Imagining order in moments of rupture
The 2026 conference invites scholars to examine how historical actors — political thinkers, jurists, reformers, revolutionaries, literati, and religious scholars — imagined, contested, and redefined order in moments of rupture and transformation.
Bringing together perspectives from across global intellectual history, the conference asks how ideas of order and disorder have travelled, clashed, and been reworked across regions, languages, and traditions — from early modern political thought to the contested orders of the modern world.
Plenary sessions
Ayşe Zarakol
University of Cambridge
“Order and Disorder from an International Relations Perspective”
Of all the social sciences, International Relations (IR) probably has been the one that is most concerned with the concept of order. This talk reviews the ways the concept of order has been used in IR, and its relation to other similar concepts. The goal is to see if existing definitions can help us better theorise disorder (and other similar concepts). The talk takes as its starting point the essay “Rethinking International Order” published in Ethics & International Affairs 38, no. 2 (2024).
Dániel Margócsy
University of Cambridge
“The Devil is in the Detail: Resource Extraction, Colonial Order and Demonic Powers in the Early Modern Indonesian Archipelago”
This talk examines the parallel histories of two extraordinary writers active in seventeenth-century Maluku, the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago. One of them is Imam Rijali, well-known as one of the leaders of the Great Ambon War against Dutch colonial forces, and the author of the only surviving seventeenth-century local chronicle in Maluku. The other is Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a soldier on the Dutch side in the same war, nowadays best known as a natural historian whose writings on the flora and the maritime life of the region still command respect. The talk focuses on the relationship between Rijali and Rumphius, and on how the Dutch naturalist appropriated the writings of his enemy. It is argued that, despite their enmity, Rumphius and Rijali struggled with somewhat similar questions when it came to understanding the diversity of religions, nature, and history in the Indonesian archipelago. Idolatry was a key concern for both authors, and it is this shared interest in fighting idolatry that explains why a Dutch natural historian decided to copy, sentence by sentence, the writings of his enemy into his own manuscripts.
Closing conversation
Kerem Gülay (Koç University), Camila Vergara (St Andrews University) and Berenice Schramm (Galatasaray University)
“International Law and Imaginaries of Global Order and Disorder”
Concluding remarks
Cemil Aydın (University of North Carolina), Zaib Aziz (University of Cambridge) and Banu Turnaoğlu Açan (Sabancı University; University of Cambridge)
Key dates
Peer review and selection
ISIH 2026 is a peer-reviewed international academic conference. All individual paper and panel proposals undergo formal academic peer review by members of the conference's academic committees. Acceptance decisions are made only after this evaluation is complete, and rest on academic quality, originality, relevance to the conference theme, and contribution to the field of intellectual history.