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Please join Kishore Mahbubani, in conversation with Ian Bremmer, for a discussion on the policies and approaches necessary to govern in an increasingly interconnected and complex global environment.

For years former diplomat and academic Kishore Mahbubani has studied the changing relationship between Asia and the U.S. in works like Can Asians Think? and The New Asian Hemisphere. In The Great Convergence, he assesses East and West at a remarkable turning point in world history and reaches an incredible conclusion: China stands poised to become the world’s largest economy as soon as 2016. Unprecedented numbers of the world’s population, driven by Asian economic growth, are being lifted out of poverty and into the middle class. And with this creation of a world-wide middle class, there is an unprecedented convergence of interests and perceptions, cultures and values: a truly global civilization. 

Kishore Mahbubani is the Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. From 1971-2004 he served in the Singapore Foreign Ministry, where he was Permanent Secretary from 1993-1998, served twice as Singapore's Ambassador to the UN, and in January 2001 and May 2002 served as President of the UN Security Council. Professor Mahbubani is the author of Can Asians Think?, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, and The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines have listed him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, and in 2009 The Financial Times included him on their list of the top 50 individuals who would shape the debate on the future of capitalism. In 2010 and 2011 he was selected as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

Ian Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. He created Wall Street's first global political risk index, and has authored several books, including Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World, the national bestseller, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?, and The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall.  Dr. Bremmer is a contributor for the Financial Times A-List and Reuters.com, and writes "The Call" blog on ForeignPolicy.com.  He received his PhD in political science from Stanford University in 1994.

Read an excerpt of The Great Convergence here.

Read an interview with Mahbubani here.

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