The Phil Lind Initiative presents our January-March 2018 (Term 2) speaker series on The Unravelling of the Liberal Order. The series will run from January to March, 2018 at UBC Vancouver. Join us for a talk by Edward Luce and register for all of our events on our Current Series page.
Edward Luce
Thursday, January 11, 2018
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Old Auditorium – UBC, 6344 Memorial Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Jan. 10 Update: Online registration has now ended but tickets are available at the door.
Watch the Live Stream of Ed Luce’s talk here
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Our speaker: Chief U.S. columnist and commentator for The Financial Times, Edward Luce is one of the paper’s most popular writers and “one of the finest journalists of our time.” A U.K. native, Oxford graduate, and former speechwriter for Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, he is highly regarded by policymakers, leaders, and political junkies for his insider/outsider insights on American politics and his cross-border perspectives on geopolitics and economics. At the FT, Luce has served as Washington bureau chief, Capital Markets editor, correspondent to the Philippines, and South Asia bureau chief. He also writes about the future of work and the major challenges facing the West, including the rise of populism and the decline of the middle class.
His new book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, examines the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of democratic liberalism ― of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a symptom. According to Luce, “What we do not yet know is whether the world’s democratic recession will turn into a global depression.” The New York Times called the book “insightful and harrowing.” An excerpt appeared in The Atlantic (The Changing of the Global Economic Guard).
Luce’s previous book, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, was described as “a masterful portrait of America.” He also is the author of In Spite of the Gods, praised by The Economist as “likely to be the definitive book on India for some time to come.”
About the theme: The world is undergoing a wrenching process of geopolitical transformation. The liberal order that dominated for the past half century is unravelling. Presumptions of US hegemony no longer apply and new power centers are emerging in Asia and Europe. Nation states are re-asserting their sovereignty as nationalist movements gain strength. The world´s major cities are also rewiring global supply chains. Yet, multilateral institutions developed in the mid-twentieth century are coming under assault by some of the very countries that were central to their formation. Digital connectivity and new technologies are accelerating political, economic and social transformation and literally changing the rules of the game, pulling at the seams of global stability. Will the liberal order hold, or is its disassembling inevitable? What kinds of global order(s) does the future hold? The Lind Initiative’s Spring 2018 series will explore these and other questions, with visits from the world’s leading intellectuals on the subject.
About the organizer: The Phil Lind Initiative is an annual dialogue series hosted by the Liu Institute for Global Issues, part of the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and is made possible by a generous gift from Philip Lind (BA’66, LLD’02). Created to address the most urgent issues of our time, the initiative invites prominent American scholars, writers and intellectuals to UBC to conduct research and share ideas with students, faculty and the wider community on a particular theme.
