It's my great pleasure to welcome you all to the 33rd annual Norris and Marjory Vendenson Epic International Supposedly here in Tufts University. The issue we're examining the question is the liberal world war ending. I want to thank the Vendenson family first. And I want to thank Bobby and Joanne in the back. I want to thank you for your support of Tufts in general and specifically today for your support of the epic symposium. Thank you very much. It wouldn't be possible without your support. And Norris and Marjory Vendenson, I understand tomorrow your mom is going to be here. I want to thank the IGL board. There's several members of the IGL board.  Pleasure to meet with the board. Do you think it's four times a year? And one of the things I say, it's my six year as provost. I say the boards, I think about them as IVA. Invest, bridge and advise. And this board really does that. When you think about the bridging, they do a fantastic job of spreading the word about IGL around the country and around the world as well as bringing what they learn back to IGL to help us make IGL a little bit stronger. They do a fantastic job of advising. You know, the meetings are a lot of fun because you have people who are experts in many, many different areas and they inform what's happening at IGL for taking the annual theme for Epic and so many other things that we do. And then invest. They're incredibly generous. Again, just as Bobby Vendenson is by Joanne, by the member of the board, what happens at IGL wouldn't be possible without support in many ways. So thanks again for all of that. I think the Epic students. I've been Epic students where I have mixed in up here. So it's quite a journey you've been on. Did you know what you were getting into fully? No, you didn't. That's the best way to do it.  But you know, this one really would not be possible without all of your hard work, your dedication, your vision, and your courage. And you might think, courage? What do you mean courage? You guys probably know what I'm talking about, which is you've been involved in something where you've done what we want students to be doing at Tufts University, which is you push yourself beyond your comfort zone, intellectual comfort zone sometimes. You've been asked to do things by your colleagues that maybe you thought you weren't sure you could, but you're seeing the fruits of your labor here tonight and throughout the suppose and you've seen it in many other aspects. So thank you for everything you're doing. It's certainly been possible without your hard work. I want to thank all of our visitors here. All of our visitors. It's amazing every year to come and see students and other visitors coming from around the country and around the world for this. And it's part of what makes us really special is not just the pounds, which are amazing, but also the conversations that happen around meals and all these and so forth. Also I want to thank the IGL staff. Let this Heather's way back there hiding. I see you up there, Heather. So Heather and everyone else from the team, Stakes, I see the back and this wouldn't be possible, so thank you very much. Last and not least, Abby Williams, the director and his first year here at IGL as director. This is his first epic as director, but certainly he's seen it before and been a board member and having been a student at Tufts a little while ago. So Abby's just made a huge impact in his first year. It's fantastic to have here not only for what he's doing for IGL but for what he's done along with others to really help Tufts make Tufts an even more integrated university. So Abby, thank you very much for what you're doing for IGL and for Tufts. So this is my sixth year here at Tufts and epic really is quite a special experience. It's the kind of thing that like the students I think until you've experienced it, you don't really know what this is going to be. You don't really understand it. But I started to get a sense when I was talking to alums of epic and I heard from folks we're doing amazing things now in their professional careers and what they said again and again is I am where I am because of my experience in it. It's not me you are where you are because of your experience. Maybe it was connections with board members and that was helpful. But what really mattered was is that this was one of the first times and one of the key times in their lives when they realized they could do things but they didn't think they could. So when they went off and I'm thinking one person who's made it big in the media said you know I was a young person and I'm in the media I can do that. I've done that. And so it's really a fantastic experience. I look forward to the panels today and tomorrow I'll continue throughout the weekend. And I want to get out of the way and let the real action happen. But I'm excited to be here and excited to have all of you here as well. So thanks for my last job. It's a pleasure to introduce Lorenzo Lau. And I got to be Lorenzo a little bit earlier. A few things. It's from California. One of the epic students is a senior and he's done lots of things and Lorenzo can do something I can't do. I can't swim. But Lorenzo can. Not like he can swim but he was a card up recently. Tufts, Nascar, championship team. Thank you, Provost Harris. Thank you everyone for joining us tonight. My name is Lorenzo Lau and I'm a senior army. Thank you, Carlos. Sorry about that. And thank you Provost Harris for those really kind words. So good evening. My name is Carlos Sarasari and I'm a freshman at Tufts University. This past year, throughout my first year at university, I was given the opportunity to join a class which seemed amazing, both in quality and in educational level. Greater than anything I had ever attempted before. And as Provost Harris mentioned, that's really all you know when you join Epic. You don't really know much about what you're getting into. But one month into my college career, out of curiosity really, I decided to join the class known as Education for Public Equity and International Citizenship, or as we call it, Epic. So far, the class has not only reached but has far outweighed any expectations I had for it. It's been a truly incredible experience. But at this point, many of you may be wondering what Epic actually is. Well, Epic is a year-long class that is open to all majors and small year levels of undergraduate study at Tufts University that brings together a range of lectures from different areas and levels of expertise to talk about one topic chosen at the end of the year. And this year, as you all know, the topic chosen was the possible end of the liberal world's order. In the fall, we had the opportunity to have a round-table discussion with Magma Haraj, one of the founding fathers of modern-day South Africa, as he spoke about protests, both violence and nonviolence. It was truly one of the most fascinating experiences of my life so far. This semester, I have the opportunity to spend the next three days discussing issues of international importance with people such as the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, the Foreign Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, and many other experienced practitioners and professionals. Furthermore, this class has allowed me to connect with some of the best and brightest at Tufts University. As students in this year's class I have more of my current social and educational experience. From the freshmen that have become some of my very best friends on campus to the seniors that have given me advice countless times when I really need it, I can safely say that there was no better way to start what I expected to be an amazing four years at Tufts University. As you've heard, we find ourselves here today to open the 33rd Annual Morris and Marjorie Bendison Epic International Symposium. I was looking for a way to introduce it. My thinking process was fairly straightforward. I just want to convey to you all how excited I've been in preparation and how excited I am today for the next few days to come. And the reason is simple and it's because as confident as I am with my intellectual ability and I really am.  We are also joined by university segments from all around the world, ranging from Brazil to Russia as well as various other delegations from other countries and our civil and military relationship group called Allies. We thank you all for coming. Being French, I grew up in an environment that strongly valued the importance of international discourse and discussion. And I am looking over the next few days in conversations with all new international students about the aspects of the world we live in today and the aspects of the world we will live in tomorrow. So without further ado, I invite you all over the next few days to soak in the knowledge of people that have both studied and participated extensively in the formation and shaping of the world as we see it today. I invite you to contemplate the biggest geopolitical shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall in this very symposium with possible ends of the liberal world's order. And now, my new friend Lorenzo Laos. Good evening, everyone. My name is Lorenzo Laos and I'm a senior IR major and member of this year's club. I'd like to thank you all for joining us for our first panel of this symposium Beyond Borders, contending with transnational challenges. We are very excited that you could join us. We put in a lot of work to organize this symposium and we're very excited to share it with you all over the next three days. This panel brings together a group of experts and professionals with great diversity and a great wealth of experience. In today's world, we face challenges that often span beyond borders. Climate change, migration, and terrorism. Climate change has become the growing discourse around the world, especially with the American withdrawal from the Paris climate course. Humanism has led to a weakening of borders and convocations between states and sub-state actors. This, in turn, has created migration and refugee challenges. This panel will examine these different but not entirely disparate issues. Just now, we have this very broad range kind of panel. However, the driving and main question is, well, states choose to confront these challenges together or will they try to get at them at their own separate ways? Before I introduce the panelists, I'd like to explain how this panel will work. Each panelist will give their opening remarks of 12 minutes long, which we have our ND timer, and then they will and then after that they'll have the opportunity to respond to one another. To which after that, we will open up the panel to audience Q&A. