From 25 to 29 August 2025, the 18th Pan-European Conference on International Relations (PEC) of the European International Studies Association (EISA) took place at the University of Bologna. With more than 1,500 participants, 57 thematic sections, and a total of 450 panels and roundtables, PEC 2025 was the largest International Relations (IR) conference in Europe and a central meeting point for the international IR community.
The conference was organised around the theme “Politics for a Broken World”, developed by the Programme Chairs, including Dr Delf Rothe (IFSH). The theme was grounded in the diagnosis that contemporary world politics can no longer be adequately understood as a sequence of isolated crises, but rather as an expression of profound and enduring structural ruptures affecting areas such as global security, international order, environmental and climate politics, technological transformations, and political violence.
The plenary sessions on the opening day, designed and organised under the responsibility of the Programme Chairs, set key intellectual reference points for the conference. Bringing together internationally renowned scholars, they opened space for fundamental discussions on the state of world politics, on possibilities for addressing political, societal and institutional fractures, and on the role of responsibility, critique, and scholarly analysis in times of sustained global conflict. These sessions were complemented by additional special events organised by the Programme Chairs, including Meet-the-Editors roundtables that facilitated exchange between academic research, publishing practices, and early career researchers.
The wider conference programme reflected this orientation. Many sections engaged directly with the conference theme, while others addressed core topics in International Relations: international security, shifting geopolitical power relations, global political economy, digitalisation, environmental and climate governance, and questions of global justice. Through its thematic focus and unprecedented scale, PEC 2025 underscored the central role of International Relations as a discipline closely connected to contemporary political challenges.
As Programme Chair, Dr Delf Rothe played a key role in shaping the conference intellectually and establishing it as a space for critical, plural, and internationally connected IR scholarship.
