Workshop Description: Having seen the destabilizing influence upon the world community by wars like the ones in Syria and Ukraine, we will look at what it would take to build a viable system of global collective security that ensures that no one despot or nation can ever hold the world hostage again by threatening nuclear war, or weaponizing energy, or creating a global food crisis, or by wielding chemical weapons against its own people. To this end, we will consider what such a system would entail, who might build it, and what the incremental steps might be in building it. Lastly we will demonstrate how such a system would help guarantee the maintenance of peace in the world. 

Workshop Description: Having identified our global ethics, the next step is to envision the first global institution that we can build upon the foundation of these principles that will markedly improve our collective life. We will explore the building of a Global Agency that would manage and control critical sources of energy worldwide and ensure their fair distribution to all nations on reasonable terms. We will delve into the way such an institution might be constituted and its decision-making and other processes crafted all the while using our global ethics as building tools. We will further examine how this institution would go a long way toward helping us tackle a triad of global challenges, two of which are existential:  climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the equitable distribution of energy. 

Workshop Description: The world we live in is interconnected and interdependent as never before. While that interconnectedness has forged us into a single organism it has also made us prone to systemic risks like climate change, a global energy crisis, a global food crisis, a global economic recession, and the threat of global war  (especially a nuclear one) to name but a few. Our crises demand collective solutions and yet we are lacking the very institutions, policies, principles, and processes to get us there. Before we do anything else the community of nations needs to identify a set of organizing principles — a set of global ethics — that we can agree upon and proceed to apply methodically to craft solutions to our global challenges. In addition, these principles need to be woven into and firmly embedded in new institutions that we build that are fit to serve the needs of humanity at this new stage in its development. In this first workshop we will explore this key idea of a set of global ethics: why we need them, what we mean by them, identifying a few key ones and tangibly demonstrating how their methodical application can take us a long way to resolving our global challenges.