17. International Collaboration

Etel Solingen, University of California Irvine, esolinge@uci.edu

The theme of the 2008 meeting highlights the centrality of global inequalities to political science scholarship at the dawn of the 21st century. The Section on International Collaboration invites papers, panels, and roundtables with a particular focus on various types of international, transnational, and global collaboration geared to address problems of economic, ethnic, gender, racial, social, legal, religious, political, cultural, educational, and other forms of inequality. A central aspect of this collaboration is the challenge to develop mechanisms of international governance capable of promoting sustained efforts to eradicate all forms of inequality.

We encourage panels and roundtables that: (1) Identify the most promising research paths for understanding the nature and sources of international inequality; (2) Evaluate broad trends in the direction of reduced, persistent, or enhanced inequality in a particular issue area; (3) Appraise the various theoretical strands our discipline has relied on for improving our knowledge and measurement of inequality in its various forms; (4) Take stock of failures and successes in the design of international institutions responsible for overcoming any form of inequality; (5) Compare and contrast different mechanisms, agreements, and practices for reducing inequality; (6) Explore the synergies across different forms of inequality within and across states (such as overlapping social, ethnic, economic, and gender inequalities, among others); (7) Elucidate the synergies between/among international efforts to decrease inequity at the local, regional, national, international, and trans-national levels; (8) Evaluate the extent to which international efforts to reduce one form of inequality may have detrimental effects for another.

These and other important research agendas regarding international collaboration to reduce inequality can be advanced through various methodological, ontological, and epistemological approaches; at the structural, state, regional, social movement, group, individual or any
other levels of analysis; through theoretical, empirical, and normative modes of investigation; by enhancing synergies across various disciplinary perspectives on inequality (political, economic, legal, anthropological, psychological, sociological, and others); and across academic, practitioner, and policy-making endeavors.