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our panelists. Up first will be Miss Samantha Gross. Miss Gross is a fellow at the Rockings Institution and her work is focused on the intersection of energy, environment and policy, including climate policy and international cooperation. She was also the director of the Office of International Climate and Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy. Next, we have Jonathan Prentis. Mr. Prentis is the chief of office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General of International Migration. Before that, he was the International Crisis Group's director of the London Office and Senior Advocacy Advisor. And last but not least, we have with us Professor Andy Knight. Professor Knight was a former professor of international relations at the University of the West Indies and is now a professor of international relations at the University of Alberta. And with that, let's go. Thank you for your kind introduction. I appreciate that and I really think this is an interesting panel and bringing, I like the way they run instead of introducing us in raising the question of these are all very disparate issues but will we deal with it together or will we try to go it along? I think that really brings these disparate ideas to a nice intro. I also want to throw out something I'll be quite frank in my talk and so the opinions that I put out are mine they're not those of my institution or of anyone that I work with they're coming directly from me just in case it's my turn out that I'm not there. Our theme tonight is transnational challenges and I'd like to focus my time on how mistrust of multilateralism and the polarized nature of US politics today in addressing these types is really difficult in this environment. The Trump administration as we've seen in spades recently is extremely skeptical and mistrustful of multilateral agreements viewing them really as sort of a giveaway of US sovereignty and we've seen this mistrust play out in a number of ways. The trend is very clear in trade policy particularly today we announced trade tariffs on aluminum and on steel just today and you see it in our rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and in the challenges we're having and some of the demands we're making are renegotiation of NAFTA you also see it in the tariffs put on Chinese solar panels it was definitely a the fulfillment of a campaign promise but also raises challenges for the clean energy industry we've seen this dislike of multilateralism play out in the US relationship with the United Nations this administration pulled the US out which is the US cultural branch because of its stance on Israel you see us making noise about pulling out of the MUN Human Rights Council and you saw US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley talk about taking names of countries that were voted in favor of the resolution that opposed the US movement of our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and even on security issues the US has professed a preference for going alone the long nuclear deal is in parallel and you also have seen some contradictory statements although those have calmed down more recently from this President about NATO and none of these institutions is perfect but in the past these weaknesses they've been around for a long time but the US has really recognized that despite these weaknesses there are certain kinds of issues that are really best not dealt with alone and we've understood that it's best to look out for our interests and work towards dealing with problems from the inside rather than leaving these institutions because they're not perfect that attitude has really changed substantially over the last year I'd like to focus the rest of my talk talking about how this has played out in the environmental realm climate change is really the ultimate transnational challenge the problem is that the very heart of the modern economy is so large that the world needs cooperation across borders this is something that no country can deal with alone no matter how large their economy is and yet the very reason that climate needs a transnational a transnational approach is exactly what makes it so hard to deal with emissions everywhere have the exact same effect as emissions anywhere else and the changes needed are really fundamental so governments have an overwhelming temptation to freeride so the Paris Agreement was a serious effort to overcome the finger pointing that had happened in the past between the developed and the developing world in this strong temptation for freeriding and the US was very much in favor of the Paris Agreement's approach in fact it was really designed to be something that the US could get behind so President Trump's announcement in June that the US intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement was really a challenge we are now the only country in the world that's not behind the agreement the last two holdouts were Nicaragua and Syria and they both signed on to the agreement last year so we're truly going to allow them on this one interestingly the US can't officially pull out from the Paris Agreement until the day after the 2020 presidential elections and I'm not clever enough to make that up it's a true fact but even now we're largely we're still in the agreement we're largely removing ourselves from the important work of implementing it we came up with the agreement but how to actually make it work in progress is an ongoing process at the last climate meeting which happened at the end of November of last year the US sent a delegation and that delegation was largely constructive but it was at a lower level than it had been in the past didn't necessarily represent the views of the administration and the direction of discussions that it might have had if it had been higher level like they had sent in the past one of the most frustrating things about the Paris withdrawal overall is the reasons that President Trump stated it seemed to be rooted in a misunderstanding of the agreement itself President Trump's rose garden garden stitch announcing with withdrawal was full of old rhetoric and misguided notions about what the agreement was designed to do the key innovation of the Paris agreement that it was set up as a bring your own goals kind of agreement rather than establishing top down goals for different kinds of economies which is what the Kyoto protocol did the Paris agreement invited each country to establish its own goals and to bring those and those added together became the goals of the Paris agreement in the parlance of the agreement these are called nationally determined contributions and another crucial impact of the agreement that enabled it to universal acceptance is that each country's goals are voluntary there are no enforcement mechanisms if countries don't meet their goals only reporting to understand the progress that each country is making towards its goals and perhaps apply a little peer pressure in places where that might be helpful and the idea behind this structure was to encourage countries to be more ambitious with their goals and to help get all countries on board including the United States which had been very opposed to the top down prescriptive approach of the Kyoto agreement in the past so President Trump's speech last June described the deal as terrible for US competitiveness and he complained about trans goals compared to ours never mind that each country set its own non-binding goals and he was very frustrated with the rhetoric that came out in the speech that day I don't see the US moving back towards the Paris agreement during this administration and the idea that the agreement will be negotiated is frankly just absurd no other country has expressed a desire to do this and literally every other country is on board why would the world sort of count out to our desires on this and the health hostage to our desire and they have all managed to come to a place where they at least agreed directionally on what they should be doing I don't know what the point is of ongoing statements such that we're willing to negotiate for a better deal for the US but I don't find these realistic or credible so the Trump administration's actions on multinational agreements particularly Paris these demonstrate an ongoing challenge of the polarized US political climate so many of the agreements and issues that I spoke about at the beginning of my talk they're executive actions some of these actions have always been the purview of the executive of the president's discretion whereas others of them like the Paris agreement were designed not to be binding treaties so they wouldn't need senate approval because senate approval is difficult to get right now you require a two thirds majority to approve a treaty to get frankly two thirds of the agreement to agree on a two thirds of the senate to agree on a resolution supporting Mother's Day let alone binding international treaty these kinds of agreements are strictly done through the executive branch they're easier on the front end but the problem with them is they become subject to the political winds here in the US as we've seen an executive action can be undone by the next administration we've seen a ton of that and the shift from Obama to Trump and also there has been a change in attitude about that it used to be that we tried really hard as a country to protect more unified face overseas and we pulled back from that somewhat to our detriment and this makes us a terribly unreliable partner for international agreements why would another nation cut a deal with us to understand that a deal that they make with our executive branch can be completely undone when the executive branch changes parties our unreliable nature has the ability to hurt us in a number of ways not just environmental which is what I focus on every day but in national security intelligence sharing and trade as we're seeing play out today and this is my biggest concern even though I spend my days thinking about environmental issues with this unreliability and the kind of picture that we're putting out to the world that we're not a partner you can count on in international agreements I find that scary and when dealing with the issues of the rest of the panelists here we'll talk about tonight but to end on a more optimistic note because this could be kind of a gloomy panel if I see it coming I want to point out another international environmental agreement that might fare better and it will be an interesting one to watch to understand how far the administration is willing to go and how negative they are towards multilateral agreements and that's the Kigali amendments to the Montreal protocol these amendments call for nations to begin cutting the use of hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs since that's kind of mouthful these are refrigerants that are used in air conditions and other cooling type appliances and HFCs replaced the CFCs chlorofluorocarbons that were the main cause of the ozone hole that we all heard about in the 80s it was truly alarming but it turns out that these HFCs that replace the ozone depleting chemicals turn out to be very potent greenhouse forcing gases much more potent than CO2 or even nothing so this amendment to the Montreal protocol even though that's really been an ongoing agreement about the ozone layer this one's really about climate but the US has been really positively disposed towards the Kigali amendments a state department official at a big UN meeting about this back in November was singing the praises of the Kigali amendments and the reason why is that the US is a leader in developing substitutes for HFCs and it's also true that the US manufacturing sector is very heavily in favor of the Kigali amendments because they want market certainty and they want to understand how they can sell in different places so it's their advantage to have the world unified around this single standard it's also true that the Montreal protocol has some real conservative bona fides it originated in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher heavily in favor and so there are some real conservative icons that actually helped put this agreement in place and the Montreal protocol has been one of the most successful multinational environmental treaties of all time it's been wildly successful partially because replacements for CFCs got cheap and so compliance got cheaper but it's really worked the ozone hole is healing rapidly and it's a true environmental success so the senate needs a two-thirds vote two-thirds vote to approve the Kigali amendments and we'll see what happens the senate has approved four other amendments the Montreal protocol over the years and the original agreement passed unanimously back in the 80s so it's precedent but the fate of Kigali and how this all turns out will be very telling in this environment of trust and multilateralism I mean in many ways it's an ideal agreement it has a conservative background to it industry is highly in favor of it but the flip side is the deals of climate which is an issue that we've been a little dicey about and it's also a binding multilateral treaty which is also something this administration has