A NOTE FROM THE ISA PRESIDENT

Craig N. Murphy

ISA Friends: 

Welcome to Chicago for the 42nd annual meeting of the International Studies Association. Program Chair Mustapha Kamal Pasha and his staff at American University, with the help of David Blaney at Macalester College and the entire program committee have organized rich, intellectually challenging, and complex program. The program theme, International Relations and the New Inequality, attracted an unusually wide geographic and disciplinary range of scholars to our meeting. Ethicists, historians of science, geographers, and students of public health and education are here along with diplomatic historians, social psychologists, strategists, and students of international political economy. The hotel's meeting rooms and corridors will be filled with scholars and practitioners from every part of the world. Many of us will be new to each other and for those of us who have long been part of the ISA it will be a great pleasure to meet so many new colleagues.

As at every ISA annual meeting, there are a few innovations to highlight:

For the first time in more than ten years the incoming President's address will be taken out of the packed confines of the Thursday lunch-time annual general meeting. President-elect Bruce Bueno de Mesquita will give his talk in conjunction with the annual reception of the Scientific Study of International Processes Section at 5:45 PM on Thursday evening. This is also the first meeting with a complete program created by our newest section, the

International Communication Section, which, following the practice of many others, has instituted a senior scholar award and will honor the first recipient of that award, Todd Gitlin, at a panel and reception on Friday. And throughout the program we have organized a series of theme panels designed to be focused, high-powered discussions of a single paper that presents the prominent arguments in one of the many communities that has tried to understand today's patterns of global inequality.

Chicago, of course, remains one of the best places in the U.S. to socialize, to eat well, to share a drink, and to listen to music and to comedy, and no doubt much of the most important work of this 42nd annual meeting will take place outside our panel and poster sessions. After all, despite ISA's growth, it remains a relatively inclusive and informal community, or perhaps a network of overlapping communities.

Although, perhaps, now that the Association is in its 40s, we have reached something of a milestone. While it is still true that there will be people at this convention who remember the Association's first meeting in 1959 (which, I am told, took place in a Venetian-themed motel on the outskirts of San Diego), I suspect most of the members here in Chicago were not even born when that historic first meeting took place. The ISA may have hit middle age, but unlike many professional associations, its membership remains young . . . and old . . . and in between.

One of the major challenges for the ISA, for any professional association, is to remember and honor the organization's history, the social and scholarly commitments that brought people like Fred Sondermann, John Gange, and Kenneth Boulding together in San Diego yet at the same time constantly renew both the people and the ideas that keep the organization alive. In my year as President it has been an honor and a pleasure to address that challenge with others on the Executive Committee, the Governing Council, and with the entire membership.  Welcome to our 42nd meeting, and I hope all of us will be back for many more.