SINGAPORE, April 2 — Professor Kishore Mahbubani (pic) Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, has been selected by leading British current affairs magazine Prospect as one of the top 50 world thinkers for 2014.
Prof Mahbubani is the only Singaporean on the prestigious list that includes Pope Francis, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, economist and Harvard President Emeritus Lawrence Summers, and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve System Janet Yellen.
Prof Mahbubani, a diplomat who served two stints as Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN and as President of the UN Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002, is a renowned author and thinker.
He serves in Boards and Councils of several institutions in Singapore, Europe and North America, including the Yale President’s Council on International Activities, Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, Indian Prime Minister’s Global Advisory Council and University of Bocconi International Advisory Committee.
He is the Chairman of the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize Nominating Committee and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on China.
Prof Mahbubani’s most recent book is The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World.
Prospect magazine’s list recognises leading thinkers with a global reach whose achievements over the previous 12 months made significant contributions to addressing the central questions of the world today, and aims to provoke debate about the role of intellectuals in public life.
Commenting on the selection of the world thinkers, Jonathan Derbyshire, managing Editor of Prospect magazine said in a statement that in drawing up the list of World Thinkers, it gave credit to the “currency of candidates’ thinking.”
“Kishore Mahbubani’s work certainly grapples with some of the biggest questions of our time, sketching as it does the contours of a new era in which the west can no longer take its primacy for granted,” he said.
Among those featured in Prospect’s 2014 list are 17 economists, 13 philosophers, three scientists, three technology theorists, an entrepreneur, writers and activists.
— BERNAMA