been very dicey about so I really think what happens with the Kigali amendments over the next year or so is something to watch to see how it plays out in this administration and if it goes well I think it's a positive sign for our ability to continue to engage with the world on these issues if it doesn't I think that's a negative and I think that's something that we should really watch for and with that I'll give the rest of my time back when I look forward to questions I have Ok next we have Mr. Prentice Good evening everyone I was looking at that rather menacing looking time box and I was relieved to see I was relieved to see that when the 12 minute mark is reached it doesn't explode in your face so get ready I'm just going to talk for ages now I know that Thank you very much for inviting me I'd like to thank the provost and Abbey who I think was behind my participation here I'm very pleased to see you again Lorenzo thank you for bringing us together I'm going to start also with the same disclaimer that Samantha started with anything foolish or outrageous I say I say in my own capacity all the rest I can say my function is a function there the structure of this panel is really well thought through whoever amongst you or whichever group of you thought this through I think you did a really good job in picking challenges that do meet the criteria of challenging a group of nations at a time again to follow on from what Samantha said at a time when multilateralism is Pat I don't know if it's at its most fragile but it is soft around the edges at this point in time and that should be something that concerns us all really the challenge of securing cooperation on these types of cross-border issues in such a climate is I think one of the signature issues of our time which brings me to my issue migration which I think is a classic example of this it is potentially a good news story the issue that I work on the precise issue that I work on which I won't talk about in my comments but I'll be happy to discuss in Q&A or in our chat after is the aim by the membership of the United Nations 192 US did pull out of this and 192 are engaged right now to develop a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration really a framework for cooperation at a time when the world is crying out for cooperation on issues such as this and as long as that is moving forward and it is moving forward I think we have good reason for hope on this issue not that it will be easy but I'm a gloomy person so I'd like to focus more on the challenges around migration and through them identify what I think some of the potential solutions might be and a few words of context if I may when I'm laying out what it is I'm talking about when I'm talking about migration firstly it's a phenomenon I'm talking about international migration the movement of people across borders has occurred really since time began now that doesn't endow it with any inherent virtue but it does suggest that it has staying value secondly there is a normative basis for it or at least half a normative basis there is a human right the human rights framework to leave your country the problem is the fundamental problem is there is no corresponding right to enter another it has a normative basis also in the context of refugees we've enshrined additional protection for refugees who are of course a form of migrant and this is most particularly under the 1951 convention there are no equivalent regimes either for forced internal migrants internally displaced persons nor legal regimes for migrants who do not meet the definition of refugee under the 1951 convention and as an aside and I think it's relevant in the context of discussing the liberal world order this schism between those who do deserve civil protection by crossing borders and those who don't is to some extent a reflection of the schism that appeared during the Cold War between those who are advocating very actively in favour of civil and political rights largely the west and essentially a refugee status is those whose civil or political rights have been infringed or risk being violated and those who are much more concerned about the defence and promotion of economic, social and cultural rights which to some extent are the rest so I think the epithet that it is often an epithet that if you're not a refugee you're an economic migrant to some extent has its roots in this history migrants are proportionately a small segment of the global population though growing of our world population it's statistically traditionally been around 2.7 2.8% been remarkably stable there and finally well not finally I know we're near finally I don't know why I said that migration is overwhelmingly positive for all concerns I won't bombard you with statistics but I'll throw out a few that I think are illustrative migrants typically spend 85% of what they earn in their country in which they live they send back 15% home in the form of remittances now these remittances what migrants send home to developing countries amount annually to 450 billion dollars a year that is three times the total ODA that the world spends these are the poor implementing the SDGs for the poor it's quite a remarkable statistic there migrants proportionately have higher employment than indigenous populations lower criminality rates they are overall net contributors to their communities and host them migration is also a by-product of development let's be very clear on this people have more means to move if you are the poorest of the poor you lack the capacity to move people are dying less and also migration and this is a professor in Amsterdam has made this point I think very eloquently a by-product of liberalization there is a certain equals of liberalization paradox in this certain elements of our economic liberalization for example the erosion of labor rights the rise of flexible work and the privatization of formally state owned companies have increased or have contributed to the increase in the demand of labor of migrant labor in many developed parts of the world so why this heated debate around migration in places that I think one would typically say are at the heart of the traditional liberal world order this is terrifying I can see this clock and I am hardly into my comments don't worry I won't go and I would suggest there is a coagulation of factors out there one is that world faces an aging population that should be a call to more migration but it can actually have a reverse effect and frighten societies intimidate societies secondly I think the financial crisis the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008 were deep were profound and continued to exist in making certain societies that felt themselves to be strong and dominant more fragile in the case of Europe I think is very interesting there has been a softening of its borders really for the first time since 1945 and also the beginning of a reverse flow of migration traditionally Europe was a net contributor of migrants is now receiving more migrants disillusioned with forms of external engagement some of the military endeavours in their near abroad didn't go so well conflict again on their near borders is much more complex it's much more fibrile we have been now living for a generation in a world that has not yet got to grips with and in some into I would say with catastrophic consequences with notions of counter-terrorism now the current fashionable phrase is countering violent extremism and I think these have had profound consequences as well and there has been dangerous politics that has been brought to bear in these fragile times the net result has been I think a polarizing debate in both directions I would say it would be wrong to view this polarization simply simply as it's only reductive and simplistic to assume that anyone who expresses concerns over migration is a xenophobe it's unfair, it's inaccurate it's simplistic it fails to realize that this debate is broader than a mere collection of data points equally I think we would be remiss not to draw the link between a vein of rhetoric that is out there that is alienating dehumanizing an alarmist with the rise of intolerance in many societies 56 seconds to provide you with some solutions okay so what is to be done I'll be very quick here where we can talk about it in the conversation first figure out what the goal is is it to end migration or is it to manage it I would suggest and the purpose of the global compact is to better manage it now there are important consequences that stem from that one is you can have a more honest discussion on what your labor needs are and how external labor markets will be able to fill them secondly you could have a more honest discussion of what the root causes are the root causes of migration are very different from the root causes of irregular migration you want to be able to stem the irregular movement of people and encourage them to move in a regular and safe way and the root causes have died since 2014 in attempting to move from one country to another and you also need to be clear-eyed when you're looking at these root causes about the role of development as I said at the outset it is far from clear that development actually tamps down migration on the contrary there is a significant amount of data to suggest that it encourages migration secondly get a grip on the issue understand its scale it's not as big as all that secondly understand that it is global this is not a unique challenge for the liberal world order the vast majority of migration takes place elsewhere around the world and understand that the challenge really is to address migration's pathologies rather than migration itself I think I'll leave it there for a minute and ten over I'd like to carry on but there's enough to begin as a prentice however you I just want to thank the provost for his introduction to us and also Abbey Williams for ensuring that we came invited to this event and I was going to say that Abbey Williams and I go way back to the days of the creation of the academic council of the United Nations system at the workshop at Dartmouth College I believe it was and we were two very young at the time participants in that workshop and we made friends over the years and they wanted to thank him for having me here tonight and I also want to thank the panelists my co-panelist because they set the stage for me what I'm going to say here tonight first of all I want to focus on SIDS does anyone know what SIDS means small island small island developing states why do I want to focus on SIDS well because the liberal order is supposed to be an order to benefit small island developing states states that are vulnerable than most other states we have to question whether or not that is the case today so I want to tie it into your main theme about the liberal order perhaps vanishing in the 21st century at the time when we really desperately need elements of the liberal order and I want to connect it to this notion that many of the problems of small island developing states are intermestic problems they're not necessarily global problems they're not necessarily domestic problems the line between the international and the local have become so blurred as made these problems very complex difficult to manage and I like what John could be saying just now about migration being a global problem and I ask myself is it really a global problem or is it really an intermestic problem in the sense that the lines are so blurred sometimes we don't know which institutions of liberal order are supposed to address the problem of migration should we be using domestic institutions regional institutions, global institutions to deal with this problem so that sets the stage for what I have to say I'm going to do a trick that some of my colleagues, my more senior colleagues do when they give talks like this and they're faced with a 12 minute limitation and that is to start my conclusion first so that everybody don't get