 Welcome to this evening's talk. It's the keynote address at the annual symposium of the Harvard International Law Journal. I should say good morning as well to our speaker. So first I wanna thank Roberta May or Lee, Stephen Wong, Ding Yang, Yi Xiansun and the other students who responsible for putting this together. They've done a marvelous job, a lot of work. And the panel I saw yesterday was Professor Robert's co-author, Nicholas Lamp and others who was really excellent. Now, introducing Professor Roberts. I'm just so delighted the students asked me to do this. There's a lot of talk in academia about being paradigm shifting, helping people think of things new, changing how we see the world. And frankly, I'm skeptical about most of that. A lot of it is just self-indulgent academic rhetoric, but Andrea Roberts is one of the very rare people anywhere in the world who's really done this and actually done it more than once. So it's really quite stunning. Her talent was obvious very early on, and not once, but twice. She won the Francis Dayak Award given by the American Society of International Law to the most promising best younger scholar, not once, but twice. The best article by a younger scholar she won the Australian National University Futures Award, the UK Leverholm Award. So you can already see a pattern here across multiple jurisdictions and multiple continents. None of that should have been a surprise. She had first-class honors back home in Australia in the University Medal at ANU. She was a Fulbright Hauser and Lipper Fellowship Holder, all award holder at NYU. She won the Crawford Prize back in ANU for her doctorate. I mean, everywhere, again, that same pattern, everywhere, just the top of the class, but really creative. Now, unlike many of us who might have shown some potential when we were young, but never really realized it, she not only bore this out, but has even done more, if you can believe it. So her book, she did lots of terrific scholarship about international law and international arbitration, but her book is International Law International. Really has changed, I think, how people think about international law. It won the American Society for International Law Award as the best, most creative work book in its year, but I think even more than that, I just read it and it just changes how you think about international law. You see the ways in which, whether it's the UK, France, the US, Russia, China, the different major societies think differently about what constitutes international law and that has profound consequence. And the parts I was most familiar with the US, China, UK were done so well, I mean, just incredibly, thoughtfully, sympathetically, imaginatively. It's one of the few books I really wish I had written, although I'm sure I would not have been able to. She's won all kinds of awards since the 2010 League of Scholars Award for leading World War I international law. She has a new book, which you're gonna hear about momentarily from Harvard University Press, called Six Faces of Globalization, which seems likely to do the same. Her teaching is in the same vein. She did a course very generously for our students this year in an off-hour from the US, not off-hour for Australia, that enabled many students who were not able to get here from East Asia and Australia Pacific region to take a course on geoeconomics. And I went through the reading list, which she was kind enough to send me. It was really inspired and no surprise again. She was an electric teacher here at Harvard, at Columbia, at London School of Economics and now back in ANU. So any event, let me stop and turn the floor over to Anthea. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much and thank you both for the invitation of those incredibly warm opening words. I have such a soft spot for my time from when I was in Harvard. It was a really, really inspiring time and I always love interacting both with the Harvard faculty and particularly the Harvard students. And I just wanted to say, I can see in the attendee list a number of students I had from the fall and I just wanted to say hello to everybody. And I hope I get a chance to meet some more of you in years to come. What I want to present here is actually, you're the very first time that we're going to be presenting this book. So you're our guinea pigs and so feedback will be helpful afterwards. This is a book that I'm doing with my co-author, Nicholas Lamb, who I believe is also on the line and you heard from yesterday. And it's going to be due out in October and so this is the sort of sneak preview of some of the things that we do in the book. And the book is called The Six Faces of Globalization and to understand why we call it that, I guess it helps to put ourselves back in the mindset that we found ourselves and many others found themselves in 2016, where we really started to see this pushback against globalization come to the fore. And that was both in the election of Trump and a lot of the protection of stuff, but also in Brexit and after that, all sorts of chaos in the world trading organization and a real sort of pushback and thinking about kind of what was happening to the traditional ways we had understood economic globalization. And I guess when Nicholas and I were sort of experiencing this early stage of confusion, it reminded us a little bit, the confusing debates reminded us a little bit of a scrambled Rubik's cube because there were so many different ideas about like what was wrong or what was right and was it protectionism and was it China's going to take over the world and how did you fit climate change in? And we found ourselves wanting to understand this pushback against economic globalization, but the first step about was to actually ask ourselves, with these confusing debates, would there be a way to sort of unscramble this Rubik's cube so that we could actually start to disaggregate what the different narratives were that were pushing back against economic globalization and how it was that they related to each other. And that was really the starting point for this book. So let me give you a basic overview of the narratives, the six faces of globalization that we ended up sort of uncovering in our research and how we fitted them together on the cube. So we begin the six faces of globalization with what we call the establishment narrative. And this was the narrative that was absolutely dominant the whole way we were going through university and in our early careers, which was really the win-win narrative about economic globalization. And it was the one that you heard from the WTO, you heard from most governments. It was the idea that whether you were a developed or a developing country or whether you were rich or poor, everyone gains from economic globalization. It's a rising tide that lifts all boats. It's a growing of the price where everyone can have a bigger slice. And we represent that sort of absolute gains for everybody with these blue arrows going up here. And this was absolutely the dominant understanding of economic globalization that free trade was a general good. But what we started to see happening particularly from 2016 onwards, though there were precursor ideas before that, was that this dominant narrative started to be challenged by a variety of other narratives. So what were those other narratives? Well, one of the ones that came to the fore was the left-wing populist narrative. And here the left-wing populist narrative doesn't actually disagree with those blue arrows, doesn't necessarily say that there wasn't a general gain overall in the population. But it calls attention to the fact that the gains were very unevenly distributed in this period of economic globalization. The establishment narrative was really based on the idea that you grow the pie at the international