The world has been changing rapidly in the last two decades. Innovation on technology and transportation lead to globalization. Globalization is an inevitable condition and the civilization has come to it and facing its challenges. Globalization has many facets and it may provide benefits; however on the other parts it provides legal challenges to minimize its negative impacts.

Globalization promotes international trade that leads to create interdependence between countries. The free movement of goods, services, capital, and work force becomes the main points of agreements both in bilateral, regional, as well as multilateral. These free movements are held easily crossing the states border in the virtue of free trade agreements. The free flow of information lead to awareness of freedom and democracy encouraging open participation of people in state administration. This led to the regional and international cooperation among states, such as the European Union, ASEAN, NAFTA, WTO and many other forms of international cooperation organization. The objective of such cooperation is to reduce trade barriers among the member states. However, in some points it has negative impacts especially to the developing countries that generally require foreign capital to drive their national economy to increase jobs rate and provide public infrastructure. The international cooperation also arise many legal problems such as conflict of laws, public policy, contradiction of foreign investments policies, as well as the mechanisms of dispute settlement.

Innovation in business has changed the pattern of its works. We are seeing tremendous expansion of e-commerce model, which is scraping conventional business model. IT-based business mostly operates crossing the state borders, provides sale of goods and services. Information technology has changed the transaction manner as well as the pattern of modern society to obtain information. The problems emerge from the situation, such as taxation, business license, competition, and horizontal conflicts. However, IT-based business shows reluctant to be regulated by the authority, on the other hands it must be regulated to prevent any abuse and protection over the society. In such new development, the government as regulator must intervene in terms of measurable policy and regulation as protection to the public interests.

Furthermore, globalization affects people’s consciousness on democracy and participation in government. Democracy provides greater freedom in politic. It means that the people are free to choose and determine their government through a general election. This system applies to national and local government. At local government level, democracy is implemented as local autonomy in which the local government has authority in certain aspects of governmental affairs, including the local government spending. The problems arise when insufficient supervision and maladministration on government may lead to corrupt and low quality of public services. This situation has also occurred in Indonesia after reformation movement and greater autonomy was given to the local government. In such situation, good governance may promote clean government and prevent corruption. Good governance creates a system that ensures the principles of transparency, accountability, participation, and inclusive must be embodied in regulation and administration practices. However, the integrity must be taken into account not only as a personal matter, but also must be considered as an institutional systematic matter.

Besides that, foreign investments may increase the economic growth. But, on the other side it also brings some negative impact. Multinational companies relocate their undertakings to the developing countries with some consideration, among others: getting near to the natural resources necessarily for production activities, lower labor wages, loose taxation regulation, and many others incentives. However, with low quality of regulation and arbitrary in law enforcement occur in most developing countries, it may raise many problems. Natural resources exploitation has led to environmental degradation, climate change, and social conflicts; moreover, the lower labor standards in terms of minimum wages, working place conditions, and social security with insufficient supervision from authority rising issues of human rights violation. These issues have been addressed by SMART projects along with its research focus on life cycle of textiles (ready-made garment) to create sustainable corporations.

Additionally, along with the development that has been observed by many scholars in the field of law and politics; some scholars also believe that current situation shows the turning point to the deglobalisation, as we can look from the BREXIT phenomenon and the US policy concerning protectionism in trade as well as its state borders. Regionalism comes with many benefits, but also make some cost, for instance the sovereignty problems, the financial problems, and the pluralism of law that have to be handled and harmonize. However, an opposite situation is occurred in ASEAN, which has been more that 50 years building their cooperation. The cooperation is laid on the same historic, culture, and non-intervention that becomes the strongest pillar to embodied into the cooperation. The cooperation within the ASEAN members is going stronger and stable and creating peace within the region, despite of many current issues that is facing by ASEAN Member States such as human rights, economic development, environment, terrorism, and regional security.

Finally, this conference tries to respond those challenges to seek solution for current issues faced in international level. The discussion and the view of legal scholars from all over the world have been very meaningful to answer the problems in the future.

See you again in the ICLGG next year!