there at the end there's nobody who's going to conclude with and the basic conclusion is that global security and global governance two essential elements of the post 1945 world order which essentially had liberal principles embedded within them these things are necessary today because the threats and the vulnerabilities of especially small island developing states are such that it cannot be contained within a national border states cannot deal with these problems on their own they have to sort of deal with them collectively and the interconnectedness of the threats the interconnectedness of the vulnerabilities is what makes this much more complex and much more difficult to address and that's one of my colleagues as she made that statement in the recent publication and the problems that the governance of these problems have been done not just at one level but at multiple levels simultaneously and this is the point that's been made recently by Amitav Acharya who speaks about this new order that's emerging from the so called liberal order has been a multi-plus order multi-plus order not necessarily a multi-polar order but a multi-plus order now why do I want to stick with the Caribbean and small states because I recently spent four years in the Caribbean as a retro district in natural relations as the as Lorenzo pointed out many of the Caribbean countries have done relatively well economically they've moved from poverty-stricken countries to in some cases middle income countries and we've seen recently that it takes just a series of devastating natural disasters to push their economic progress back many many years and this is why they are so vulnerable these are small mostly island states in which a single hurricane can undo years and years of development and plunge relatively prosperous households in any Caribbean country back into poverty again we've seen this almost with Dominica the small islands that suffered through the recent hurricanes the almost perpetual bombardment of natural disasters in the Caribbean and I use that as a focus because it was there recently either hurricanes tsunamis or storms the mudslides floods earthquakes volcanoes and drugs this is what makes the Caribbean states so vulnerable and it poses not just a threat in terms of the economic development but also raises the issue of whether or not these countries can actually withstand the manifold these manifold threats whether or not those threats are going to become as essential in nature in other words are these countries that are going to maintain themselves and survive after these threats so even for those Caribbean states that have managed to transition from low income countries to middle income status they have problems getting official development assistance and sometimes concessional finance because the national community made it pretty difficult for them to be defined in a way as allows them to get that kind of financing to help them through the manifold vulnerabilities the Caribbean states are compounded by the negative impasse of globalization on these countries we know globalization is like a two-edged sword there are benefits of globalization but there are also devastating negative impasse of globalization as well in Caribbean states economies are highly susceptible to external economic shocks their domestic markets are much too small to entertain the possibility of economies of scale their economies are subject to currency speculation and they lack competitiveness to truly integrate into the global economy these countries have a high dependence on imports and produced a very limited number of goods for exports and the widening trade and current deficits of these countries combined with the massive accumulation of external debt and a very high level of consumer spending further ensures that the Caribbean countries increase their vulnerability to unexpected external economic shocks borrowing external capital to address the setbacks of natural disasters for example and inverting budgeted funds from other social concerns within the country to cope with the critical infrastructural problems that happens as a result of these natural disasters only as to the very bleak picture of these countries and I think this is not enough Caribbean region as a whole now suffers some of the highest rates of crime conflict insecurity social economic inequalities in the world so the intensification of globalization has no doubt provided abundant opportunities for the regionalization and internationalization of criminal activities all over the world and the Caribbean is no exception as I said to my students in the class just yesterday the vehicles of globalization which can bring so much good to certain countries can also be used to bring a lot of bad into countries like Trinidad and Tobago where it was recently the scale of drug trafficking money laundering human trafficking as well as illicit sale in small arms and light weapons the porousness of the borders of Caribbean states are in large part responsible for the increase in the trans border criminal activity that we see there criminal organizations operating in the Caribbean having some cases penetrating institutions like the police force the judicial system prison system and even local parties bureaucratic establishments and there's a great need for security sector reform I used to think that security sector reform is limited to countries in Africa that are going through civil conflicts but there are countries in the Caribbean with low intensity conflicts that also require security sector reform and the time that I have left is one minute 36 seconds I want to focus attention on a very serious security problem which I think Jonathan mentioned in passing but I think it's very important for the Caribbean and not a lot of people know about this and that is the problem of homegrown violent extremism why because in Trinidad and Tobago where I was there were 200 foreign fighters fighting on behalf of ISIS in Syria and Iraq here's a country that's known for its carnival and we just finished carnival just recently a fun loving country I guess there are so many people in that country that have embraced ISIS and embraced the ideology of hate perpetrated by ISIS to the point where some of them have decided to go and fight on behalf of ISIS and die on behalf of ISIS so there's another problem we have to address and that is the issue of how do we manage to assist those countries in the Caribbean with very little capacity to address these kind of problems very little security intelligence very little border security how can we help them to be able to reduce the level of violent extremism in those countries I would say suggest that the liberal order the embedded principles of the liberal order we want to introduce them but as our panelists would be saying that liberal order is on the threat right now thank you professor at this point I'd like to open it up to the panelists to ask each other questions that they may have one of the things I just come back on the on the violent extremism issue just to sort of mix things up a little bit is yesterday liberal well understood may have a solution it has also been part of the problem as well the single-minded focus I think on the violent extremism it has been understandable in its root but it has had some very dangerous consequences being any enemy of the state wherever that state is as a terrorist it has been inimical to effective peace-making, conflict management in many situations and I think the focus on violent extremism in some situations foreign terrorist fighters is a different thing because they come home so it is a national security issue but seeing violent extremism as the source of the problem when in fact it tends to bolt itself onto the problem there was relatively little violent extremism in Iraq or in Syria until the conflicts were well developed I think that is thinking about certainly I would suggest I may respond to that I think you're absolutely right about the fact that this is again another two-edged sword in a sense the liberal order because it has created this blowback if you will and I think the challenge then is to try to see what methods should be used within those countries that are developing violent extremists to try to address not to surface of the problem but underlying reasons why individuals want to become violent extremists in the first place and I think this is a challenge for any government in the region I know in Trinidad the government has not as field to deal with the underlying sources of the problems that cause individuals to gravitate towards violent extremism those sources like things like marginalization exclusion feeling as though you're not part of the society you have to be able to bring them into the society and I think this is one of the biggest challenges for those governments they have difficulties in trying to to address underlying causes and maybe the focus of the liberal order ought to be on precisely that dealing with the underlying sources as opposed to solutions that seem to me the problem is worse this I'll let you in on the conversation that Jonathan and I were having and Andy's clearly in the same place until we realized the mics were high and then we got a little more quiet but this is really all about all the issues we're talking about and the decaying of the liberal order in general I think is really about just a real disaffected people and people who are very disillusioned and everyone up here has talked about it has its roots there you see countries pulling inward you see them yearning for a simpler less globalized age it comes out in terms of it comes out in terms of not wanting binding agreements with other countries not wanting migrants disaffected people sort of finding outlets for their unhappiness be that political movements are actually joining violent extremism and I think that's kind of a thread that binds us all together and I'm 100% in agreement with you I've seen a lot of solutions in this country and not just from what we look at, I don't want to sound like a raging partisan Democrats too I don't think anybody who wants to address the root of this problem and that is that globalization not just in this country but around the world it's really left a certain population of people behind and the benefits of globalization are easy to see but I don't think we've necessarily done it in that context come back to migration my subject it's interesting that migration found its way into the UN for the first time under the shadow of the sustainable development goals and it is housed in the sustainable development goal that focuses on addressing inequalities within and between states and I think a lot of these issues that we are talking about, the challenges to the local world order I think really are being exposed by different strata of inequalities and inequities which I think are really imperative So at this point we'd like to answer your question Please find out behind the mic and for a second time I'm going to turn it over to one question I guess while you guys are lining up I guess I'll be selfish I was wondering at all of you at all of the panelists Ms. Gross pointed this out with I guess the lack of credibility that the U.S. has been espousing recently and over the past two decades since the United States acted multilaterally in Iraq and I guess very recently the withdrawal the almost withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Peace Accords how and obviously the U.S. is such a leader in the world of the Paris and the liberal world order how can we go about restoring credibility in American actions and proving that we are I guess fit to leave this order I'll start because my answer is really really short we have to walk the walk and we have to be reliable we have to make agreements and stick to them and I think the polarized environment in this country makes that more challenging and I don't think it's really sunk in yet this is