Event Recording - New dimensions, 50 years on: Reflections on continuity and change in global politics

On 18 November 2025 BISA held an online event that revisited the first ever BISA conference, held in 1975 under the title The New Dimensions of Foreign Policy. In a back to the future spirit, the discussion looked both backward and forward - revisiting the ideas that animated BISA’s beginnings while asking what new ‘dimensions’ might define the next fifty years of foreign policy thinking.

The four panellists, each addressing one of the themes of the 1975 conference, were: 

Maritime – Professor Tim Edmunds (University of Bristol)

Monetary – Dr Pedro Perfeito da Silva (University of Exeter)

Technological – Professor Helena Farrand Carrapico (Northumbria University)

Energy – Professor Caroline Kuzemko (University of Warwick)

The event was chaired by former BISA chair (2011-2012) Professor Inderjeet Parmar (City St George’s University). Please see below an introduction to the event and a further insight into BISA's origins: 

Fifty years ago, in a wintry January 1975, the British International Studies Association was born into a world that felt as if it were coming apart at the seams. The long postwar order seemed to lay in ruins: Bretton Woods was collapsing, OPEC had leveraged its oil power, the Third World and G77 were demanding a New International Economic Order, even USA-Western European-Japanese relations were loosening,  American power had been humiliated in Vietnam, and Portugal’s empire was imploding. At home, Britain faced the three-day week, rampant inflation, IMF surveillance looming, and the festering north of Ireland conflict. The intellectual mood was one of paradigmatic crisis: realism seemed bankrupt, liberalism naïve, and Marxism on the rise yet struggling to explain détente, the Sino-Soviet split, or the resilience of global capitalism.

Half a century on, in 2025, the echoes are uncanny. Monetary order is again under strain, energy and technology once more become strategic weapons, great-power rivalry on land and sea is intensifying from Ukraine to Taiwan, imperial retreat and blowback haunt Western capitals, and domestic orders—from Washington to Westminster—are fractured by polarisation, inequality, and institutional distrust. Climate collapse, technological disruption, and pandemic shocks have layered new systemic threats onto the older, unresolved ones. The unipolar moment has definitively passed; we inhabit a world of competing orders and contested universality.

Yet this eerie resonance is not mere coincidence. The crises of 1975 were never resolved; they were managed, displaced, deferred and globalised. Today we live with their mutated offspring. BISA was founded precisely at that historical moment to make sense of such conjunctures—moments when domestic and international orders co-constitute and destabilise one another. The opening address at the founding conference by Andrew Shonfield – director of Chatham House – was entitled “The Fragmentation of Power.” Déjà vu all over again.

For fifty years we have interrogated international orders, power, knowledge, race, gender, class, and latterly empire and the enduring legacies of colonialism - in ways that mainstream policy discourse too often evades.

As we look forward another fifty years, the need for rigorous, critical, historically informed international studies has never been greater. BISA stands uniquely placed—independent yet engaged, scholarly yet policy-relevant—to illuminate pathways through the gathering storms. Today’s roundtable comparing and contrasting the dynamics and scholarship of 1975 with 2025 and beyond is not for nostalgia, but to sharpen our vision of what must be understood, contested, and reimagined if humane and equitable orders are to emerge from the crises ahead.