International Society for Intellectual History Conference

Order and Disorder in Global Intellectual History

The annual conference for the International Society of Intellectual History

Sabancı University, 18-20 September 2026

Call for Papers

ISIH 2026: Order and Disorder in Global Intellectual History
Date: 18–20 September 2026
Venue: Istanbul Policy Center, Sabancı University
Address: Bankalar Caddesi No: 2, Minerva Han, 34420 Karaköy, İstanbul, Türkiye

Visit IPC Website 

Background and Aims

Across the globe today, political and legal orders are unsettled by democratic backsliding, constitutional regression, ideological polarisation, and the rise of authoritarianism. This instability invites us not only to interpret present crises but also to reflect on how order and disorder have been conceptualised across time, space, and traditions.

The 2026 Conference of the International Society for Intellectual History (ISIH) invites participants to examine how historical actors, including political thinkers, jurists, reformers, revolutionaries, literati, and religious scholars, imagined, contested, and redefined order in moments of rupture and transformation.  They turned to cosmology, medicine, law, and politics as models of balance and development, shaping their visions of stability and change. The conference aims to examine these visions through the lenses of intellectual history and the history of political thought, highlighting how order was understood as something to be secured or restored, and disorder as either collapse or renewal. Bringing these historical perspectives into dialogue with the present, the conference aims to shed new light on today’s challenges of disorder and the search for sustainable political and legal orders in the future.

We encourage papers that explore the meanings and uses of “order” and “disorder” in intellectual history from the early modern period to the present. No fixed definition of these terms will be assumed, and they should be taken in their broadest sense. Topics might include historical debates about the sources and maintenance of order, reflections on instability or transformation as drivers of intellectual traditions, or alternative visions of order and disorder as tools for understanding change.

The conference will bring together scholars from diverse regions and traditions to examine how competing visions of order have emerged, clashed, and evolved. We particularly welcome contributions on how concepts of justice, legitimacy, and authority have been constructed, destabilised, or rethought, how global and local encounters reshaped ideas of sovereignty and constitutionalism, and how historical precedents have been mobilised to address contemporary crises.

Themes 

Possible themes for papers include, but are not limited to:

• Intellectual Histories of (Dis)order: How concepts such as crisis, revolution, anarchy, and fragmentation have been understood and mobilised in political and legal discourse, and how “order” itself has acquired shifting semantic layers across different linguistic, disciplinary, and social contexts.

• Ideologies and Order: How competing ideologies imagined, described, and defined order and disorder, and how these visions structured political, social, and intellectual life across contexts.

• Legal Orders and Normative Innovation: How disorder generated urgency for constitution-making and legal reform; how it prompted reflection on the relationship between order and the rule of law; and how law functioned both as a method of ordering society and as an opening to alternative constitutional futures.

• Empire, Civilisation, and International Order: Legal and political thought in service of managing imperial pluralism and domination, from the rhetoric of the “civilising mission” to the alternative orders envisioned by colonised, semi-colonised, or imperial actors. Particular attention will be given to the role of international law and theories of global order.

• Knowledge and Classification: How intellectuals have imposed order on knowledge, turning epistemic disorder into new methods, disciplines, and systems. From early modern strategies for managing “information overload” to modern projects of systematisation, practices of classification reveal how ordering knowledge has been inseparable from ordering society.

• Medicine and the Body Politic: Medical metaphors that cast order as health and disorder as illness, decadence, or decay. Figures such as the “sick man of Europe” and the “sick man of Asia” illustrate how political crisis was framed through lifespans and pathological analogies, linking cure, reform, revolution, and reordering.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

• Daniel Margócsy (University of Cambridge)
• Martti Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki)
• Ayşe Zarakol (University of Cambridge) 

General Guidelines

Submission Guidelines:

We invite proposals for:

• Individual papers (max. 300 words)
• Thematic panels (max. 500 words, with 3–4 paper abstracts)

Please include a short CV or biographical note (max. 2 pages).
Send all proposals to:  isih26.sr@sabanciuniv.edu

Timeline:

• 15 February 2026: Deadline for abstract submissions
• 15 April 2026: Notification of accepted participants
• July 2026: Registration deadline
• August 2026: Final programme published

Registration fee:

The conference fee is £100. Reduced rates and fee waivers are available to PhD candidates and early-career scholars through the bursary scheme below.

Bursaries:

The ISIH is pleased to offer a limited number of bursaries for travel (up to £500 from Europe and the Middle East, up to £800 from North America, and up to £1,000 from the rest of the world) as well as waived conference fees for PhD candidates and early career scholars (within 3 years of PhD completion). Please include a brief “statement of need” explaining limited access to institutional or other funding when submitting your proposal.

Publication opportunity:

Selected participants will be invited to submit manuscripts for individual articles or thematic special issues based on their contributions to the ISIH’s peer-reviewed journal, Intellectual History Review.

 Organizing Committee:

• Banu Turnaoğlu Açan (Sabancı University; University of Cambridge)
• Abdurrahman Atçıl (Sabancı University)
• Egas Moniz Bandeira (University of Erlangen–Nuremberg)
• Franz Fillafer (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)
• Kerem Gülay (Koç University)
• Ayşe Ozil (Sabancı University)

Submission Guidelines: Panels and Papers

We invite proposals for both individual papers and complete thematic panels that engage with the conference theme of Order and Disorder in Global Intellectual History.