level and then you leave it to the domestic level to redistribute. But what they would say is actually that redistribution never happened. And in fact, there were various sort of pre-distribution problems which meant that you actually hollowed out the middle class, you disadvantaged the working class, and gains moved upwards in this relative term to the elite. And we represent that here by these red arrows showing that this is sort of a class-based analysis where the real winners of economic globalization were the rich in the different states. That one is a little bit different to what we saw coming out of Trump, which is what we call the right-wing populist narrative. And here you'll see the argument is not so much though there was the rich people that won from economic globalization within your own state, but really that it was other communities that took the jobs away. And this is very much, I should say, all of these six phases of globalization, these are the perspectives that we see in the Western debates. I'll talk a bit about some of the debates from outside the West later on. So from within that Western perspective and particularly that American perspective, here you see the argument that really it's certain communities and certain types of workers that have really lost out from economic globalization because their jobs were effectively shipped offshore to places like China, to Mexico, to India. And it's really the workers in those developing countries that have gained at the expense of the workers in the developed states. And this is one that really makes you think about the Rust Belt and some of the towns that have been industrialized and have had really bad problems with not just lack of employment, but also the suicide and opioid crisis, the deaths of despair. So that's a white working class issues that have given rise to a lot of the populist narrative. And this right wing populist narrative sort of has two different variations to it. One of it tends to be a very strong anti free trade, which is we don't want our jobs shipped offshore to these foreigners. But the other element of it tends to be a sort of anti immigration, which is we don't want those foreigners coming into our land to steal our jobs here at home. And so these two versions, the left wing and the right wing populist narrative, I think have had a lot of play and a lot of play in the election. So we've seen, for example, AOC and Bernie Sanders very much embody the left wing populist and we see Trump and a number of other politicians very much embodying the right wing populist. But there are other narratives here as well. And one of the ones I want to bring to the fore, which goes to what Professor Alfred said about the course last semester, is the geoeconomic narrative. So the geoeconomic narrative you'll see here instead of circling a particular class or a particular community, the red box here is circling whole countries and in particular focusing in on the China-US great power relationship. And here the argument is that even if in absolute terms, both the US and China benefited from economic globalization in terms of absolute gain. In relative gains, China has crept up and closed the gap on the United States. And what that's really pricking is a very strong geopolitical contest that has a strong economic dimension, a political dimension and also a security and strategic dimension. And here we see this playing out in all the debates about Huawei and all sorts of US-China sanctions and competition. We see it with export controls. We see it with concern about AI and quantum computing. And one of the interesting things about this one is if the protectionist narrative often has kind of a yearning for yes to year, so good old fashioned steel workers and manly men doing manly jobs. And that's a yearning for yes to year. The geoeconomic narrative focuses to the future and says, who's going to dominate these cutting edge technologies? So there's a lot about AI, a lot about quantum, a lot about the technological frontier. And that brings us to one more narrative that we should put on this line, which is the corporate power narrative. And this one, when we're thinking about those tech giants, we should actually start to think, well, maybe it's actually not particular classes that have won or particular communities or particular countries that have been winners and losers of economic globalization. Maybe the way to understand what's actually happening is that power has gone to these big multinational corporations that have been able to offshore jobs. So they disadvantage their workers at home, but they also don't offshore good jobs to these developing states. They effectively offshore bad jobs that don't have the same healthcare and environmental standards. They're able to sort of globalize their markets, globalize where it is that they can do production. But then they're able to hop, skip and jump around the world and sell everywhere and not necessarily pay significant taxation on that. And that's particularly true for the corporate power giants in the tech area, where a lot of it is based on IP, which doesn't physically locate anywhere. So they choose to physically locate that in places like Ireland that have incredibly low taxation rates. And so we see them really opportunistically getting the advantages of economic globalization, but not paying their dues back to the societies in which they operate. And so those are sort of five different narratives, but it was in the process of doing this that we really came to realize that there was another narrative we needed to take on board seriously. And that's the one that we would call the global threats narrative. And nobody could live through 2020 without being very aware of this narrative. I should say that I started 2020 in the terrible bushfires in Australia and actually getting caught in one of the big sort of inferno areas. And so saw this firsthand Australia's experience of some of the threats that really brought home climate change in a very visceral way. And we were just through recovering from that and of course the world gets hit by the coronavirus. And interestingly, the first reporting of the coronavirus to the WHO and those terrible fires in Australia, they both happened on the 31st of December of 2019, but they spread around the world, creating a sense of threat that we really helped to capture with this global threats narrative. And this global threats narrative is a bit of a mirror to the establishment narrative in that it is also kind of collective that we're all in this together, but instead of us all being in this together and all winning, the idea is that we're all in this together. And if we don't change the way that we approach economic globalization, we're all at risk of losing from unsustainable economic growth. And we see two real variants of this global threats narrative. One is the one that we saw very strongly coming out of the COVID crisis, where we were very concerned that we had had such interdependence between our countries, both in terms of physical flows of people, but also in terms of our interdependent supply lines for medicines, et cetera, and all of our just-in-time supplies, that we had optimized for efficiency and interdependence in a way that left us extremely vulnerable and brittle and not resilient. And so one narrative we see coming out of global threats is a resilience narrative. The other one which goes to the bushfires that I was talking about is very much more the environmental sustainability, which is what we are doing with economic globalization is not just creating extensive supply lines that leave us vulnerable, but we're also exporting and encouraging that Western consumption lifestyle around the globe in a way that is just putting us on an unsustainable collision path with our global