On 30 November-1 December 2017 the international conference The State of the Art in the History of Politics took place in The Hague, the Netherlands.

On the occasion of the start of its second lustrum, the Dutch Research School for Political History OPG organized an international conference to discuss the state of the art in the history of politics. The central issue for the conference was to look for the commonality between the many approaches to the history of politics that have bloomed in the past decades. Does political history still have a core of shared topics, problems and concepts, or is the field fragmented into a wide array of studies on things political?

The main programme was structured around five debates on (a) Writing the History of Political Culture, (b) Writing the History of Political Institutions, (c) Writing Global History, (d) Politics of the History of Politics and (e) Writing the Political History of the Social. Key notes were given by Prof. Dr. Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wagner, Prof. Dr. Susan Legene, Prof. Dr. Corinna Unger and Prof. Dr. Lutz Raphael.

In between the debates, there were four sessions in which new research could be presented and collaboration forged in elevator pitches, speed dates and sand pits. PhD candidates and research master students presented their work with poster presentations.