List of TIJ-IGLP Workshop Streams
1. Corporations in Global Society
In this Stream, we will look at the evolution of the corporation as an institution and explore some of its complex contributions to the organization and governance of social, economic and political life across the globe from the 16th century to the present. We will explore the corporation as a governance institution in contemporary global ordering, with a particular focus on the relations between global corporate structures and the local political, economic and social arrangements in small and medium sized nations in the developing world.
2. Criminal Justice Reform: The Asian Experience
Effective criminal justice reform thinking and implementation requires deep appreciation of national contextual realities as well as meaningful adaptation of what has proven to work well across national boundaries. In this stream we will develop an analytical framework to examine reform projects from multiple lenses: historical, sociological, institutional, legal, geographical and knowledge/data focused. We will evaluate reform as not only as a technocratic domain but equally as a political phenomenon and strategy. Informed by select international literature, our collaborative learning method will emphasize vital actual experiential insights from our diverse faculty as well as seasoned participants.
3. Driving Safely on China’s One-Belt-One-Road
Much of the discussion surrounding China’s One-Belt-One-Road program (OBOR) has focused on China’s objectives, whether it will attain those objectives, and problems that have arisen in specific participating countries. This stream will assume that OBOR will continue, and will ignore how, or whether, OBOR benefits China. We will focus instead on identifying conditions that might allow participating countries to benefit from OBOR, based on their specific circumstances and what we have observed so far about how OBOR functions. Participants will gain an overall picture of OBOR to date, and will share experiences that their own countries may have had. We will then engage in practical exercises designed to identify conditions under which recipient countries can ensure that OBOR works to their benefit.
4. Global Regulation, Finance and Tax Policy
This stream will explore the forces which structure the global regulatory terrain. We will consider the tension between global, regional or bilateral trade regimes and the policy space for national regulation; as well as the vastly unequal power of different national regulators, all of whom affect economic life beyond their borders in ways they have and have not anticipated. We aim to help participants map, navigate and alter the complex global regulatory terrain affecting their economic development objectives. We will compare the regulatory experience of nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America as they engage the global economy while pursuing national development objectives
5. Human Rights & Social Justice
This stream will explore the relationship between violence and human rights law and advocacy. Human rights are often imagined as placing limits on violence. But they are also used to legitimate violence and to facilitate the exercise of violent power by individuals and states. We will explore this relationship by considering different forms of violence—spectacular, structural, slow, and revolutionary – and the role of human rights both in attending to and normalizing that violence. We will consider several case studies around issues such as the environment, trafficking, and religion, with a particular focus on the experiences of South and Southeast Asia.
6. Law and Development
This stream investigates legal reform strategies geared towards inducing economic growth and social welfare. We will explore the role of law in economic and social theories of development, the global and intellectual context that channels the range of development reform, and recent shifts in development theory and state practice. We will focus particular attention on choices: alternate legal arrangements which may open alternate trajectories for development with different patterns of inequality or social justice.
7. Law, Labor and Inequality
This Stream investigates policy and legal reform questions surrounding work in an interconnected, globalized economy. Considering a case study around forced labor, we will examine the context in which forced labor arises, the ways it is connected to the organization of work in transnational supply chains, and the many actors – from local to global – who are touched by or implicated in these practices. State and interstate policy is typically designed with an eye toward several, sometimes competing, objectives: promoting economic development as well as social welfare and the protection of workers’ rights. We will explore the multifaceted role of law in relation to these complex policy objectives in the context of labor, with a particular focus on law’s distributive effects on different actors. Looking at recent trends in legal advocacy and policy at both domestic and global levels, we will consider the range of tools available to address forced labor and other bad labor practices, with special attention to the ability of those tools to attend to structural inequalities.
8. Mapping Geographies of Authority and Power
The iconic “World Map” has conditioned the way international lawyers and national policy makers visualize the relationship between political authority and global space. Yet, that geopolitical picture is losing real-world traction. When the United Nations Charter was signed in 1945, New York was the only megacity on the earth with a population of over 10 million. By the year 2030, two-thirds of humanity and three-quarters of the globe’s corporations will be located in 40 megacities. International order is rematerializing beyond what modern cartography has long insisted is the map of geopolitical and geo-economic reality. This interdisciplinary stream seeks to conceptualise and visualise the unfolding materialism and inscription of international order today.
9. Poverty and Social Inclusion
Poverty is becoming more complex than the absence of basic resources. Today it often means living at the margins of social organization; in a world of precarious employment, global inequality and the increasing securitization of daily life. This stream will explore the political economy and ethnographic realities of this “new poverty” and the polices, macro and micro, which affect it and try to deal with it. To sharpen our focus, we will begin by examining contemporary policies aimed at achieving the social inclusion of young criminals in Latin America (often poor young racialized males involved in, for example, drug trafficking and mobile phone theft) and the assumptions, mechanics and unexpected outcomes of such policies.
10. Science and Technology Studies
This stream will focus on the relationships among science, technology, and political power in contemporary policy making. The modern state’s capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge is significant both in the production and maintenance of political order and in shaping or justifying the choices faced by policy elites. We will focus on the role of scientific knowledge in policy-making oriented to environmental “sustainability.”
11. The Political Economy of Private Law
This stream will examine the role of private law – both nationally and transnationally – in structuring global political and economic affairs. We are particularly interested in the political choices embedded in private law regimes as they affect inequality and opportunities for development. We will also consider the relationship between formal or official entitlement schemes and the unofficial and often informal world of customary law and social norms for the economic life of both the global poor and the global elite.
12. Trade Policy
The legal terrain for trade has undergone a series of reorientations over the last decades, from multilateral to bilateral, to regional – and now to a complex and variegated set of overlapping regimes. We will consider the political – and economic – stakes involved for nations with various perspectives and economic strategies as they engage the regime. Our aim is to help clarify the choices embedded in current regions and options for their productive contestation and change.
13. Law in Global Affairs: Whither “International Law”?
The institutional and doctrinal arrangements we have called “international law” for a century or more seem increasingly irrelevant to global economic and political life. Yet law – legal arguments, legal professionals, legal institutions, rules and practices – are everywhere in today’s globalized world. This stream will explore the rise and fall of a specifically “international” law, focused on the specific institutions of the UN system. What were its promises, its consequences, its dark sides? And what can be its future?
14. Good Governance: Public and Constitutional Law
This stream will explore the ways in which governance is performed in contemporary policy work. We will focus on the role of law in governance as a site of choice rather than a ready-made solution to significant policy challenges. The limits of law, the unintended consequences of law and the importance of legal arrangements which may be difficult to perceive – private, informal, foreign – will all be considered. We will focus on the understanding what constitutions can and cannot do against corruption.