limits. And that we really need to change the paradigm to take Professor Alfred's phrase. So instead of trying to optimize economic efficiency, we really need to ask ourselves, how do we recreate our societies and our global structures so that we can all survive and thrive within the limits of our planet? And so if we understand these as the six main narratives that we see driving the debates in the West on economic globalization, how should we understand the structure of them? We're here, we think that you should understand that the establishment narrative which we put on top is a win-win. Everybody wins from economic globalization. It really doesn't matter who you are. Whereas many of the debates that we see playing out in the press at the moment are at the second level, which is win-lose arguments. There are winners from economic globalization and there are losers from economic globalization. But different narratives pinpoint different winners and losers and have different explanations as to why those winners and losers matter. So they often have a different unit of analysis and they often also have a different metric for what's good and what's bad and why. And so if that's our win-win analysis and our win-lose analysis, what we see developing more strongly and we expect we'll carry through in some of the next decades, is this lose-lose analysis, which is unless we pull together and do this differently, we're all at risk of losing. Now, when I say that this is stuff that we hope that you'll be familiar with from the press, we certainly, with this lens on, see it everywhere. So for example, the establishment narrative we see very clearly here and this very positive on the up, everything's good from economic globalization. We see this idea of the richest of the rich and the left-wing populist narrative and this sort of class problems that this has created and inequality. We're clearly seeing a much greater concern about the sort of left-behind communities and the effects of deindustrialization in the West. It's incredibly hard to miss the China versus America strategic rivalry and the geo-economic narrative. We're also seeing a much greater focus on corporate power, particularly in the tech sector and this idea that we've got certain markets that have become winner-takes-all markets in the way that is very dangerous and might need to be cracked down on through things like antitrust and new taxation agreements. And finally, I think we're increasingly seeing a real concern that we're all in the line of fire, not just for things like pandemics but also for the longer-term issue of climate change. Now, how do we understand these narratives when we start to unscramble the Rubik's Cube? And here, I think the way that we ultimately decided it was not only did we have six narratives that we sort of found when we unscramble the Rubik's Cube but those three different levels are also mapped onto our cube. So on the top of our cube, we have the establishment narrative, which is the win-win. In the middle of the cube, we have the four different win-lose arguments and when you flip the cube over and try and look for a new paradigm, that's where we see a global threat narrative. And so that gives you an idea of the sort of six main faces of globalization and how it is that we desegregate them and also relate them to each other. But the question then is, what do you do with this analysis? And so in the next four sections of these slides, I'm gonna give you some examples about how we use this analysis to help us structure our understanding of some of the debates we see about economic globalization. And I'm gonna start with the idea of strategic switching. Strategic switching is where you see particular actors deliberately take a particular narrative and try to switch the face of the cube to present another face as the dominant narrative because it changes your understanding of who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, what the relationships are and how you understand it playing out. So let me give you two examples of this. The first one comes from the elephant graph. Now, I expect most of you are familiar with the elephant graph, which comes from Branko Milanovic. But in case you're not, let me just explain it briefly. This looks at the change in real income in percentage terms of the world's richest and the world's poorest. So everybody in the world, in the individual percentiles, is represented on the bottom level. So the poorest of the poor are down on the left-hand side and the richest of the rich are on the right-hand side. So this is individuals and percentiles, it's not countries. And then what you see on the y-axis is you see in each of those percentiles how much in the high period of economic globalization, which is the sort of 20 years that he's recording from 1988 to 2008, how much percentage growth did these people have in their income? And I want you to pay particular attention to point number two, because point number two, which has seen almost no growth in this 20-year period, that really reflects the less well-off people in the working class and the poor in the developed countries. Now, you'll notice in global terms, they're still at about the 80th percentile. In global terms, they're still well-off. But in relative terms, they have had almost no or all no increase in their income in this period of time. And so when you have a group like that that has been hard done by and feels aggrieved, who are you going to blame for it and where are you going to direct attention? And we see political parties directing it in very different ways. We see Trump and the right-wing populist narrative saying, you people who have lost out in this way, you, we hear your pain and you know who you should blame. You should blame those people in point one. Who is in point one at the head of that elephant? Well, the people in point one at the hell of that elephant, that they're the working class in China, in India, in Mexico, that have seen a very, very significant percentage increase in their income during the period of globalization because we've really seen the emergence of the middle class in these areas. And so Jesus says, you've been hard done by, look to them, they're the ones that have profited at your expense. But then you have people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC who are like, no, no, no, this is a distraction. Don't look at the people who have had these jobs in Mexico and China. If you want to know who has really got ahead, it's actually the 1% and the point 1% in your own countries that have won an extraordinary amount in this period. And keep in mind, even if the people at point three, who are the sort of global 1%, in relative percentage terms, have gone up by a similar amount to the people in point one, the people in point one didn't have a lot of money to begin with, whereas the people at point three had a lot of money to begin with. And so if they're both going up by 100% compared to where they were previously, one of them in absolute terms is going up in a much more striking way. So we see these sorts of debates happening where people are trying to shift the face of the cube from the right wing protectionist narrative to the left wing protectionist narrative. But we also see it playing out, I think, at the moment in the anti-trust debates. So one of the first times that I noticed this was when Zuckerberg had to appear before Congress. And one of the photographers actually took a photograph of his preparatory notes and said, if they ask about breaking you up, say you can't do that because then China will win. So let's think about what's happening there. He's going before Congress where they're really concerned about the power of big tech. So this is a corporate power framing where you've got the US as the regulator concerned