10:39 a.m., March 24, 2009----The University of Delaware's Department of Political Science and International Relations will host a conference on the “United States in the Global System” on Friday and Saturday, April 17-18.

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The conference will feature a keynote address by Peter Spiro of the Temple University Law School and author of Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization at 5 p.m., Friday, April 17, in Room 104 Gore Hall.

Spiro will deliver a talk titled “Unintended Stimulus: Bush and International Law.”

Spiro is the inaugural holder of the Charles R. Weiner Professorship in international law at Temple University Law School. A former law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court, Spiro specializes in international law, the constitutional aspects of U.S. foreign relations, and immigration and nationality law.

Six panels will be held Friday, in 209/211 Trabant University Center, and Saturday, in the Ewing Room of the Perkins Student Center.

The Friday panel topics include “Globalization and Perceptions of Others,” 9-10:30 a.m.; “Global Forces and the Direction of U.S. Institutions,” 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m., and “Policymaking and Normative Ideas,” 2-3:30 p.m.

The Saturday panel topics are “New Directions in Law,” 9-10:30 a.m., “Power in a Post-9/11 World,” 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m., and a roundtable discussion titled “Reflections on the United States in the Global System,” 2-3:30 p.m.

The goal of this conference is to look at institutional arrangements, policy-making, and normative questions through a variety of lenses that consider the complex interaction between the United States and the world in this globalizing context.

The global financial crisis of 2008 presented in stark terms the challenges facing the new administration in the United States government. An intimately interconnected world requires looking at policy-making and normative issues of justice and fairness through new eyes.

The phenomenon of globalization creates both excitement and frustration through processes generating new combinations of people, institutions, values, ideas and power. In the face of these new and ever changing arrangements, people, organizations, and states from around the world have generated novel political, economic, and legal arrangements.

These responses have included policy changes in a variety of areas ranging from labor, the environment, health, gender, electoral systems, legal structures, trade and public opinion. In normative terms, globalization presents challenges for thinking about and resolving issues of equity and fairness not only in terms of how we define these terms in a global context but who addresses them and how.

These questions present profound possibilities and dangers for the United States both in terms of responding to the transformed global environment and in terms of responses to the presence of U.S. actors and policies in these new global environments.

A conference program is available at the Department of Political Science and International Relations Web site.