Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum
Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum (GPF) helps the representatives of different countries to jointly generate criteria of modern efficient democratic statehood. These are such standards, which are jointly determined and accepted by everyone, that work for the purpose of building a fair, balanced, sustainable world order that would ensure decent existence of humankind.
The First Yaroslavl Forum (‘The Modern State and Global Security’) was held in 2009. President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev, Prime Minister of Spain Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Prime Minister of France Francois Fillon took part in this Forum. Its participants discussed questions of new standards of state construction and democracy and also what a modern state should be like, how it should act and progress in order to secure freedoms and well-being of citizens and contribute to global stability.
In 2010 Yaroslavl, which celebrated its millennium that year, brought together influential statesmen and politicians, representatives of business community, including businessmen innovators; leaders of science and education; experts in the field of political science, economics and law from many countries. The Second Global Policy Forum (‘The Modern State: Standards of Democracy and Criteria of Efficiency’) continued the discussions about the role and the place of modern states in ensuring safe and sustainable development.
The 2011 GPF, which will be held in September, is devoted to the subject ‘The modern state in the age of social diversity’. The Forum will focus on the issue of efficient performance of modern democratic states in the age of social diversity. The panelists are aimed at dwelling on the issues that jointly outline the ways of solving the problems that modern states are facing today. There will be three sections:
Section 1. Democratic institutions in multiethnic societies
The section is devoted to analyzing the experience of designing and building democratic institutions in multiethnic societies of the modern world. Russia has historically been composed of numerous ethnic communities, civilizations, cultural and religious groups. Russia's experience in building democracy is to be discussed in the context of other plural societies, including, among others, India, the United States, Brazil, and the European Union. One of the topics to be discussed at the section is the efficiency of democratic institutions and practices against challenges of illegal migration, ethnic separatism, and fundamentalism.
Section 2. The rich and the poor: where is justice?
The Section participants will make an attempt to elaborate practical recommendations for modern states, including strategies of economic development, conflicts and crises management – all these are processes directly influencing the formation of national and global political and economic cultures. The goals of the discussion are identification and improvement of key mechanisms for reducing inequalities both inside countries and on the global scale.
Section 3. Global security and local conflicts
The potential for emergence of new local conflicts remains high and one of the global security and international agenda priorities is to prevent such conflicts in due time. The settlement of ‘frozen conflicts’ with far-reaching dangerous consequences is also of great interest.
The objectives in this case are: the search of consensus policy solutions for governments in this sphere, development of existing mechanisms and creation of new institutions, as and when necessary; the elaboration of efficient ways of cooperation between governments, global and regional institutions; the formulation and agreement on common conflict resolution principles taking into account the peculiarities of every conflict.