This covers the Wednesday and Thursday of the conference.
In general, the ISA experience has been incredible. There are a huge number of things to see and people to meet if you really put your mind to it, and I know that I have already lost some opportunities. But there are still two days left, and I plan on making the most of them.
As to the specifics, I saw an amazing roundtable discussion on Realist Institutionalism, a somewhat controversial theoretical approach (for modern realists) that pulls a lot from classical realism as well as constructivism. This is very exciting for me personally, as a lot of the issues the panelists discussed were from up in my 550 paper. Those of you who were in 550 with me might remember (if I did a good job in my presentations anyway) some of the concepts I brought up about contests over prestige, and using the Antarctica Treaty to defend their own power and interests. Anyway, those sorts of things and more were talked about, and it made me really want to go back and tune up my paper, there was so much deeper I could go both in the case as well as the theoretical framework. I might even submit it for next years ISA to discuss in a panel myself.
However, that panel was offset by one of some extremely mediocre paper presentations. If you are coming all the way to San Francisco from as far afield as Argentina, Finland, or China, you should bring your A game to present your paper. After all, you have no idea who will be in the audience and you only get one chance. Coming with a lower quality presentation than one I would expect from the average 550 student is really not serving you, the audience, or ISA itself.
It seems paper presentations are on a range though. I watched, from a packed room, paper presentations on Outer Space policy, and they were polished, clean, and informative. Definitely learned a lot, especially regarding what people are researching at the moment, what angles they were looking at. Most of the panelists were examining the civilian and military aspects of space policy (why space has been so slow to be weaponized, examining the experience of the European Space Agency, etc.) but none of the presenters really discussed the commercial aspects of space, though all mentioned that it will be very important in the coming years. I definitely wrote down some ideas for future papers that, thus far, people seemed to be ignoring.
The last thing I saw on Thursday was an exceptional roundtable discussion on Nuclear Deterrence. Waltz was supposed to be there, but he appears to be MIA for this conference. I was really hoping to meet him, one of the first things that got me into IR as a field was reading Waltz's books. As reading those books launched me on a path that put me where I am today, I wanted to shake his hand tell him that personally. Even without Waltz though, the roundtable was excellent, with all the panelists bringing unique insights and direction to the discussion. I brought home a list of topics and ideas to explore in my own research, and hope to one day be one of the people they mention as "besides Scholar X, Y, and Michael Lopate, people haven't been doing much research about this topic."
Yep, that's how vain I am.
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