Foreword from the Chair

This has been a year of global chaos: Everything from massive street protests in the United States and around the globe to the COVID-19 pandemic have laid bare how the political economic status quo is riven with inequalities and exclusions. This chaos will inevitably reset global political and economic arrangements, which only reaffirms and heightens the urgency of the Young Initiative’s mission of envisioning alternatives to the status quo in the global political economy. In the past year, we pursued this mission in all facets of our work. To give a few examples from the different domains in which the Young Initiative works:

Events with local and global impact. With the aim of linking the Young Initiative’s theoretical/practical work to global academic and policy conversations, we kicked off the academic year with a Cross-Cutting Approaches to Human Rights workshop. This brought together 24 leading scholars and practitioners from around the world to focus on how to best re-conceptualize human rights so they can better inform struggles against rising global/local nationalisms. Conversations had a particular focus on recognizing how violations of economic rights are an essential dimension to understanding the structural exclusions that underlie our current global tumult. Partnerships across disciplines and divides. With the aim of connecting the Young Initiative to academic and policy partners across ingrained boundaries, we expanded our pathbreaking partnership with the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office in integrating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into city policy. Task forces working with city clients during the spring and summer of 2020 were led by faculty from Occidental’s Biology, Diplomacy and World Affairs (DWA), and Politics Departments, showing the interdisciplinary dimensions of working on the global political economy (a fall 2020 task force led by a faculty member from the Urban and Environmental Policy Department will further extend our focus on connecting across disciplines). This academic policy partnership is helping Los Angeles expand the reach of how it integrates the SDGs into addressing a range of local issues that have global dimensions. Academic work on global political economy. With the aim of furthering the Young Initiative’s academic impact on the Occidental campus and beyond, Associate Professor Madeline Baer joined the Young Initiative and the DWA Department this year. Baer’s impactful work on water policy and global governance as well as her expertise on economic and social human rights have already strengthened all dimensions of the Young Initiative’s work. We are equally thrilled that Igor Logvinenko will be joining the Young Initiative/DWA next year, bringing with him a track record of innovative academic research on how economic globalization impacts institutions, democratization processes, and rule of law practices in autocracies. In the upcoming academic year, Logvinenko is planning a workshop at Occidental on kleptocracy, focusing on the intersection of financial globalization with corruption, both in emerging market economies and in the United States.

More details about 2019-20 Young Initiative events, interdisciplinary partnerships, and academic work follow in this report. COVID-19’s impact on scheduling live events raised (and raises) a challenge to the Young Initiative’s work in both form and substance. In form, we will be taking this as an opportunity to conduct and communicate our work through innovative media.

In substance, the pandemic has exposed how the global political economy status quo systematically makes some populations more or less vulnerable to ill-health, disease, and death. This systematic vulnerability is superficially distinct, but actually intimately connected to the political economy of the murders of George Floyd, Nina Pop, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many other AfricanAmericans in the United States. For the Young Initiative, thus, the challenge is to query how we will rebuild our societies in the wake of these linked crises: Will it be in their old images, or will we have the courage to imagine new, more connective forms of society?

Anthony Tirado Chase

Professor, Diplomacy and World Affairs Chair, Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy

The following three sections of this report detail the Young Initiative’s work in the domains on which our mission focuses:

Young-sponsored student activities Young-sponsored campus events Young-sponsored workshops and faculty research