about the excessive power of its corporations against the little guy consumers. This is a Winners Takes All corporate power narrative. What does Zuckerberg do? He tries to shift the face to say, no, this is a geoeconomic competition and you shouldn't be regulating me. You shouldn't be trying to break me up because we're on the same team, which is Team USA against Team China. And we know that the Chinese companies are deeply in bed with the Chinese government and they are playing this fast game on AI and on quantum. And if we want to be in that game, we need to be on Team America together and we need to be strong together. So don't regulate me, don't break me up because the real battleground here is the international geoeconomic battleground. And in response to this, you see scientists all over the world saying, no, don't do that. Don't create this as a geoeconomic competition between China and the United States. If we want to deal with some of our collective challenges like climate change, we need all of our scientists to be able to work together and to do things like come up with vaccines and come up with ways to deal with the financial crisis. So this isn't us against them, we're all in this together. And so you can start to see in debates that people are very strategically shifting the frame to give a different sense of who's us and who's them, what's the battle and what's the relationship between the different parties. But I've mentioned a few times that this is the perspective that we see within the West. And so what I want to acknowledge here is that it can look quite different from outside the West. And I'm not gonna do this extensively because most of the book is trying to understand what's happening in the Western debates. But I want us to say that the Western debates are not representative of the world. And particularly some of the malaise about economic globalization that we're experiencing in the West is not being experienced everywhere in the world. And we would be wrong to think it was. But also because of the dominance often and the insularity of the media that we watch, we tend to watch our own media and not watch things from other parts of the world. So it can sometimes, sometimes some perspectives can be missed. In saying that, I should also say there is no one perspective per country. What we see of course in the US and elsewhere is we see multiple narratives by different actors and we see the same thing happening elsewhere. And we also see the same six narratives popping up in many countries around the world. So the establishment narrative, for example, there are many political leaders in many countries, sorry, that endorse the establishment narrative. And we see various other narratives like the global threats narrative has got some very strong support from the global South. But we also see some narratives that I think get underplayed in the Western debates because they reflect particular perspectives or particular historical experiences from around the world. And so while we're not trying to do this exhaustively, let me just give you four illustrative examples of some of the narratives that are more prominent, we think outside the West than inside the West. So the first one I'm going to give you is one that has a longer historical lineage, which is the neocolonial narrative. Because what you often find in the assumptions about in the Western debates at the moment is that the West and the developed states are the ones that have been losing from economic globalization and that many of the winners have actually been developing states. Whereas if you look at the neocolonial narrative that goes a long way back, there has often been a very strong suspicion from many states in the developing world that actually trade and investment has been extremely exploitative and has been about getting materials and workers and warlords from the developing world to the developed world in a very extractive way that sort of reinforces the power dynamics between them. And this has been articulated for many years as a neocolonial narrative. We see it in international law, for example, by people who write about third world approaches to international law, which is a very strong sense that there is a transnational capitalist class and that includes not just the developed states, but also the IMF, the World Bank and major multinational corporations. Now, this one which really casts the developing states as the victim is quite different to another narrative that we started to see developing several decades ago, which is what we call the Asia rising narrative. And that's one that's really coming to the fore now, which is the idea that the West used to dominate economic globalization and economic production, but really what's happened and trade and investment has been a large part of this is that Asia has come into its own and we're now gonna be entering into the Asian century because they have a really positive experience with a lot of economic globalization. And so some of the very same doom and gloom that you see in the West about economic globalization, you see the flip side in many places in Asia that have had a very positive experience on the whole with economic globalization. There are many different sub-narratives of the Asia rising one. There are sort of the miracle ones about the smaller economies that we're able to industrialize and there's a question, is this economic sort of openness or is this direction by their governments? Debates about that. We see some of these Asian rising narratives that are very strongly China focused, that it was really the rise of China and the rest, whereas others focus on sort of the sleeping giants of China and India that have both woken up and have these fundamentals that mean population size, their economies are always gonna be very significant. But what's very different about these two narratives is one is about the exploitation of developing states and the other is about at least some developing states managing to move forward in a really positive way. This interestingly is a little bit different to the narrative we call the against Western hegemony narrative. And China plays a particularly interesting role here because when you see someone like President Xi, sometimes he's embodying the establishment free trade, pro-trade narrative. Sometimes he's embodying that Asia rising, we were great and we're going to be great again and we're doing this through openness to the world. And sometimes he's with Russia in this sort of against Western hegemony narrative, which is there is not one size fits all of globalization and we don't want your model and don't try and force it on us. And you see that most clearly in the area of cybersecurity where we're releasing very different approaches to the internet, but you're increasingly seeing this also in the trading space. And so whereas the West is often very concerned about Huawei and sort of economic weaponization of the economy, of course Russia and China are very concerned about things like semiconductors being cut off from suppliers or cuts through things like Swiss so that you can't get money to different countries. And so the need to decouple in terms of financial controls. And so I think China's inhabiting this very interesting space at the moment between that kind of establishment Asia rising narrative and this against Western hegemony narrative. And of course, there are some regions of the world that aren't experiencing any of these particular areas. And the one we want to highlight here is the sort of left behind narrative, which is if you look at what people often say about economic globalization, which is the extraordinary number of people that were lifted out of poverty. But if you actually break that down by regions, what you see is that the huge reduction in