a problem the fact that our face to the world keeps changing I don't think we've realized how much of a problem that is and until we do we have to be reliable and walk the walk and become reliable these issues aren't going to go away and domestic politics changes there's ebbs and flows and different strands so what seems permanent in 2018 is not going to seem permanent in 2020-2022 so I just want to put that out there as a general self-evident observation which makes me feel better to remind myself of that and also to point out the fact that yes, these are interesting times in your country and how it's projecting itself in the world but it does remain a major look at that, it is a major funder of all of these multilateral institutions that that I work with that you study and focus on and I think this shows every signs of continuing to remain so committed I think these issues are going to speak to themselves and they're going to speak more eloquently than any number of panelists can these are issues, as said at the outset, you chose this you structured the content of this panel very well these are issues that cannot be resolved that's a very, very powerful motivating factor towards a multilateral cooperative collaborative can I answer this question using a slightly different tack that is to take it sort of elevated to a theoretical plane if you will a conceptual plane world order world order, the structure world order has fundamentally three planks three pillars, if you will one is ideas the ideas that sort of propel the world order in the first place, right the second is the institutions that are created when a new world order comes into being and those institutions have embedded with them the ideas that are dominant at the time and the third pillar is the material capability the capacity to do something within those institutions the capacity to do something with the ideas so you have these three elements that you can think about it that way what we are witnessing right now is a shift in world order I would argue from the 1945 world order that was brought in essentially by the United States which was at the time the most dominant power in the international system whose ideas were embedded within the U.N. Charter you see a lot of it that are sort of very familiar to many Americans because you can find it in your own constitution some of those ideas the liberal ideas were embedded within the institutions that were created in 1945 the post world war II institutions and those institutions basically reflected the dominance of the hegemony at the time in the United States the capacity to do something with it the United States as Jonathan mentioned they are still very much paying paying for the institutions and paying for the work of the institutions hegemony comes with responsibility and there is economic responsibility you can't be the hegemon without real-life responsibility what we are witnessing now is a hegemon that's failing a hegemon that's losing what are you and as a result the ideas that they used to support they are not even going against some of those ideas and the institutions that they used to support they are no longer supporting in the way that they used to so maybe this is a temporary thing let's hope it's just temporary let's hope it's just a trunk thing that's a big elephant in the room here but it started before Trump this decline in U.S. hegemony there are other states that are obviously clashing with the United States in terms of positioning themselves to take a leading role within the international system China is one of them but it's not the only one and I think this is a sign a signal that maybe our world order the structure of the world order is undergoing some sort of shift and we are living through it right now we don't know what it's going to look like we don't know what the pulse already is going to look like but certainly there is depth of attention in that system and in that structure because ideas are shifting the institutions are not being supported in the way that there should be other ultimate institutions being created and the material capabilities are not always given to support the institutions as well so I'm proud to add this before you give your questions so... could I follow up? my question is actually directly related to that thank you Dr. Knight my question is related to looking at the current multi-national organizations and because in the time that they were created in a certain sense as they were created we've all commented on how it's very different now changing materials, changing powers how do you see the role of the existing multi-national organizations changing or the need for new multi-national organizations or possibly more nations working more individualistically in as we're seeing trade groups more kind of silent it would be very quick but hi John hi John I want to be very quick on this one but I'm going to go back to what I said about I'm a type of chariot or world order that should really take place away from multilateral world order to multi-plex world order in which the the players aren't necessarily nation states always there are non-governmental organizations there are private sector institutions that have the capacity to do some problems we're dealing with they just need to have the institutional framework to operate so I think what's happening is that we're operating now in a multi-plex world order that's the shit that's going on and therefore it's going to mean that we're going to have to think differently about how we solve some of these problems we may not be able to depend on nation states in order to solve these problems even working collectively we may have to have private partnerships at a global level to address some of these problems because some of the private actors are much more substantial in terms of material capability than sometimes some of the states so that would be one way to look at this is to think of this as a transitional moment in history and we've gone through these transitional moments before I mean they've gone from the medieval period to the lesbian world order that was a transitional moment it changed the whole nature in which the international system operated the state system became the dominant actor I'm able to city-state in this era so we've gone through these just before there's no reason why we can't imagine us going through another transition like this one Thank you very much, my name is I'm from the University of Israel and my question is mostly to Mr. O'Buffin that's the president's program I'm more than happy to hear you do so I will use Professor Nye's tactic I'll just cut to the chase and the example of my explanation My question is the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Courses is actually a symptom of the United States losing its leadership at least in the environmental area so can I give an example or explain myself? Well I would like to address the inter-security and specifically the Mox Valley River Facility it was as far as I remember we were cancelled after several prolongations the accountant office actually said that we're just hemorrhaging money so it should be closed or either solve that problem or close it and please continue the hand for the different mountain concerns and all that stuff made me kind of feel that whether from political or chemical reasons the United States has difficulties to project its power as a global environmental leader and gravel from the Paris Accord is just a symptom I think I might actually separate those two examples I feel like the US has a bit of a love-hate relationship with nuclear we can't quite decide we generally like the idea of nuclear power we like that it's carbon free those who care but the challenge is nobody wants a nearby nobody wants the waste nearby nobody wants the plants nearby I think is an ongoing challenge that's quite different from the changing attitude towards environmentalism that we've seen in this administration from the last I think that's an ongoing issue and so you'll see this administration pushing more for Yucca Mountain I'm not sure, I think they're actually the ones that wanted to cancel in Savannah River but I think there's generally a real mistrust of nuclear that way predates the current trend and as far as the US and environmental leadership it's a really interesting one I don't necessarily think that we're trying to change our attitude towards environmental leadership I don't think anybody, up to and including Scott Pruitt wakes up in the morning and says I'm going to mess up the environment today but I think this administration has a real mistrust of regulations and really is focused on markets and they're like these are problems that markets can solve and regulating can lead to an efficient way of dealing with things and so that I think is the way that I think it's a combination of our mistrust of regulations and our mistrust of multilateralism that is being projected out into the world as a general pulling back on the environment or pulling back on leadership in the environment but I think it's not so much rooted in environmental attitudes as it is these two fundamental attitudes towards regulation and multilateralism Thank you Hi, my name is Julia and I'm from Brazil I study law My question is to Mr. Grossman Mr. Prentice and it's regarding environmental refugees so I wanted to get an irritating environmental refugees and if you think that moving forward that's going to be a transnational problem I believe that it's going to be a problem that the countries will have to deal with especially climate change countries get small countries sometimes people have to migrate because of the rising water and what you think would be the best way to deal with that if you think the refugee definition the classic definition would have to be sort of changed to include those people or if they fall into another category of migrants I think also Andy applies heavily to the small island states can I just say something nothing to do with that question but just some of the other questions and discourse again, I suspect it's self-evident but I'm going to say it anyway we should not conflate the liberal world of order with the US there is overlaps with that all so when we discuss threats of the liberal world order it shouldn't be reduced to is the US as powerful as it was yesterday I want to put that out there environmental refugees is going to become an issue it is complicated for a number of reasons one, you intimated that there is no such category of refugees of environmental refugees and indeed I think when you look at a lot of the roots of multilateralism the UN Charter the Universal Declaration on Human Rights the 51 refugees convention that I mentioned in my woefully complete comments try drafting them today we wouldn't get anywhere near the high principle and protective elements and aspiration that the drafters had back there so I say this because I think the notion that we weren't suggesting of reopening the refugee convention to redefine it to broaden it may actually backfire but what this issue and I think there are other issues as well it is as yet unclear how many people migrate solely because of environmental factors in fact what research is out there tends to suggest is intuitively makes sense that it's a confluence of factors of motivations that compel people or encourage people to move and this comes to my last point is what is around notions of voluntariness it's clear if you're a refugee you're not moving for voluntary reasons and then as I said in my comments the popular epithet is if you're not a refugee you're an economic migrant and that carries with it certain pejorative connotations that you're seeking a better life because you feel like it that you want to cue barge you want to take jobs from other people and it strips any notion or subtlety of motivation or compulsion out of decision to move or not and one of these factors is of course going to be in many