PARTICIPANTS

RICHARD FALK
University of California, Santa Barbara

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2001 he served on a three person Human Rights Inquiry Commission for the Palestine Territories that was appointed by the United Nations, and previously, on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. He serves as Chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's Board of Directors and as honorary vice president of the American Society of International Law. Falk also acted as counsel to Ethiopia and Liberia in the Southwest Africa Case before the International Court of Justice. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including The Great Terror War (2003), which considers the American response to September 11, including its relationship to the patriotic duties of American citizens. Other works include Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001); Human Rights Horizons (2000); On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics (1995); Explorations at the Edge of Time: The Prospects for World Order (1992). He has also co-edited numerous works, including Crimes of War (2006).  He received his B.S. from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; L.L.B. from Yale Law School; and J.S.D. from Harvard University.

As the prior century came to a close the return of religion to global salience came to exert a growing influence on the political and moral imagination. The full impact of this return was felt negatively as a result of the 9/11 attacks, and the U.S. response taking the form of the Global War on Terror. These developments unfolded against a background of globalization that had blurred the boundaries between state and world in significant ways, and contributed to the rise of cultural and religious forms of identity complementing patterns of national identity. So far the state structure, including its inter-governmental frameworks, of which the UN is the most encompassing, have addressed this complex set of developments only marginally, and seem so preoccupied with threats of religious extremism, as not to have appreciated the positive potential for the future of world order associated with the wider meanings of this religious resurgence. It is against such a background that international NGOs have great opportunities to build trust and understandings in transnational settings that could provide the moral foundations for a strengthening of human solidarity that will be needed to confront such challenges of global scope as climate change, energy transition, and world economic regulation. Such a role presupposes NGO leaders with an appropriate sensitivity to the negative and positive features of this new sense of world order in which religious consciousness is playing such a vital part in the formation of public consciousness and grassroots activism. Training future leaders to be constructively engaged in this world of transnational politics presupposes an understanding of and a sensitivity toward this complex role of religion in (mis)shaping world order in the early 21st century.

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