poverty really comes from East Asia, the Pacific and South Asia. And actually Africa in absolute terms has more people in poverty now than it did back in the 1990s. And so then the question becomes kind of who hasn't got on the globalization bad wagon and are they going to be the next ones? Are they the sort of next in line in the sort of idea of the flying goose where there's a lead and now we'll have others follow or are they just going to be exploited yet again but maybe this time not just by the West but also by China? One of the reasons that I highlight these different narratives is just to make us very conscious of different perspectives both within the West and across some of the Western and non-Western perspectives. And one of the things I hope you take away from this is the importance of looking at different perspectives when we seek to analyze narratives. There isn't one true story. There are many faces of globalization and many perspectives that color the way that we see things. And I think one of the very nice examples of this is the different styling we see, for example, on the geo-economic narrative from a US perspective and from a Chinese perspective. Just as one illustration of this last time I presented on geo-economics in China I was talking to people about this book. And this is AI Superpowers, China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order. And it's actually by Keith Lee who was from Taiwan. He came up in Google in Silicon Valley and then he went back to China to do Google China there. And I think this is a fantastic and really interesting book about the evolution of the internet in China. But look at the styling. It screams geo-economic geopolitical competition. When I spoke to my colleagues about this in China I wanted to get them a copy of this book to see what their reactions were. And I couldn't find exactly this book. Instead, the book I found was this one which I think is basically the same book. But it's actually called AI Future. And there is no hint of geo-economic competition in this. Instead, you have Keith Lee there and all of this about the AI Future is about the wonderful technological future and all these little things here, like his age, his hobbies, all the things AI will be able to tell about you. And this is really a story of technological advance and progress. And one of the interesting things when you start to be aware of these differences is you could say to yourself, well, is this one censored? And my view on that is probably undoubtedly yes. Even if it's not actually censored by the Chinese censored, I'm pretty confident the author himself would have self-censored because you wouldn't be able to do an AI superpower's book into the Chinese market at that time. But at the same stage, is this one sensationalized? I would say probably, right? It's not that there's no reason for concern over companies like Huawei. But I think there is a very strong rhetoric that's coming up at the moment that's sensationalizing some of these things. And certainly from my experience, if you want to sell books, going with something like that probably is the way to go. Okay, so where does this take us to now? So where I want to take this to now is that we've very nicely, I think solved the Rubik's Cube and got the six different sides. And so we could have ended the story there. But our sense is that it's a little bit more complex than that. So I want to give you a little bit of a sense of this kaleidoscopic complexity, which is remember every side of the cube actually has nine different faces. And I think a lot of what we're going to see in the next era is how do we mix and match those cubes? Not so it's an incoherent mess, but so that we take different ideas from different parts of the cube and find new faces of globalization in the mix. And I think the Biden administration is a very much an example of trying to do that pick and mix approach to find a new face of globalization. How do we think about this through kaleidoscopic complexity? Well, I think about a Rubik's Cube is a Rubik's Cube is a puzzle that has one right answer. And it may be hard to get there. In fact, Rubik's, who first came up with the Rubik's Cube when he first scrambled his Rubik's Cube, he had no idea if he would be able to get back to the answer and it took him over a month to solve his own cube. I can say my daughter can now do it in about a minute because of this book, but nonetheless, there is one right answer. Whereas when we're dealing with really complex problems like economic globalization, we actually think really complex problems, there is no one right answer. There are many perspectives and what it helps to do is overlap them on each other. And so instead of just taking the six faces of the cube, we started to think about, well, what if you were actually to think about them as layering on top of each other so that we could see which narratives overlapped with which ones and what new colors did they create? And when we take this much more variegated approach where we sort of understand that these narratives can be squinted and reconfigured, it made us think it's not so much like a Rubik's Cube, but like a kaleidoscope. And what we really wanna be doing when we think about the kaleidoscopic complexity is acknowledging how complex it is and however changing it is. There isn't a right answer. Every time you shift the dial, you see something a bit new, but we also wanna have some analytical traction on this. And this is where it starts to help to have the idea of these different overlapping circles. So let me give you one example of this. And this comes up from the period after the COVID crisis when all the countries are starting to scramble and thinking we must have greater national self-reliance because we can't be in the situation again where we don't have sufficient PPE and we can't serve us the medical needs of our population. So how do our narratives play out here and what sort of alliances and overlaps might you be able to see for particular policy proposals? Well, let me start with the most obvious one that came out of COVID, which was what we think of as the resilience narrative, which is one of the sub-narratives of global threats. And here we saw a lot of governments throughout the world, including ones that are very pro-economic globalization like France and Germany, really embracing this idea that actually there are some things we need to be resilient, so we need to secure adequate supplies and capacity and essential services. And this really comes with a whole bunch of different goals and policies. We need some level of national self-reliance. We need diversification. We need to ensure capacity in essential areas like medicine. We need to have some stockpiling and we need to have export restrictions on essential materials that we don't give away, things like vaccines or things like face masks when we really need them. Now, when you look at these particular policy proposals, it's interesting to think, well, how do they overlap and differ from some of the proposals by some of the other narratives? And one of the other narratives here that I'm going to show you is the protectionist narrative. Now, the protectionist narrative is less concerned about securing adequate supply lines and more concerned about trying to rebuild domestic manufacturing at home. But what you can see there is that that actually can have some real overlap with the resilience narrative about, for example, supporting this idea of national self-reliance. We shouldn't be relying on supplies that come in from India or from China for things like medicines. We should be rebuilding supply lines at home and bringing back manufacturing. But there are some narratives, there are some policies that they would have in common. There are others that are quite different. So, for