The Globalization Comes Home Project

Working with The Institute of European Studies (IES), RPGP developed the "Globalization Comes Home" Project, the first in-depth, systematic effort at assessing the US not as a globalizing force but as a nation being transformed by globalization.

Mission

Over the past decade, bookshelves have become filled with volumes describing the nature, origins, and impact of globalization. In such books, globalization is most commonly characterized as the major vehicle for U.S. dominance of the post-Cold War era, a time in which there is no major viable alternative to American democratic and capitalist values. Most of the literature on globalization has focused on the implications of this new US-dominated worldwide system for international relations and the global economy or for the domestic politics, economics, societies, and cultures of other nations. Largely and surprisingly absent from this literature, however, has been extensive discussion of how globalization is impacting the United States itself. Indeed, it is rarely even acknowledged that while the US may be providing a crucial impetus to globalization, the process of globalization – once set in motion – has become a force unto itself. Thus globalization has its own logic and demands that are having a profound impact within the US itself, in ways that are often unanticipated.

February 2007 "Globalization Comes Home" Conference Complete Conference Information

R2P: The Responsibility to Protect How can state governments be encouraged to stop genocide and other mass atrocities? The R2P Project, led by The Human Rights Center (HRC) brought together an international assembly of policymakers, legislators, philanthropists, religious leaders, scholars and activists to discuss the "responsibility to protect" and move the concept from principle to practice.

Mission

The current movement toward advancing the responsibility to protect has grown from a recognition of the global community’s inadequate response to the 20th century’s “grotesque and morally indefensible” mass atrocities: the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Bosnia. In each of these situations, international leaders sat by as genocides, war crimes, and crimes against humanity transpired in the most systematic and brutal ways. Inaction was defended on the grounds that state sovereignty trumped the international community’s responsibility to protect the victims. At the dawn of the 21st century, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a challenge to the international community. “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty,” asked Annan at the UN Millennium Assembly in 2000, “how should we respond…to gross and systemic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?”

March 2007 "Stopping Mass Atrocities" Conference

For God's Sake: Religion and Politics in the West This project examined organized religion's influence on everyday life in light of such controversies as Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech; the influence of evangelicals in U.S. domestic and foreign policy and the global repercussions of the Danish publication of the Muhammad caricatures.

Mission

RPGP partnered again with the Institute of European Studies (IES) to sponsor a conference focused on the role of religion in the Western world.

For God's Sake: Religious Upheaval in the West