Kishore Mahbubani
Dean & Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
Kishore Mahbubani is currently the Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY School) at the National University of Singapore. Before this, he served in the Singapore Foreign Ministry from 1971 to 2004, where he was Permanent Secretary from 1993 to 1998. He also served twice as Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN. In 2001 and 2002 he served as President of the UN Security Council.
Professor Mahbubani has published and spoken in all corners of the globe and 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.
He graduated in philosophy from Singapore and Canada and served as a Fellow of the Center for International Affairs in Harvard University from 1991 to 1992. The Foreign Policy Association Medal was awarded to him in New York in June 2004 with the following opening words in the citation: “A gifted diplomat, a student of history and philosophy, a provocative writer and an intuitive thinker”.
He was also listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in September 2005 and was also included in the March 2009 Financial Times list of Top 50 individuals (including Obama, Wen Jiabao and Sarkozy) who would shape the debate on the future of capitalism. Most recently, Prof Mahbubani was selected as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers in 2010 and 2011. In 2011, he was described as “the muse of the Asian century.”
