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 Steven Pinker and register for all of our events on our Current Series page.
Steven Pinker
Thursday, February 1st, 2018
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Old Auditorium – UBC, 6344 Memorial Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Sold Out. To be added to the Wait List, please email your full name and your guest name(s) to Bonita Perko at bonita.perko@ubc.ca.
 Photo by Rose Lincoln, Harvard Staff Photographer |
Our speaker: Steven Pinker is one of the world’s most influential intellectuals, with multiple bestselling and award-winning books on language, mind, and human nature. He has held positions at MIT and Harvard, where he currently resides. His forthcoming book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, challenges prophecies of doom to provide a sobering and more optimistic account of the future.
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.