instances the environment I suspect it's going to be dealt with for the foreseeable on a very ad hoc basis for example in some of the pacific island states that many of them already have dual nationality with Australia for example New Zealand just announced it was going to issue humanitarian visas to some of these small island states in its neighbourhood precisely for these reasons but it is going to be one factor amongst many that is simply going to contribute to what I think we've all been saying is that this issue migration not going away in fact if anything the indicators are it's going to intensify in the coming years and that sort of builds on what you said I'm sorry to answer your question with question I think I'm going in the right direction here I kind of hear you saying that actually the way the charter is now we're unlikely to get anything that's better and more functional and perhaps given the continuum between refugees and economic migrants that's not a zero one thing that's a continuum and the environmental refugees environmental migrants continuum just like the migration system I agree with this what I'm talking about is entrenching in treating law I think you would be very hard pressed to get an expansion of the refugee definition and possibly full hardy to go down that route without getting into a discussion with refugee law because I'm not really equipped to do that there has inevitably since 1951 since the 67 protocol there has been an expansion of subsidiary protections and in fact you could look at some of the the regional arrangements like for your region the Cartagena Declaration that allowed generalized violence to become a refugee cause that's not in the 1951 convention so you can see either on a regional basis or as a matter of customary international law and practice this definition being opened up I was talking about as a matter of hard treaty law at the multilateral level difficult to see it happening any time soon thank you very much firstly thank you so much for the interesting panel my name is Arthur E. Harding and I'm a first year student here at TUF I'm part of the Epidemiology I'm not from the first Russian which John maybe asked but as you all mentioned the United States is the joint Paris peace so Paris America's global compact and various of the things at the same time we see nations like China Russia adopting the very same economic and political institutions in the way ahead considering the different value systems this multiplex order do we see a change in these policies that the system made when these expected preferences would go on I mean nowhere can play in the liberal order with the United States in the United States receding its role but at the same time being the hegemony it has had an effect this I think Mr. Prentice is going to answer this question so sorry can I paraphrase the question are you asking whether you see this whether I see this or we see this liberal world order is it going to change the affairs or do you think it's going to be replaced by no my question is considering the fact that all nations like China and Russia and various other nations are accepting the very political and economic institutions which were framed by the United States and the West back in 1945 do they consider any changes in the near future because they have all different values and different understandings of where they come from I'm not sure I would accept the premise that they have different values I mean I'm not trying to be well I'm slightly trying to be difficult we were in an academic environment I don't know what that means I mean they have bought into this system China for example is now one of the more sizable contributors to UN peacekeeping missions that's a direct consequence of the expansion of its power and influence the world over it realises again to take up what Andy said that as you become more powerful certain responsibilities lie with that now and I wish to say it's as simplistic as that but again I think what I hope you will drill down on as you ask the question over the next few days is is the liberal world order ending what do we mean by the liberal world order and which bits of it actually might and we'd be not too unhappy about saying goodbye to if indeed it is ending I think there is an assumption behind these questions that what we have is good as a sort of homogenous whole I urge you to query whether that is in fact the case so whether it's the US or China being the dominant force in world affairs I don't really have personally any strong views on that what I think I want to have to do what we want to do is put in place a system of checks hopefully the power of whoever is the dominant force could not be total and frameworks through which we can co-operate that's essentially what multilateralism is good evening I was just curious for Dr. Knight you addressed a number of the issues that face these small allegations ranging from economic to security threats and particularly those presented by natural disasters how do you see those threats going away in a sustainable way that those countries can then continue to manage other obviously the rest of the world has a role to play in rectifying these issues in a short and medium term but as a long term problem these countries aren't going to get more land and natural disasters unfortunately won't go away at least for current technology how do you see these countries being sustainable and viable over the long term that's a very good question and I really don't know what the answer to it is yet it reminded me of something that Jonathan said in his talk which I thought was very significant he said in the case of migration you have two choices end migration altogether or manage it and I would say that while that's true there are some countries that just don't have the capacity to manage migration Trinidad is one of them but as well as about the implode right now there are thousands of Venezuelans coming into Trinidad and they have no capacity to I mean border to stop those individuals coming in to Trinidad so the problem is that many of these issues are like I said before, intermestic rather than simply domestic problems or global problems so there's a blurring of the line between the domestic and international so I can't see a situation where these countries facing the vulnerabilities of the threats that they face to the point of being almost a substantial threat I can't see those countries have the capacity to deal with it on their own or even within their own region Characombe has failed to to act in a proper way recently because it doesn't have the capacity to deal with it so at the end of the day what you're looking at is really a multilateral system I know not only a multilateral system but a multi-platform system that would involve not just all the countries of the world getting together and trying to solve this problem collectively but also involving non-governmental organizations private sector organizations private sector industries to help solve some of these problems the reality is that some of those countries that you were talking about in the Caribbean for example, small islands and developing states they no longer exist they maybe think that they are existing today right now they sometimes don't have the capacity to exist as the independent states they're just independent states in name only but not in a de facto sense they might be a de jure a sovereign state recognized by other states but de facto they're not able to operate as independent states right now so I see the possibility that some of these states will no longer exist to be quite honest as by animal states that's the reality thank you very much I'm Lena, I'm from Brazil I'm from Washington my question is for Mrs. Gross I would like to know about the United States position on the United Nations agreement on international jurisdiction and what can be the impacts on these islands I'm embarrassed to admit that I actually don't know as much about that as I should and so I don't think I can give an educated opinion on that yeah but doing that in an August room such as this is someone call if you want it so I'm sorry that I can't help you out as much you know what I might do though if I have the mic is I may throw out an answer to it but I personally answer to some of the questions that I've heard and I'm sorry it's less helpful to your question but when we're talking about the death of the world and the challenges that that is and what is going to replace it and what happens with China and Russia and what's going to be rising something that one of my colleagues has done a little work on David Victor who's with Brookings and UC San Diego the idea that even though multilateral huge global problems you don't necessarily need huge global groups to make progress I mean we see sort of smaller groups of countries like the G7 and the G20 and we're all really comfortable with those migrants on environmental issues they can be laboratories for innovation they can do some proof of concept on different things and so you actually don't need everybody to agree through the UN process because it's so hard to get people to agree on anything through the UN process that everybody's goals are so different in their international interests so this is a I feel like I've been a little somber up here but this is one really positive thing for me on how to face something if you get enough people to move something forward you can learn a lot from doing it they can make some progress and you can learn what works and so it doesn't relate as much to your question but it also maybe harkens back to it may not be the end of the world if the US doesn't sign something if there are enough groups cooperating enough countries enough sub-nationals, the people that matter then it may not be the end of the world if any one country doesn't do something if enough people are doing the right thing you can learn a lot from that my name is Uzair my question is that's so tremendous and it's sort of along the lines of the capacity of managing migration there's this notion in political discourse that if we allow refugees to come here there are going to be some that slip through the cracks and do all sorts of things but what isn't being told is the process of becoming a legal refugee it's one of the hardest processes to obtain a refugee status in the United States between 18 to 24 months it's harder than any other visa process that you can get and so my question really how do you flip this whole question and flip it to baseline facts and not a rhetoric that is either established to fear or through any other issue and how can you pay that into the discourse amongst the American people it's a great question actually it's a brilliant question because it helps me to finish off my comments and in fact I think it plays into a strand that permeates all three of our presentations essentially it requires leadership I don't mean that in a glib way because leadership I think one of the most difficult aspects of leadership is to put in particularly for liberal world order who tend to be operating in democracies who have to put in place policies that outlast the electoral cycles so they are both prey to a popular a media popular views but also must transcend them as with my boss in Europe I will keep it anonymous and having a meeting with a senior cabinet official who was explaining how he understood what needed to be done on migration but you know doing that now would be electoral suicide my boss said with sort of mock naivety I'm sorry I thought government officials always operated in the public interest to which this government official shot back immediately it is in the public interest that I'm re-elected but this highlights I think the central challenge that they have this short versus long term but I think there are some things that you can do in the short term and one of those really revolves around the responsible use of rhetoric and we see rhetoric