Call for Papers – Conference on Façade Politics (Yale, May 8-9, 2026)

[IPS Section]

Dear IPS Members, 

See Call for Papers below, circulated by Reo Matsuzaki.

All the best,

Adriana Mandacaru Guerra

IPS Communications Director

I am reaching out to inquire whether it would be possible to circulate a call for papers among the International Political Sociology Section members for the Conference on Façade Politics, which will be held at Yale University on May 8-9, 2026. This interdisciplinary conference is being co-organized by Fabian Drixler (Yale), Anna Grzymala-Busse (Stanford), and me, and it will be hosted by Yale’s Council of East Asian Studies. 

I have included the call below and attached it to this email. 

We would greatly appreciate your help in sharing this with the section members and hope that the conference will be of interest to them. Please let me know if I can provide any additional information. 

Best wishes, 

Reo 

——

Conference on Façade Politics

 

From colonial Southeast Asia to authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, scholars have identified dissimulation as a key instrument in the politics of domination and resistance. In this conference, we would like to consider an additional possibility: that the enactment of façades can be a collaborative act for managing conflicts and achieving compromise.

 

The aim of the conference is to take the emerging scholarship on Tokugawa and Meiji Japan as a starting point to challenge and expand our broader theoretical understanding of façade politics. In 2012, Luke Roberts’ Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan uncovered the pervasive operation of the concepts of omote and naishō in the politics of Tokugawa Japan. Fabian Drixler and Reo Matsuzaki have attempted to generalize them in their recent essay, “Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan,” and demonstrate their applicability in a modern state. We propose that the type of political performances analyzed by scholars of Japan are not unique to the Japanese historical and cultural context. Similar dynamics may be found in various other parts of the world. It is our hope that the recent discoveries in Japanese history provide tools for the analysis of other times and places.

 

We are looking for colleagues across disciplines who are interested in trying out whether the concept of façade fictions is useful in their areas of study. We also welcome contributions that focus on exploring the boundaries and differences between these and other forms of façade politics in both domestic and international arenas.

 

The Conference on Façade Politics, a 1.5-day event sponsored by the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale University, will take place on the university’s campus in New Haven from May 8 (Friday) to May 9 (Saturday), 2026. If you are interested in participating in this conference as a panelist, please email a proposed paper title and an abstract of approximately 250 words to the conference’s co-organizers—Fabian Drixler (Yale University), Anna Grzymala-Busse (Stanford University), and Reo Matsuzaki (Trinity College)—by May 2, 2025.

 

We look forward to receiving your proposals and learning about your work.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Fabian Drixler (fabian....@yale.edu)

Anna Gryzmala-Busse (amgb...@stanford.edu)

Reo Matsuzaki (reo.ma...@trincoll.edu) 

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Reo Matsuzaki
Associate Professor of Political Science
Trinity College
300 Summit St., Hartford, CT 06106
reo.ma...@trincoll.edu

860-297-5320