Harvard Workshop on Global Law and Policy in Qatar: Part 2

Research Fellow Maksim Karliuk on Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law & Policy Workshop, which took place from 2 to 11 January 2015 in Education City in Doha, Qatar.

The Workshop brought together over 100 doctoral and post-doctoral scholars as well as faculty from around the world for a unique series of lectures and intensive interdisciplinary debates. The Workshop aimed to promote innovative ideas and alternative approaches to issues of global law, economic policy, and social justice in the aftermath of the economic crisis. The aim was to strengthen the next generation of scholars by placing them in collaboration with their global peers as they develop innovative ideas and alternative approaches to issues of global law, economic policy, social justice and governance.

The Workshop was focused around a series of substantive Streams. Exploration of each stream was led by a team of senior scholars, and was designed to promote discussion of recently scholarly trends as well as classical texts. I myself participated in three streams. The International Law stream was about rethinking the possibilities and limitations of general international law today. The Legal Architecture of Monetary Integration stream explored the global financial architecture as mechanism of integration within a hegemonic political and economic system. The Thought and Method stream explored a range of intellectual and analytic methods that have animated innovative, heterodox and critical work in global law and policy.

The core of the IGLP Workshop was writing workshops. Each day, participants shared their own scholarship and discussed their own ongoing research in small groups. The writing workshops allowed participants to engage on a one-on-one basis with their peers and specialist faculty members, as well as to share ideas and receive feedback on their work from participants, junior and senior faculty. Each participant was assigned to a group and paired with a partner, where they presented and commented on each other’s papers. My writing workshop partner was a Japanese scholar doing research at Kyoto University and the University of Chicago on contemporary criminal law issues. My research contribution was on the legal order of the Eurasian Economic Union as compared with the EU's autonomous legal order.

In addition, there were several plenary talks and lectures by leading scholars and policy makers on various topics of current importance.

Apart from studies and research, there were various opportunities for networking with scholars from around the world and jointly exploring Doha. Thus, there were outings to downtown Doha, the Museum of Islamic Art and desert safari.

Upon the end of the seminar, the participants were awarded with Harvard Law School certificates of successful completion of the Workshop. However, the main award of the 10-day Workshop was the incredibly high intellectual level of the event, which spurred thoughts on further research, and contacts with scholars from around the world.