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.

The Freeman Workshop on Global Policy series will resume in September 2012.

Recent Workshops:

February 28, 2012, Prof.  Aseem Kaul, Carlson School, on "The Changing Nature of Global Integration" Professor Kaul looks at the shift in intra-firm cross-border trade since 1990 and the industry- level factors that have driven the changes.  He shows that between 1990 and 2005 US manufacturing saw a significant shift in the way firm operations are organized.  The flow of goods in the first part of the period was primarily from the US parent to its subsidiaries. Increasingly, however, intra-firm product flows have originated with subsidiaries until they were the larger part by the end of the period. Analysis at the industry level shows that this shift has been driven by an increase in foreign R&D activities and the rise of strong foreign competitors rather than by the search for low cost manufacturing bases. The important policy implications of these developments will be discussed. PowerPoint: 120228GlobalIntegration

February 14, 2012, Prof. Oren Gross, Law School, on "When Machines Kill: Criminal Responsibility for International Crimes Committed by Lethal Autonomous Robots" For all of the exponential innovation in the technologies of warfare the main component of the modern military has remained human soldiers.  With battle space becoming increasingly more complex, with the pace and amount of data that need to be gathered and processed in real time and, quite frequently under fire, increasing rapidly, humans may have already become the weakest links in what is known as the “OODA Loop” standing for “observe, orient, decide, and act.” The increased complexity of the battle space has reinforced by the trend towards the distancing of human combatants from that space. Additional factors now account for the development of a far more significant move towards the future removal of humans from the scenes of war that would usher in a paradigm-shift towards wars that are de-humanized or, perhaps, “post-humanized.” We are faced with the prospects of what may be regarded as practically risk-free wars either among clone armies or when one side controls Lethal Autonomous Robots (LAR). This near-future face of warfare raises significant legal, ethical and policy questions about the nature of warfare in the future as well as the appropriate regulation of future wars.

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.

Past Workshop videos and PowerPoint presentations:

View past workshops