example, the building a domestic capacity is something that's strongly supported by the protectionist narrative but isn't necessarily essential to the resilience narrative. Some of the sort of import and export restrictions that you would see for the protectionist one and attention to sort of competitive gains vis-a-vis other countries are not really part of the resilience narrative. But they also intersect in interesting ways with a final narrative that I'll show here as just an example, which is the geo-economic narrative. So if you can imagine that the resilience narrative might, for example, be saying, we need to make sure that we have sufficient supply lines on things like medicines in general because if they may be cut off for no one's fault from friend or foe, the geo-economic narrative is like, no, we need to be particularly careful because our medicines come from China and China is a strategic foe and therefore we need to make sure that we have our own resources so that we can't have this weaponized by a strategic foe. And that's what then suggests we need to impose certain restrictions on imports and exports. We need to build up our own capacities. But also interestingly, what you start to realize is that there are some areas of overage between these narratives and some areas that aren't. So let me just give you an example of that. If you look at the overlaps of these narratives, what we see, for example, in diversification is that from a geo-economic perspective and a resilience perspective, if you and your allies, like-minded, can get together and diversify your supply line so that you're sharing it with each other, then you satisfy both of those narratives and you could get a coalition of people of both narratives. But that doesn't help you at all with the protectors who really don't wanna have stockpiling or diversification among allies. They wanna have it built and manufactured and manufacturing at home. And so we start to use these different narratives and overlay them on each other to kind of project forward some of the debates we're seeing to start to see what overlaps there might be and what new alliances might be formed. And we've actually found that to be quite an helpful way of understanding future debates. So this leads me to the final part of the talk and to a concept of integrative complexity. And this goes a little bit what Professor Alford was talking about at the start. So let me connect the dots. What kind of project is this? So this is a very unusual project for the Academy of Today. The Academy of Today tells you to narrow in in a very specific way and rigorously prove that one particular thing is correct using empirical methods. This is not that project. Instead, what we are doing is taking a macroscopic approach to try and understand many debates and how they connect. And we're also sketching particular narratives and we actually do that from the inside looking at various sources in a much more emotive and almost artistic way to try and understand empathetically what the perspectives are and how they overlap and how they differ. What kind of project is this? This kind of project is what psychologists would call a project of integrative complexity which is when you're looking at very complex issues you need to adopt an integrative complexity approach which really has two stages. The first stage is that you need to be able to differentiate. So you need to be able to take this kaleidoscopic complexity of a mass and start to differentiate into different perspectives different ways of looking at a problem. And in doing that you often need to take a much more sort of empathetic approach of not black and white, good versus evil, right versus wrong but understanding there are not just many perspectives but there are many shades of gray and you need to understand those different shades of gray empathetically to understand how different people can be the hero in their story or the victim in their story. And if you wanna get a handle on something like economic globalization you need to see it in the round. So the first thing you do is differentiate which is what we do for example with the six narratives. But the second step is you need to find ways to integrate and that's what we do by putting it onto the Robics Cube. We start to ask ourselves not just what are the different perspectives and how do we differentiate them but also how can we integrate them into a global structure that provides some sort of a way to work through these different perspectives that gives you a framework for thinking about what's similar, what's different and also allows you to do things like the overlapping diagrams that search for commonalities but also incommensurable. It's one of the things we really noticed when we did this project was that many of the narratives were embodying different values. And so instead of just looking for economic efficiency some of them were embodying values like the right wing protectionist one of some of the traditional values of traditional community and the importance of actually being a producer and having stable families. And for some people on the left who find that other value very hard to understand they're also embodying the values with some of the people on the right find hard to understand like appreciating the environment for its own sake not just as a means to an end of how it serves our lives. So this is a project of integrative complexity and one that I think we can adopt when we look at other complex issues. It's also one that psychologists and forecasters suggest is really important for getting a better understanding of the future. And here I'm going to refer to the work of Tetlock who does work on super forecasters and the idea of drag-and-fly eyes which is here to study on all the people who are best able to predict the future and it turns out they were much better than the CIA and much better than single disciplinary experts. They were people who had what he called drag-and-fly eyes which is not just pieces, anti-pieces and synthesis but an ability to see many different ways and integrate those perspectives. And the reason he picks drag-and-fly eyes is that they've got these two major eyes that have thousands of lenses in them which they actually integrate. So we have two lenses that we integrate into our bifocal vision. They have thousands and it actually creates these drag-and-fly eyes that allow them to see almost 360 degrees. And he says if you want to get a better understanding of what's going to happen, you need to develop more people with drag-and-fly eyes who are effectively doing integrative complexity. Now for many people, the idea of all of those perspectives in their head is just a painful experience. So there are other ways that you can get this diversity in as well. And one of the things I'm going to say about this is you can have diversity in your own head or if that just sounds awful, you can have diversity in teams or preferably both. And so here Syed, who's done work on radical ideas and we get this out of complexity science as well, just has a visual that I think explains this very nicely. Quite often what we think about when we think about getting the best person for the job is we think about someone like David. And David, as you can see here, is very highly trained and he has a circle of expertise and a circle of experience and that's what he really brings to this. And he does that really well. The problem is if you build a team where who you hire is David, Andrew, John, Toby, Nathan, Jacob, Jeremy, Theodore and Ben, these may all be extremely highly talented individuals when you think about them individually. But the problem is their perspectives and their approaches can be so similar that what is a collection of very intelligent individuals can make for a much less intelligent