used either subconsciously or sadly not so subconsciously irresponsibly all the time you know one of my favourites I used to spend a lot of my pre-working in the conflict field was one of my favourites was the reference to innocent civilians as if somehow there's another category of civilians out there whom we can bomb a little bit but but you really see this in Spain when you're talking about migration swarms and cubarges I mean this is really the pejorative end of the discourse conflating traffickers and smugglers is another one referring to countries as countries of origin or countries of destination is another it implicitly places the onus or the burden on the country of origin you are sending your problems to us the innocent country of destination ignoring the reality in fact that countries are the same that both at one at the same time they are countries of origin destination and transit more often frankly and also economic and illegal migrants or two of my bug bears if you don't pay tax you're not an illegal citizen so why you suddenly your whole personality becomes illegal because of the administrative status by which you're in a country it is lost to me and it is very dangerous it leads to a very difficult environment in which you can have a constructive debate around the type of needs that your society has in terms of of labour being the most obvious one refugees which was your subject which was the focus of your question I changed it to migrants is slightly different because of course they have a legal status there is an obligation to provide them with protection the more complicated one are migrants where there is no such obligation but your society needs them in any event good evening my name is Lisa Hamann I'm a teacher in the college Dublin and I've studied international these days Dr Knight you were mentioning a very important point that the unclearity and lack of responsibility especially when we talk about migration and a refugee crisis I think it's inseparable from a lack of empathy and I was wondering because it is a multi-level task how would you suggest to redevelop empathy on this certain levels and especially on the political sphere where the political leaders decide what is right or wrong or what the next act will be and I actually do believe that with empathy or redeveloping the feeling of empathy the responsibility comes and I wanted to know what your opinion about empathy and responsibility is that's a very thoughtful question I think and it's thoughtful because at the time I think there's not a lot of empathy being shown by some of the leaders in this country I should say I have to be very careful but I think there's a problem with that if you have leadership that don't demonstrate empathy you can see it starting to affect the rest of the society too and starting to see others also displaying the same lack of empathy throughout society I think that can be reasoned by the point it goes back to the point of I think that international relations have tried to steer away from the notion that ethics and morality matters right there are those who are of the opinion that ethics and morality don't really matter in international relations that what really matters is interest national interest matters not ethics, not morality I think we have to bring morality that is back in in the same way that we talked about bringing the state back in we have to bring back some of those underlying principles of ethics, morality, empathy back into society and back into this course on national relations I believe it has to start with the leadership in some of these countries embracing the notion of empathy and hopefully help to affect the rest of the society that this is the way to go I don't know if that asks you a question but if that's where it will start it answered a part of it I'm still wondering and struggling and finding and attempts to how we actually bring the board of directors to realize this important task I think maybe we have to start electing local leaders who have empathy in other words we have to start voting those without empathy out of office maybe that's one way to do it thank you good evening my name is Kamigwara I'm a senior at Tufts University I'm in the epic club where I study international relations in Russia my question is what is the most gross one I think really fascinating phenomenon we've seen in international relations recently is this sort of subtle ascension of sub-state actors so non-federal non-national governments sort of taking the stage in international relations we see that with Xi Jinping visiting the California District Ground we see that with this whole reaction of citizens in London reacting against what I said given the role that sub-state actors like city governments even townships but on the broader scale state governments, province governments play in the climate crisis especially considering the fact that things like emissions emissions standards building codes, urban planning those are all regulated at the sub-national level what role do these governments play what can they do to transcend sort of the national rhetoric national politics surrounding climate change particularly in the United States right now you are right and you actually included part of what I was planning to answer your question within your question it is entirely true that a lot of policies that are really important to emissions and I'll talk about sub-nationalism climate because that's sort of where my knowledge base is a lot of the things, building codes how grids are set up and operated at the sub-national level and so sub-nationals have a lot of say in how the US complies with its climate goals it's funny a different talk that I've given to a different audience where I've tried to sort of raise some optimism about not so much about our withdrawal but about the effect of our withdrawal one of the things that makes our withdrawal less bad environmentally is that a lot of the decisions that need to be made are not federal and so what you'll see is that we won't see a strong drop-off in our emissions reduction efforts in our clean energy efforts because a lot of these are just not federal decisions what will happen which is a little bit more challenging is that you'll see more divergence among states and I spoke to some California officials a few weeks ago and one of the things that they're thinking about a lot in California and as you see they're pushing hard and good on them for doing it and seeing what works and that's good for the world in a lot of ways but it may become challenging for them and they're starting to think about this is if they get away ahead of everyone else they start to have a lot of edge effects competitiveness effects effects of rather than reducing emissions they're sort of moving emissions around like okay fine well we won't do that in California and tomorrow we'll do it in another state and so this I think it's challenging not just with sub-national actors where there are differences of opinion in how you should deal with climate and environmental issues that a lot of these decisions are made locally which can be helpful when you have jurisdictions that feel very strongly about them and pushing really hard when it gets challenging is when you don't have the federal sort of setting the floor and you get two disparate policies that you start to have migration of emissions and edge effects around the states and that's when it starts to get challenging that's where you start to need the center to sort of set some boundaries and keep those effects from getting too big and so but when I talk about this and talking about it a lot internationally I feel like I'm almost playing psychiatrist and saying no it's not this bad environmentally and that's one of the things that I point out is that a lot of these decisions are not federal and also a lot of business decisions are not changing we were talking I was talking with a couple folks about this at dinner tonight and when you look at energy companies making decisions a four year administration when you're thinking about a four year project is peanuts they're not changing how they make decisions even for investments in the US because their decision horizon is much longer than this administration and when they think about what's happening they don't make these decisions based on a four year administration they look at the way the whole world is going and they make decisions differently so that's again optimism that's a little bit of optimism around our withdrawal Thank you I think I'm equalizing my university in Moscow well what is it about the revival of the US meaning that usually private actors they won't put the problem they won't put the problem and talk tonight you mentioned that the private sector private sector actors should contribute more to the development to the development of smaller violence states so could you please expand a little bit on that and maybe you can give some examples of the patterns of some big mechanisms that private companies transnational companies are engaged in solving these problems I'm now working in Moscow in the state office in the region of Istanbul saying that I'm going to work on private private operations in the sphere of development and I've worked on all the processes we've worked on and they say well we don't really know the only example you can recall is these climate goals that we sent to schools which is attributed to my stream like the climate knowledge to the students so it's like but it's not like the situation some examples of private companies contributing to this problem that's a very good question actually and again it goes back to my concession actually I'm a type of charity's conception of the multi-plex world order which you're looking at many different types of players not just states not state actors but also private commercial firms and private security firms and so on getting involved in decision making and helping to solve certain types of problems it really brought me back to what Sam had to say about like-minded groups of actors working together on a problem you don't need to have the entire globe working on it but a few like-minded actors and those actors don't necessarily have to be a few like-minded states it could be the states in combination with non-state actors I think I can think of a couple of examples I think of the audible process have you ever heard of the audible process to ban landmines in a treaty that was signed to ban landmines okay so Canada took the lead on this I remember the foreign minister was Lord that's worthy at the time and Canada took the lead but you know what he did he didn't get a lot of buy-in to create this process to ban landmines from states within the UN system he had the difficult time getting the UN system members to be part of this so what he did was involved companies businesses that were involved in perhaps creating helping to create the landmines in the first place and he brought them together in Ottawa that's what's called the audible process brought in academics I was one of the academics, I was a junior academic at the time so he brought in academics he brought in people from the private sector and what he did was create a coalition of actors that had the same mindset wanted to ban these despicable weapons that do more damage after wars are over that even during the wars it's really despicable what people can do with those landmines and the United States as a primary actor in National Affairs didn't want to be part of this at all but guess what, I think in large part because of the efforts of that combination of different actors the US actually started to abide by some of the measures that are in that landmine treaty so I think it would have a way of moral suasion sometimes on countries that may not want to be part of that kind of deal and eventually force them into or shame them maybe into to be a part of that process so that was just one example to think of off the top but this is an evolving issue so you have to sort of find the case studies and sort of look at them in more detail and see which ones are working I know that the efforts to stop the trade in small arms and light weapons is also attracting companies and private sector actors into that process as well so there are a few examples that I can point to like that that includes this panel thank you for coming it's a lot of poking discussion I know some of you have you're a little sleepy I guess you're just weighed down by the intellectual knowledge learning you just learned anyway this the symposium will continue tomorrow at Lane Hall at room 100 the next panel will be the changing social contract the globalized economy and technology in the 21st century that's tomorrow at Lane Hall at room 100 at 1230 thank you thank you see you outside


