5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 483international relations, he insisted, had a ‘core’ and this core consisted of
political science or policy science.^184
It should be noted here that Sharp had chaired a Preparatory
Committee that had been established by UNESCO in order to oversee
the foundation of IPSA.^185 The background to the foundation of IPSA
concerns UNESCO’s 1947 General Conference which took place in
Mexico from November 6 to December 3. In Mexico, the conference
had determined that the ‘study of the subject-matter and problems
treated by political scientists’ should be promoted.^186 It was deemed
a matter of priority that political science should be equipped with the
means to study the ‘political realm that was held responsible for the col-
lapse of the world order...[and]...both to study and to reform the defec-
tive institutions.’^187
Reflecting its policy in relation to academic disciplines in general,
UNESCO decided at its 1948 General Conference to lend its support—
both moral and financial—to the formation of an international associa-
tion of political scientists. It was thus under the auspices of UNESCO
that IPSA’s founding conference was held in Paris between September
12 and 16, 1949, with representatives of sixteen countries in attend-
ance.^188 All those in attendance at the conference agreed that IPSA’s
headquarters should be based in Europe in order that the discipline
might be advanced in that region. The conference, having considered
Brussels and Geneva as possible locations, settled on Paris as the location
for the association’s headquarters and, in light of this, IPSA was subse-
quently ‘constituted as a “foreign association” under French law’.^189
As noted above, because of what was bound to be an obvious over-
lap between the ISC and the soon to be born IPSA, Torres Bodet had
(^184) Ibid., 60.
(^185) Boncourt, ‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ 5.
(^186) UNESCO, ‘Records of the General Conference of UNESCO, Second Session,
Mexico, 1947,’ quoted ibid., 4.
(^187) Boncourt, ‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ 4.
(^188) Yves Déloye, ‘Retour sur une naissance: 1949 ou l’histoire de l’AFSP au prisme
de celle de l’AISP-IPSA,’ Participation 33, no. 1 (2009): 20. A meeting of research-
ers involved in the ‘methods in political science’ project which took place in Paris on
September 16, 1948, had already decided that the project necessitated the establishment
of a ‘dialogue between political scientists from different countries and disciplines.’ See
Boncourt, ‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ 5–6.
(^189) Boncourt, ‘Political Science, a Postwar Product (1947–1949),’ 7.