team because it doesn't have diversity in terms of its scope and it tends to reinforce its own biases and move to an extreme of how right it is because it doesn't have these diverse perspectives. If you really want to have a smart team rather than smart individuals, you need to be much more actively thinking about diversity across multiple dimensions, cognitive diversity, diversity of socioeconomic background, diversity of the country you come from, diversity of race and gender. And this isn't just like a nice add-on. If you actually want to understand complex problems, this is essential. And this just takes me to one final thing I wanted to say about what Professor Alford said at the beginning when you think about this sort of project. I feel in the academy at the moment, we have done a huge amount to focus on the left-hand side of this particular brain, cause, evaluate, rely, contrast and look at all these straight lines and rig a and prove this. But actually when we want to understand complex problems, new problems, evolving problems, but also other people's perspectives that are not necessarily our own, this right-hand side of to intuit, to sense, to dream, to imagine, this is often where creativity and empathy comes from. And we could do with a little bit more of that. And so one of the things I'd say that was just so beautiful working on this project with Nicholas, is that he has this beautiful ability that I often fly up and kind of macro, do macro perspectives. And he is deeply and textually involved with the narratives and telling people stories in an incredibly beautiful way. And I realize that I'm very drawn to people in the academy who have this more artistic side to them. And so I guess the question at the end is, if in 2016 we saw the world falling apart, will we see it being pieced back together? Well, I certainly hope so, but I don't think it's ever gonna be what it was before. I think it's going to be something quite different. And I think that the different faces of the Rubik's Cube for us have really made us think about different possibilities going forward. So if this is a taster, let me just say this has just gone up on Amazon, which is the new book with my co-author, Nicholas. It's available for pre-order now. This is the first time we've presented on it. So if you had feedback and ideas, we'd love to hear them. But thank you very much for being our guinea pigs today. Thank you so much, Professor Roberts. I think this is definitely fascinating and it's a great honor to be the first platform for you to present your new books. So congratulations. I know Professor Nicholas Lampe is also here. So congratulations as well. So maybe I can turn to Professor Alfred first. I wonder, do you have any comments or questions that you can use your privilege to share with us before we open the Q&A session? Well, thank you. So I just wanna say how stunning and wonderful it is. I feel everything I said, the outset and much more. And I certainly agree, and Dean Anthony just the other day talking to a group of law students making that very pointy about the two sides of the brain and to be an effective counselor, you really need all the non-linear qualities on the other side about sensing and understanding and passion. Anyway, no, Yixian, why don't we call on the students to ask their questions? And I'm happy to jump in later if there aren't enough, but let's give the students a chance first. Sure, of course. So I think I just saw one of the questions from our attendees. And if I may rephrase this, I guess the question is how, to what extent we should be critical onto the six or more ways of interpretation available. So in that sense, I guess this is a question from the professor of regulation and legislation. And the questions would be, despite the fact that there are multiple ways of interpretation, is there a better way to do so or is it a better combination? So yeah, thank you. So this is a really important point. And one of the things that happened early on in the project is people were like, oh, okay, yep, yep, we can see those six, but which is right. And I remember the time thinking, there isn't one that's right, right? And I think where we've come to on this is an understanding that when you're dealing with complex issues, you often need to have multiple narratives, multiple analogies, multiple metaphors, because most of them have something right in them, but they're not completely correct. All models have some truth and they have some falsity to them. So I don't think that there is one narrative that's correct. And I don't think there's gonna be one narrative that gains dominance in the same way as the establishment narrative did. That does not mean that all narratives are equal. And so one of the things that's very nice when you actually lay them on top of each other is sometimes you realize that they're speaking to different things. So they've got a different unit of analysis. Some of them look at corporations and some of them look at companies and they both have truth, but they're just focusing on a different thing. But other times you realize that some of their claims are partial. So for example, there is a big debate about the people in manufacturing who have lost their jobs between the right-wing protectors who say those jobs were shipped off shore to China and the establishment narrative who say those jobs were largely taken because of technology. Now I think there's a bit of truth in both, but you can actually start to look at those issues empirically. And so one of the things to think about is when you see a tension between the narratives, that's often a place that you wanna dive in further to find, well, what is the empirical basis for that or not? But you also need to, I think, in doing that, be very aware that there are just different value systems. And one of the problems with some of our approaches, and I think economics is a classic example of this, economics tends to be so elite dominated, so white, so Western in so many ways. I think it's had a harder time understanding some of the values that are underlying some of the different narratives. And so for example, you would see a real shift in the economics profession about some of these issues after David Otto did his amazing work on the China shock. But if you've gone with sociologists and anthropologists into many of these communities in these de-industrialized towns, they could have told you these stories from a much earlier time, but it wasn't a sort of a valid form of knowledge. And so it kind of just didn't penetrate into these ways of thinking. So I think it's very important to look for empirical evidence when you see clashes, but it's also very important to recognize that different perspectives can bring things to the fore and people can have really different values. And quite often I find that between these different narratives, there's a bit of a tension between do they have different values which are different but commensurable? So when I teach this in Geoeconomics, I say sort of economics and security, is it like apples and oranges? So they're different, but they're tradable. We can find a market for them. Or is it like love and money? Whereas somebody said to you, can I give you a million dollars to marry you? You would find that just offensive, at least in our cultures at the moment, right? Because they're not meant to be tradable, even though we actually know that men that are very well off are much more likely to get married than men that aren't well off. So there might be some subtle trading happening behind the scenes. But the point is that different narratives can embody different values and sometimes these values are incommensurable. And so there isn't a right or a wrong one. That's why we have things like democracy. That is very insightful. And also