Offered once a year, the International Business Fellows Program consists of a multi-disciplinary graduate level seminar, IB 395, that seeks to further students’ understanding of the major cultures, political systems and economic structures that exist throughout the world and of the societal forces, demographic developments and environmental changes bringing change to those structures and systems.  It also attempts to assess how their interaction may shape the world in which our individual, corporate and national aspirations must be pursued. Finally, the seminar approaches such issues in an inter-disciplinary context. The seminar is taught by lecturer and international lawyer, D. Michael Dodd. 

The seminar will include lectures, readings and discussions on:

• international economics, finance and business
• international political and military affairs
• cultural, historical, and religious factors making up and dividing peoples, countries and civilizations around the world
• demographic developments, environmental changes, potential pandemics, resource-allocation concerns, and other risks and challenges putting pressure on world systems and structures at this point of the 21st century

For the Spring 2007 semester, the seminar will pursue such questions as:

• Are we entering into a new era where there will be a "clash of civilizations," the erection of regional economic and trade barriers, and/or the pursuit of a new political and military balance of power among  former rivals/allies? If so, will this jeopardize or end the recent expansion of global activity between and among countries? Will recent episodes of terrorism, war, and threatened fractures in old alliances be a catalyst for a renewed commitment to international cooperation among nations politically, economically, and militarily?
• What are the political and economic implications of demographic trends in Africa, China, Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and the United States; global warming; trans-national risks on traditional notions of national sovereignty and independence; a shifting center of influence from the Atlantic to the Pacific?
• What are the business, individual and societal implications of globalization? Will it end the middle class dreams of the American worker? Can Europe's social safety net survive? Will economic development end China's one-party rule? Will globalization upend India's caste system?
• What will be the role of international organizations? Will the United Nations find new life or will it follow the path of the League of Nations? What will be the future of the EU? How ill the WTO adapt? Will the World Bank and the IMF continue as they are or will they find new life or be replaced? Will China and other Asian countries develop new regional or international institutions which they control? If so, will they complement or conflict with or replace the western-developed international institutional system?
• What will the world look like in 2050?

Michael Howard, in his book The Lessons of History, wrote that the real lessons of history are not so much about “pride and folly,” as about

“people, often of masterful intelligence, trained usually in law or economics or perhaps political science, who have led their governments into disastrous miscalculations because they have no awareness whatever of the historical background, the cultural universe of the foreign societies with which they have to deal. It is an awareness for which no amount of strategic or economic analysis, no techniques of crisis management or conflict resolution...can provide a substitute.”

Such lessons may be applied to the business world and other walks of life. The seminar will endeavor to bring such historical and cultural factors into our discussions.

For detailed information about the seminar, see the Spring 2007 Seminar Syllabus.

Graduate students confront global issues in the Spring 2007 International Business Fellows Seminar: