Unless otherwise noted, sessions are held every other Tuesday from 12:45 to 2 p.m. in the Stassen Room (Room 170) of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs during the fall and spring semesters.

Upcoming Workshops:

February 28   Aseem Kaul, Carlson School, on The Changing Nature of Global Integration

Next Workshop:

February 14   Oren Gross, Law School, on International Crimes by Autonomous Robots

Recent Workshops:

January 31, 2012, Dean Eric Schwartz, Humphrey School of Public Affairs on "The Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric, Reality and the Role of Norms in Protecting Basic Rights" Following massacres of civilians in Srebenica and Bosnia in the early 1990s, NGOs, governments and international organizations undertook a range of "lessons learned" exercises that informed efforts to enhance the worldwide efforts to safeguard civilians threatened by genocide or other grave violations of human rights in the context of conflict. Dean Schwartz will discuss the progression of these efforts and their impacts.

December 6, 2011, Professor Ruth Okediji, UMN Law School, on "Innovating Around Intellectual Property: Culture, Traditional Knowledge and Trade in the Goods that Embody Them" The process and substance of efforts to protect the traditional knowledge (TK) of indigenous communities—both at the national and multilateral levels—reflect the resilience of the entrenched assumptions that sustain the global intellectual property (IP) system. For some observers, TK protection is simply another regime of proprietary rights that lacks appropriate mechanisms to support the production of public goods needed for economic development. Importantly, there remains a persistent notion that the two regimes can and will remain in distinct (if related) spheres and will realize independently verifiable objectives.Professor Okediji will argue that this is highly unlikely. Indeed, while negotiations over a TK treaty are advancing, there also has been an acceleration of efforts to strengthen the global network of IP regimes in ways that explicitly undermine innovation and heighten barriers to access to those very goods aimed at improving public welfare. The multilateral space for trade regulation is increasingly designed around strong legal protection for knowledge goods; in light of this TK protection as currently constructed may undermine the public welfare values of IP policy and simultaneously devalue the public interest norms around which TK is ideally organized.

November 22 , 2011, Joel Waldfogel, Carlson School of Management, on "Pop Internationalism: Has a Half Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?" Advances in communication technologies over the past half century have made the cultural goods of one country more readily available to consumers in another, raising concerns that cultural products from large economies – in particular the US – will displace the indigenous cultural products of smaller economies. In this talk Professor Waldfogel presents research conducted with his Wharton colleague, Fernando Ferreira, that presents stylized facts about global music consumption and trade since 1960, using unique data on popular music charts from 22 countries, corresponding to over 98% of the global music market. Contrary to growing fears about large country dominance, trade shares are roughly proportional to country GDP shares; and relative to GDP, the US music share is substantially below the shares of smaller countries. They find a substantial bias toward domestic music which has, perhaps surprisingly, increased sharply in the past decade. National policies, such as radio airplay quotas, may explain part of the increasing consumption of local music.

Past Workshop videos and PowerPoint presentations:

View past workshops