The food industry, like the tobacco companies and other drug lords, have been able to come up with products that tap into that same dopamine reward system. Why a picture of a cheeseburger rather than sugary soda pop? Well now we know fat may have similar effects on the brain as well. You feed some people some yogurt packed with butterfat, and within 30 minutes you can start to see the same changes in brain activity you get when you drink sugar water.  It's like when drug abusers have to use more and more to get the same high. Frequent ice cream consumption is related to a reduction in reward region responsivity in humans. They're talking about the pleasure center in the brain. Paralleling the tolerance observed in drug addiction. Once we've so doled our dopamine response, we may subsequently overeat in an effort to achieve the degree of satisfaction experienced previously, which contributes to unhealthy weight gain. What do fatty sugary foods have in common? They are energy dense foods. It may be less than a number of calories than their concentration. Consumption of a calorie dense diet, compared to the same number of calories in a calorie dilute diet, leads to that numbing of the dopamine response. It's like the difference between cocaine and crack. Same stuff chemically, but by smoking crack cocaine, we can deliver a kind of a higher dose quicker to our brain. As an aside, I found it interesting that the control drink in these milkshake studies wasn't just water. But they can't use water because our brain can actually taste water on the tongue. I didn't know that. So they had to use artificial saliva. They made people drink a solution designed to mimic the natural taste of saliva. Ew. Anyway, with this new understanding of the neural correlates of food addiction, there have been calls to include obesity as an official mental disorder. After all, both obesity and addiction share the inability to restrain behavior in spite of an awareness of detrimental health consequences. That's one of the defining criteria of substance abuse.  Yet you can't stop. Redefining obesity as an addiction, as a psychiatric disease, would be a boon to drug companies that are already working on a whole bunch of drugs to muck with our brain chemistry. For example, you give people an opiate blocker, like they do for people with heroin overdoses to block the effects of the drug, and people eat significantly less cheese. It just doesn't do as much for them anymore when their opiate receptors are blocked. Rather than taking drugs, though, we can prevent the deadening of our food center in the first place by sticking to foods that are naturally calorically dilute, like whole plant foods. This can help bring back our dopamine sensitivity so that we can again derive the same pleasure from the simplest of foods. And this is not just for people who are obese. Yes, when we regularly eat calorie-dense animal and junk foods like ice cream, we can blunt our pleasure center and overeat to compensate. But when our brain down regulates dopamine receptors to deal with all these jolts of fat and sugar, we may experience less enjoyment from other activities as well. That's why cocaine addicts may have an impaired neurological capacity to enjoy sex, while smokers also have an impaired ability to respond to positive stimuli. Since these all involve the same dopamine pathways, what we put into our body, what we eat, can affect how we experience all of life's pleasures. So to live life to the fullest, what's the solution? Well, the food industry, according to some addiction specialists, should be given incentives to develop low-calorie foods that are more attractive, palatable, and affordable so that people can adhere to diet programs for a long time. No need. Mother nature beat them all to it.


Working as a director has been my lifelong dream. As a child, watching movies was my favorite pastime. I would try to imitate my favorite directors by filming movies of my own. For my 13th birthday, I asked for a video camera. I remember feeling like an actual director as I carried my camera around and filmed whatever I could find. Filming wasn't just an activity for me, it was my passion. In film school, I was learning the practices of successful directors. I was to watch as many films as I could. I survived on a study diet of cockle pitchcock and lynch. I'd seen all of the classics. I watched and re-watched them. I studied and took notes. There wasn't anything left to watch. I resorted to short films, independent projects. I would browse the internet for hours, searching for my next one. Sometimes, the task became grueling. Each storyline was different, but all of them felt like the same movie. I wanted something fresh, something new. It was in this moment of desperation that I stumbled upon a video on YouTube, except it wasn't like the other ones. It struck my attention because the video didn't have any views, perhaps because it was titled only with the number one, and the thumbnail was just an image of a young woman sitting down on a couch. After hours of idle searching, my interest was sparked. As the thumbnail suggested, the video showed a woman sitting on a couch. Her body was facing forward, but her face was turned towards what appeared to be a television. She was in a living room. Occasionally, she would pick up the remote from her side and change the channel. The video was shot in such a way that it appeared the camera was fixed on her, even as she moved. It was an unconventional method of filming, and I hadn't seen it used often, so I was already gripped. I glanced at the time indicator. The length of the video was five minutes, yet three minutes into the video, nothing of importance had seemingly happened. I skipped to the near end and the woman remained sitting on the couch. Puzzled, yet intrigued, I continued to the next video titled, 2.  After she was finished, she transferred the vegetables from the cutting board into a bowl, and then began adding various seasonings. It continued on for five minutes, just as the last video, as she ambled around the kitchen. I proceeded to the next video titled, 3, in which she appeared vacuuming the carpets of the living room. I didn't plan to watch each five minute video, so I looked to the user's channel to see how many videos had been posted. My jaw dropped when I reached the end of the page listing the videos uploaded. Fifty videos had been filmed. Each apparently consisting of five minutes of everyday household chores. Despite feeling overwhelmed, I continued watching. I couldn't just leave this discovery behind. My curiosity was aroused. Each video was practically the same, consisting of the same woman carrying out everyday tasks. I made my way through each one. I didn't watch them fully, and skipped to the next one before I became bored. It wasn't until I was towards the end of the series that I noticed the videos started to take a different somewhat darker direction. In this particular video, the woman was lying in bed. It was dark, but I could see that her eyes were closed, and she didn't appear to know she was being filmed. The camera was positioned above her, filming her as she tossed and turned restlessly. A feeling of a sneeze came over me as I watched. I wasn't settled, yet also filled with a morbid curiosity. The videos appeared to become more and more intrusive. I watched her leaning against the wall in what appeared to be the living room. There was something different about her in this video. Her body appeared as if she hadn't been eating, and her face was a sickly shade of pale as if she were ill. Her eyes were wide with worry, and her forehead was wrinkled in frustration. She frequently looked around the room, darting her eyes from left to right as if she were afraid someone was going to sneak up on her. Holding a phone to her ear, she spoke in a muffled voice. She spoke in a fast and rushed tone, occasionally stopping to catch her breath. I couldn't comprehend what she was saying, but I could make out the words, watching me, and what if something happens to the baby, and please help me. Towards the end of the call, her eyes filled up with tears and she began to cry, only stopping to gasp for breath in between subs. In the next video, I watched as she frantically rummaged through her room. She looked under the bed, opened each drawer, and even removed the picture frames from the walls. When her search proved fruitless, she walked over to the bookshelf. Standing in front of the bookshelf, her body was facing the camera, and she was seemingly closer to it than she had been in all of the previous videos. She began removing books and tossing each one to the floor. It was then that I was able to see her face clearly. I suddenly recalled the missing person poster I had seen a few weeks ago while I was out. I could only remember a few vague details, like that she was in her early twenties and she had a baby, but I distinctly remember her face. My heart skipped a beat upon the realization that it was the same woman. The feeling of nausea filled my stomach. I gulped in fear as I watched the woman in the video suddenly freeze. For the first time, she looked into the camera. Her face became contorted in an expression of horror. She gasped and her hands flew to her mouth. The video came to a stop. I sat motionless in my computer chair. Any sense of curiosity I had was vanished. I didn't want to continue watching, but I knew I had to find out what happened. With a shaking hand, I reluctantly clicked the next video. It was the last one. A sense of dread filled me as I watched the screen intently, my eyes wide and bloodshot. Nothing appeared on the screen. It was entirely black. I could hear a faint and muffled sound in the background, a woman screaming in pain and a baby crying in a shrill and high tone, as if it had been crying for a long time. It continued on for three minutes until the woman's agonized screaming turned into groaning and then completely dissipated after several minutes. The video came to an end. I immediately stood up from my seat and bolted across the house to find the phone. I called the police. I don't know how I managed to get the words out. My voice shook and my entire body trembled with fear as I waited. When the police finally arrived, I led them to my computer. It had automatically turned off from inactivity, so I restarted it and opened up the browser. I tried to find the video again, but the search was fruitless. I quickly grew panic. My eyes widened in disbelief when I saw that the computer history had been completely cleared. I searched, using every possible method I knew, but it was as if the video had never existed. The police officer scoffed at me. I begged them to listen to me and to consider what I had to say, but they didn't believe me. The police won't believe me. My family won't believe me. No one believes me. I feel like I'm losing my mind. With each passing second, this feeling of dread inside of me grows stronger. I haven't been able to sleep for days. I lie awake every night, afraid that whoever or whatever killed that woman is going to come for me. It could be watching me right now.