LSE Director Minouche Shafik
LSE is where the world comes to debate the greatest challenges of our time.
LSE Festival 2019 will bring together global thought leaders to continue our investigation of the big challenges that society faces today and how the systems that bind society together need to evolve and adapt. We are expanding our focus to look at the shifting geo-politics of our times, the disintegrating democracies, reconfigurations of identity and technological transformations. How did we get here? What are the challenges? And, importantly, how can we tackle them?
We are living in an age of insecurity. Increasingly, the values of liberal democracy, liberal economies, and a rules-based international system are being repudiated – even though they have delivered progress for the vast majority of people. Discontent has been fed by fears over slowing economic progress, especially in advanced economies, flat-lining productivity and social mobility, and concerns about the future brought on by shifts in demography and technology. We are also seeing a shift in global power from West to East – with major consequences for geo-politics and international relations.
This is a moment of great instability and uncertainty, but also one of great opportunity to rethink old paradigms and challenge prevailing orthodoxies.
Please join us in thinking about how global disorder is best understood and how we might imagine, together, a better world.
Professor Julia Black, Co-Chair
Louise Jones, Co-Chair
Professor Rita Astuti
Professor Bill Callahan
Professor Simon Glendinning
Dr Neil McLean
Dr Alison Powell
Martin Reid
Professor Tony Travers
Kirsty Wadsley