Harvard Workshop on Global Law and Policy in Qatar

Leading Research Fellow Kirill Molodyko and Research Fellow Maksim Karliuk were selected among one hundred young and promising scholars to participate in the high-level scientific workshop of the Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy. Kirill shares his experience and impressions in our blog.

In early January, I visited Qatar in order to attend the annual Harvard workshop on global law and policy. The workshop was organised by the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School and Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar. 

I would like to note that a year before, being already a student at Harvard, I applied for this workshop, but failed to pass through. My next attempt, fortunately, proved to be more successful. The competition is fierce. After all, the selected participants do not bear any financial costs linked with their participation, except for the money spent on souvenirs at the famous local market Souq Waqif. The participants, about 100 people per year, are mostly selected among graduate students and young university professors, taking into account the traditional Harvard approach of using geographic diversification.

Those who have proved their worth are given the opportunity to claim the position of programme assistant next year. In addition, IGLP also holds annual summer conferences within Harvard University under the direction of the permanent project supervisor, David Kennedy, Hudson Professor of Harvard Law School.

Ideologically, the workshop organisers try to give the participants an opportunity both to deepen their knowledge in the area of their already established personal professional interests, and – for their overall development – to acquire information about something completely new, something they have never come across so far.

That is why the workshop includes lectures on an interdisciplinary level, as well as work in groups of two types.

For example, in some permanent groups we were discussing each other's scientific articles (or their drafts). These works were the main criteria of the earlier selection process. Specifically, for five consecutive days in a group of 10 people under the leadership of Gleider Hernandez, Professor of the University of Durham, we were discussing two articles per day respectively.

Those groups were not selected by topics; they were based on geographic diversification. The idea of those 'first type' groups was to provide participants with the information about some new areas that people have never actually come across before. Thus, in my group I was familiar at some basic level with only three topics out of those presented by my nine groupmates.

I presented my draft article on the correlations between the rating indicators of countries in international rankings and the economic performance of the corresponding countries. However, many participants presented more nationally-oriented reports related to the trends of legislation development particularly in their own country.

In addition, each participant had to enrol in three two-day groups of the 'second type' from a general list of nine groups. Here the people would sign up on the basis of their narrower professional interests. Among the corresponding groups that I visited, I most of all liked the track "The Legal Architecture of Monetary Integration" conducted jointly by two famous scholars: Dr. Leopold Specht (Austria), Academic Supervisor of our Lab, and Professor Moatasem El-Gheriani from Egypt. The latter also read one of the general lectures on Islamic law as a whole and a few specific aspects of Islamic banking for all participants of the school.

I should note that in Qatar there are some construction works of an incredible scale in progress – with an eye to the World Cup in 2022. There is also a similarly huge construction site in the campus of Hamad bin Khalifa University where the seminar was held. In fact, it is a new, recently opened University – the second one in the state. Qatar is strategically striving for the regional leadership and, as I understand, one of the ways to achieve this goal is to teach the highest possible share of the future regional elite within its walls. And although Saudi Arabia founded a new huge university with the same goals in mind, I think Qatar still has a certain competitive advantage in the form of a relatively milder moral system.

In conclusion, I would like to note that I have very positive memories not only of the business part of the workshop, but also of the Persian Gulf, the Museum of Islamic Art, and especially of the extreme jeep safari in the desert, with which our workshop came to an end.