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Global Order Conference 2016 - Results
Opening Speech

Introducing the Global Order Conference 2016 on Mobility and Identity in a Globalizing World, students from the organization team and UCF Director of Outreach Prof. Hans-Joachim Gehrke delivered an opening speech. The student organizers explained the underlying idea of the Project: establishing a common platform for people from different academic disciplines, regions, and generations to explore and help solve themes of global concern. This might work best if essential structural components that are predictable could be identified and acted upon. Thus, the aim of this year's Conference was to identify predictable key components of global migration processes, and explore ways of using predictions to improve our handling of migration. Prof. Gehrke took up this line of thinking to point out how UCF as an interdisciplinary and -national academic institution contributes to establishing common grounds for academic research and solutions to global problems.

Refresher: The Freiburg Review

With the track sessions of the first Conference day behind us, we didn't stop dedicating our attention to issues around Mobility and Identity in a Globalizing World. On the contrary, we took the chance to approach this theme from a whole new angle - the creative, artistic one. As if predestined, the recently founded regional literary journal The Freiburg Review had published its fourth edition on Identity without Borders only weeks ago. With keen interest, Conference participants attended the reading of five literary works - from short stories to poems - in the UCF Common Room. This format provided much emotional and psychological access to the theme of Mobility and Identity. The more narrow and personal focus pinned down and made palpable the migratory phenomena that the Conference as a whole addressed on the macro level. Certainly, the stories are going to stick around in our minds - like that of a Middle Eastern immigrant to Germany whose defect laptopt sets a library on fire, earns him even more bewildered looks than he got on the bus when first arriving, and reminds him of the old kind of fire back home that did not erupt from luxury but war. While artistically captivating, the reading was a welcome intellectual refresher, and we are grateful to The Freiburg Review for the splendid cooperation.

Keynote Speech

To conclude the first Conference day, GOP founder and patron Luis Moreno Ocampo discussed the current challenges of Global Order in his keynote speech and was glad to answer subsequent questions. Drawing on his experience as former first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, he emphasized that increasing cross-border mobility encouraged international crime and required the establishment of internationally ratified legal institutions. These should make an effort to not merely condemn criminal organizations, but much more create communication between them and governments in order to find solutions. The Global Order Project, he said, was a formidable starting point to contemplate what international legal institutions could look like, and how further problems of mobility and identity may be addressed.

Track Exchange

Bringing to life the interdisciplinary potential of the Conference, participants from all five tracks met in the morning session of Saturday, the final Conference day. The track exchange was designed for participants to first let their fellow students in on the essential contents of their track; subsequently, discussions developed that were informed by the manifold present perspectives and revolved around key questions such as "What are political, legal, social, and economic drivers of migration?" and "How does global migration challenge identities centred around the nation state?" Participants brought up ideas reaching from fostering feelings of European identity through educational measures to evaluating the use and ethical aspect of browser games that allow players to adopt the role of refugees who flee their country and embark on dangerous journeys. All in all, the track exchange proved valuable to connect diverse perspectives on the Conference theme, and thus build ground for common ideas and approaches to accommodate better for migratory processes.

Panel Debate

The second Global Order Conference was concluded by a panel debate with our experts. Having faced questions prepared by the organization team, they were confronted with issues raised by participants in the audience. 

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