Geoffrey Pleyers

Michael Burawoy passed away abruptly on February 3, 2025. The International Sociological Association (ISA) mourns one of its most influential and inspiring presidents, a remarkable and creative global sociologist, an advocate for a public sociology relevant to the people and civil society, an inspiring teacher who trained generations of sociologists, and an extraordinary human being. Born in 1947, Michael Burawoy was first trained as a mathematician...

Geoffrey Pleyers is FNRS Research Director at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He has been actively involved in the International Sociological Association (ISA) since 2006. He chaired ISA Research Committee on Social Classes and Social Movements (RC47) from 2014 to 2018 and acted as ISA Vice-President for Research from 2018 to 2023. On July 2023 he was elected ISA President for 2023-27. He is interviewed here by Breno...

The climate meltdown has become a visible reality, and in the meantime, during the global summits, governments only demonstrate a lack of capacity and willingness to tackle this urgent issue. Democracy is under serious threat in various regions of the world. Technocrats conduct major trade negotiations, and citizens have little impact on these decisions. Authoritarianism has gained impetus, as have nationalist and far-right movements. Hate speech and intolerance...

Over 40 years ago, the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association (ISA), meeting in Poland, also met Izabela for the first time, standing dignified amid drifting snowflakes to welcome us. As the niece of Magdalena Sokołowska, I assumed this doctoral student was only helping with local arrangements. How wrong can one be? This was not one week off her thesis on Virginia Woolf but an introduction to four decades of working for the ISA...

New President’s Address, XX World Congress of Sociology, Melbourne, July 1, 2023 While sociology aims at understanding the transformations of our world, our discipline is also affected and itself transformed by them. This is notably the case of the project of global sociology, which needs to be revisited considering the transformations our world has gone through over the past decades. I started studying globalization in the...

After its heyday in the 1990s, global sociology has come under harsh criticism by approaches that include subaltern, postcolonial, decolonial, feminist and gender studies, and Southern theories together with other “epistemologies of the South.” Beyond their heterogeneity and divergences, these approaches converge in challenging the legitimacy of global sociology, which has been identified with Eurocentrism and the domination of Northern/Western...

The coronavirus has brought science back to the center of public space, even in countries where populist leaders used to delegitimize it. Epidemiologists, medical doctors, and biologists bring us hard facts: the pandemic progresses every day and it is far worse than a “strong flu.” Social scientists have come up with facts that are as hard and unquestionable: while the virus itself may infect any of us, we are deeply unequal...

In January 2001, 20,000 activists and public intellectuals from all continents gathered in Porto Alegre for the first World Social Forum. They were united by the hope that the 21st century would be more democratic and that international solidarity and global struggles could shape globalization toward a fairer and more equal world. Almost two...