Jackson engaged with other epistemological scholars during a roundtable on his recent book Facts and Explanations in International Studies...and Beyond that delved into the problem of the rise of "alternative facts.” Patrick began the session by explaining his motivation for writing the book—which included that phrase from former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway—and his hope that the book could help clarify how we think about facts and explanations and enable us to produce better explanatory accounts of the world.
The roundtable panelists then shared and discussed themes such as the declining societal value of expertise and knowledge, the necessity of a shared language for engaging in life and politics, the difference between scientific claims and those based on faith, and the challenge of real-life issues such as claims of sexual harassment when facts are based on experience and experience is taken as evidence.
Seray Yalaz, “Signals from Homeland: The Role of Terrorist Group Reputation in Diaspora Support”
During the ISA session on “Rebel Interactions in Multilevel Conflict Dynamics,” SIS PhD Student Seray Yalaz presented her co-authored paper “Signals from Homeland: The Role of Terrorist Group Reputation in Diaspora Support,” which explored the question of why some terrorist organizations succeed in mobilizing diaspora support while others fail. Rather than seeing the diaspora as automatic supporters, Yalaz looked at data from 100 terrorist organizations associated with ethnic or religious sectarian groups to assess the factors and strategies diaspora members use to determine their support for the organization. While her and her co-author’s hypothesis was that terrorist organizations with higher positive reputation strategies (costlier, longer-term investments like in media or politics) would be more likely to win support from the diaspora, the results were not conclusive and Yalaz is still looking for alternative explanations and gathering more data.
In an ISA session on “The Faces of Gender-based Violence and Discrimination,” SIS Professor Shadi Mokhtari presented her current research project that builds off of her 2023 paper “Human rights as mockery of morality, manifesting morality, and moral maze” published in the Journal of Human Rights.
Introducing the concept of a reverse savage victim savior metaphor of human rights—a post-colonial critique of human rights in which Western imperial states are the savages, not the saviors, and anti-imperialist states and cultures are the victims—Mokhtari used Iran and the 2022 protests focused on women’s rights as a case study. She explained how many Iranians feel that they have been subjugated by a violent, religious regime that is “colonizing” their lives in the form of cultural imperialism, and the 2022 protests were thus seen by many as a moment in Iranian politics where Iran could be reimagined as a place where the rights that have been taken away would be reintroduced in a new reality where women and ethnic minorities were included and mobilized politically.