Spring Speaker Series
International Institutions Under Strain
Given the leadership role that the United States continues to play in the world, for our Spring Speaker series the council brought a series of three events looking at International Institutions Under Strain Post WWII Era. Our objective was for the local community to gain deeper insights into foreign policy and affairs being discussed. It is also important to understand how the institution’s challenges can impact the everyday lives of American citizens.
This series highlights the particular threats and future direction of three powerful international institutions: UN, WTO, & NATO.
United Nations
Our first speaker, Shelley Inglis, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton discussed the rise of new economic powers, resurgent authoritarianism, and ethnonationalism in many societies and politics. Shelley Inglis expertise lies in system-wide policy coordination coherence in the field of rule of law. Her experience includes providing policy guidance and programme support to UN field presences particularly in conflict-affected and post-conflict environments.
Click here to learn more about the United Nations in this private interview with our guest speaker, Shelley Inglis.
World Trade Organization
Daniel Ikenson, Director of Cato’s Herbert A Stiefel Center, Trade Policy Studies visited the Greater Cincinnati area to discuss the international institution under strain, World Trade Organization.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an essential pillar of the global trading system. It was established in 1995 as the crowning institutional achievement of nearly a half-century of global trade barrier reductions under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT was initiated in 1947 under U.S. leadership and in recognition of the facts that international trade facilitates economic growth and fosters peace among nations.
Departing from those premises, the Trump administration views trade and the global trading system with deep skepticism and is now threatening the very existence of the WTO through a variety of provocative, unorthodox measures.
Click here to learn more about the World Trade Organization in this private interview with our guest speaker, Daniel Ikenson.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
For our final speaker event of the series, we had the honor of hosting Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institution. Constanze is an expert on German, European, and transatlantic foreign and security policy and strategy is the inaugural Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings.
Her areas of expertise include transatlantic relations; German foreign policy; NATO; the European Union’s foreign, security, and defense policy; international law; and human rights.
Stelzenmüller is a governor of the Ditchley Foundation and a fellow of the Royal Swedish Society for War Sciences. She has worked in Germany and the United States and speaks English, French, German, and Spanish.
Learn more about NATO as Constanze discusses the local impact of the international institution on 91.7 WVXU Cincinnati Edition.
Interested in learning more about our speaker events? Register for the Councils E-Newsletter.
