Contemporary trends suggest a sea change in the international order as the US reverses its longstanding commitments to free trade and liberal democracy. Based on a forthcoming book titled Chinese Developmentalism in the Global Legal and Economic Order, co-edited with Jacques deLisle and Jaclyn Neo, our speaker, Matthew Erie, says that China promotes a novel ordering they call “Chinese developmentalism,” which favors state-led economic growth, industrial policy, technological innovation, and illiberal governance.  Chinese developmentalism is complex and still evolving, but Erie says while its aspirations are far-reaching, the magnitude and direction of its impact are far from inevitable.

North Korea is one of the world’s poorest countries, but also one of the most challenging places to deliver humanitarian aid. For years at a time, its government has barred foreign aid workers, suspicious of their intentions. Swiss aid worker Kathi Zellweger, one of the very few Westerners to have lived in North Korea, and who visited the country seventy-five times over three decades, will share her experiences working with local medical experts, negotiating with suspicious government officials, and finding ways to help thousands of people, most of them children. She is joined by Mike Chinoy, a former CNN correspondent and repeat visitor to North Korea, with whom she wrote the book, Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea.

The international legal order is fragmenting into multiple “geo-legal orders,” in which the interpretation and operation of international law will increasingly depend on the spheres of influence of leading states and political groupings. This raises a basic question: how will a multipolar international order work? What normative constructions will emerge to bind the new geo-legal orders together? Dr. Malcolm Jorgensen, a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, will share his current research in progress.

Since the Chinese government carried out full-scale privatization of the urban housing market nearly three decades ago, private home ownership in cities has soared and tens of millions of home-owning Chinese have joined home ownership associations. In his new book, The Authoritarian Commons: Neighborhood Democratization in Urban China (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Shitong Qiao argues that homeowner associations (HOAs) have fundamentally changed how Chinese urban neighborhoods and cities are governed. Drawing on six years of fieldwork, he finds that local governments have come to rely on homeowners to help govern their own neighborhoods, and homeowners have become accustomed to the democratic ritual of electing HOA leaders. Does the rise of HOAs have any wider significance for China’s political future?