With just over a month to go until the ISRF Conference in Warsaw, Poland, here are some of the key topics which will be discussed.
Adam Smith
Migration, democracy and the climate crisis – these three issues, as intractable as they are entwined, are central to contemporary politics.
And so the complex, sometimes confusing, relationship between these subjects will form the focus of the Independent Social Research Foundation’s 2024 Conference, which takes place between 7 and 9 October in Warsaw, Poland.
When confronted by these vast and divisive phenomena, it’s all too easy to feel helpless – indeed, the notion of “climate fatalism” was a key topic of debate at the ISRF’s last annual conference.
But in bringing together heterodox researchers from across the UK and Europe, the ISRF hopes to promote ways of interrupting and reversing the “vicious cycle” connecting the Conference’s main themes.
The Conference is a key part of the ISRF’s mission to find new solutions to some of today’s most pressing social issues, something Director of Research Christopher Newfield alluded to in a recent article.
“One of the ISRF’s slogans is ‘new thinking for real-world problems,’ and the starting point of new thinking is militant clarity about what we face,” he wrote earlier this year.
“A second starting point is to believe in the ability of research to contest, redirect, and rebuild power systems into much better forms than we currently have.”
This year’s ISRF Conference comes at a time when “global democratisation has stalled” with the V-Dem Institute reporting that 72% of the world’s population now live in autocracies.
For the ISRF, this is in no small part due to the “anti-democratic backlash” against migration, as the movement of people continues to be a “flashpoint in politics around the world”.
As the Conference programme explains, this political shift reduces the possibility of international cooperation around the environment, allowing the climate crisis to intensify.
And this in turn fuels the “vicious cycle”, leading to yet more migration with the UN reporting that “in 2022 alone, 36.2 million people were displaced because of natural disasters brought about by climate change”.
University researchers around the world play a critical role in producing the evidence needed to understand, mitigate and address the climate emergency and its impacts.
But the 2023 ISRF Conference explored how these expert voices have been “increasingly marginalized, underfunded, and problematised in recent years”, leading to a deepening knowledge crisis.
Newfield’s article in the ISRF’s last Bulletin threads together the overarching themes that came out of the 2023 Conference, in Bologna, Italy, many of which feed into October’s event.
“I left the conference with the sense that as bad as world problems are, we are in fact collectively up to the job of fixing them. Indeed we’ve already fixed many of them in theory—the conference was another step in that process,” he wrote.
“A challenge that remains is getting the delegates’ ideas put into wider use.”
Warsaw makes for an auspicious destination for the upcoming Conference – Poland has its own complex history of migration and, since Russia invaded Ukraine, has welcomed an estimated 1.5 million refugees.
The Conference will include discussions focused around how the real and perceived effects of migration impact on different countries, the pros and cons of open borders and the role the media plays in people’s understanding of these issues.
Fittingly, given Poland’s attempts to move its economy away from a traditional focus on coal, there will also be debate around green energy and what can be done to animate and focus public debate around climate change policy.
The latest ISRF Conference also comes almost a year after the Polish people voted out their former right-wing government. And what happens next might hold clues for the future of Europe and world politics at large.