building on the questions submitted by our attendees, I guess my follow-up questions would be one about incentives. How could we really achieve for this sort of more holistic view of understanding the fact of globalization? And in particular, how could we push some of the supporters of those narratives, the ones who have taken the benefit of being partial to actually take it into account of the different dimensions of different communities and different narratives? Yeah, that's a really hard one, right? Because one of the things that we have in our political systems is those who have been advantaged by a particular system often then have enough money that they have various political advantages which help lock in their power. But my own feeling at this at the moment is that that sort of inequality can grow and grow to a certain point. And then it gets to an explosive level where it's no longer stable. And I think we're starting to see that. So for example, the moves that are happening on the international stage now to try and rein back in the big tech powers with things like taxation with things like antitrust, I think are going to be moves to address some of the inequality because I think it's got to an unstable point. But I also think it's an interesting one of understanding the relationship between different narratives. So when I saw that the US was raining back in big tech and when I saw that China was raining back in big tech with Jack Ma, my first reaction on seeing that was those two countries on the geo-economic narrative have already committed to a technology split between them because you sort of have to have an assumption that you're going to be somewhat bifurcated technologically in the geo-economic realm before you start disciplining your companies in quite this sort of way. And you see a lot of people in the antitrust debate saying, oh, but the way that you get innovation and stuff is to break big companies up and allow them to thrive and look at what happened with Bell, for example, when we broke that up. And like, that's true if you're just in one market but if there is a massive goliath in another market and you're in the same market and you've broken your stuff it's not necessarily true in the same sort of way. So I think we're at an unstable time where some of those who have been advantaged are being forced to reckon with that you can't have as much advantage and keep it stable but we really need to keep that sort of complexity mirror of the interconnections between these things. When I taught my daughter, oh, she rather taught me the Rubik's Cube, one of the things you realize is sometimes you perfect one face of the cube and you completely muck up the other ones. And so I think one of the things we need to be encouraging people to do is if there's something in all the different narratives you need to keep those in mind because if you don't, your position will be unstable but the politics of how you support some of those underprivileged narratives I don't think I have a good insight on at the moment. That is definitely a very complex project. Bear in mind of the time limits, I guess. I will ask the final questions also from the audience. I guess that is, as I understand one about representation as you also raise your presentation. So how could we really leverage voices and of those communities from the non-Western world from the global south that is not, let's say not adequately featured in the current conversations and discussions about the effects of globalization and do we have any hopes or tips about that? So I think this is a really interesting point and it's one of the things that's really exacerbated by the way we've done globalized media and also globalized education frankly. So I look at the list of people who are in the attendee list and I see people from all over the world and some of your faculty members will be from all over the world but a huge number will be from America. And so we find these sort of asymmetries that's the same with news. A lot of it will come out of the West and will go around the world but it won't necessarily take it on board in various ways. One of the interesting places where you're seeing this challenge I actually think is in Hollywood where you're seeing a real rise of things like was it rich, crazy Asians or something like that? We're seeing a much greater rise in popular consciousness now about trying to understand some of the other regions of the world but particularly ones though where US often feels some sort of concern and so there's often like a strategic element to that as well. But it's starting to have like a cultural effect but it's also a fascinating example where you see, so you often see a disconnect between Silicon Valley and Washington DC but you also have this really interesting disconnect between Hollywood and Washington DC and so it's another really interesting example of this that they're sometimes giving voice to some more Chinese perspectives and approaches because they also want to sell into the Chinese market but that's also creating limits as well. And so for example, you've never seen a Hollywood movie that does Tiananmen Square because you would actually get blacklisted not just from the market I think on that particular movie but potentially more broadly. And so we're seeing some really interesting tensions. So I think one of the things to think about in this sort of diversity is it's incredibly important to have some of these international experiences and the sort of colleagues that you meet through doing this are going to be with you for the rest of your life and they're really important but we also need to have greater diversity within our own countries. And that doesn't just mean things like gender and race diversity. I also think that means ideology and viewpoint diversity. So one of the things we're seeing in some of the academies at the moment is some nine out of 10 social scientists being left leaning. And I'm very sympathetic to left use just on a personal level but actually for us to have a sort of proper understanding of different approaches, some ideological spread is actually also incredibly important. And I think that we have underplayed some of those perspectives because there isn't enough socioeconomic diversity and isn't enough ideological viewpoint diversity. So I think this diversity point is really important. And I also think going back to the point that Professor Alfred made about those two sides of the brain, we also need cognitive diversity. And I think there are a lot of things that we're doing at the moment that are really privileging certain cognitive approaches, which are very important cognitive approaches. But to think globally, we need to have a variety of cognitive approaches. And so there's some really interesting complexity work about that, that when you're trying to deal with complex problems, you don't just want the 10 best handlers, you want a whole variety of tools. And so that's a whole variety of perspectives, a whole variety of cognitive approaches and diversity on many axes. Thank you so much, Professor Roberts. I think we are just at 7 p.m. right now. So I guess, and due to the limits of the time, we have to wrap up right now, but thank you again so much for being with us today and also thank you so much for Professor Alfred for giving us the introduction. I just want to quickly remind the audience that we have our next panel beginning quickly at 7 p.m. 15. It's titled, Remand Gaining the International Legal Order with a very interesting panel, all HLS alumni with different geocouples for focus. And I personally think it's a very good panel to go to with all the inspirations and new imaginations that Professor Roberts just bring us with. So thank you again and thank you for being with us and have a good night. Thank you very much.