“…The fundamental understanding of the mechanism of the response of smart materials toward external stimuli is essential to design and fabricate such materials. − Extensive research on smart materials opens the opportunity to bring in newer technologies in the field of commercially and industrially relevant applications like smart windows, self-healing coatings, chemicals and gas separations, optical switches, artificial intelligence, electrochromic devices, etc. − Interestingly, examples of incorporation of such stimuli-responsive building blocks in the fabrication of covalent organic polymers (COPs) are relatively rare, although certain advantages of COPs are well known. Significant thermal, chemical, and tunable physicochemical stability along with pore size, large surface area, and low skeleton density remain very important among them. − In this particular work, we have utilized the advantage of incorporation of viologens, an N , N ′-disubstituted-4,4′-bipyridinium moiety, which is an electron-accepting dicationic organic structure with an excellent reversible redox property and fast electron transfer ability, to generate an ionic porous organic polymer (iPOP-Bpy). The polymer contains an electron-withdrawing triazine moiety in the core, which is a suitable electron acceptor with favorable electron-conducting properties. − The cationic nature of the polymer, nitrogen-rich structure, physicochemical stability, and presence of an aromatic skeleton make it a suitable candidate to explore its capacity for iodine adsorption.…”