10th Anniversary EMIC Lifetime Achievement Award, May 8th, 2026

Jury’s motivation

For a lifetime of reimagining global order, bridging East and West, South and North, and inspiring scholars and practitioners to navigate our disrupted world with courage and wisdom.

Introduction (May 8, 2026, 19:40 CET/Stockholm):

Tonight, we honour a singular figure whose life’s work embodies the very spirit of this conference: navigating disruption in an age of geopolitical, technological, and planetary upheaval. For more than five decades, Professor Kishore Mahbubani has devoted himself to understanding how shifts in global power reshape knowledge, policy, and society — a mission that lies at the heart of the EMIC community.

Born in Singapore to parents of Indian origin, Professor Mahbubani rose through an extraordinary career spanning diplomacy and academia. He served 33 years in the Singapore Foreign Service, including two terms as Ambassador to the United Nations and served as President of the UN Security Council during the formative years of the post-Cold War transition. From these frontline experiences, he developed a distinctive perspective on the evolving international order.

He went on to become the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, building it into Asia’s leading school of public policy. Through influential works such as Can Asians Think? (1998), The Great Convergence (2013), Has China Won? (2020), and The Asian 21st Century (2022) — the last of which has been downloaded more than 4.35 million times — he has consistently challenged received wisdom. In 2024, he published his undiplomatic memoir Living the Asian Century, and in 2025 he co-edited the open-access volume Can Asians Think of Peace? He challenges received wisdom with a humour that is refreshingly blunt — some might say dangerously honest — often delivered with a disarming smile that leaves one wondering whether one has just been brilliantly persuaded or gently scolded.

He maintains, throughout, that global governance must integrate the perspectives of emerging economies if it is to address our shared challenges: climate change, pandemics, and great-power rivalry.

His honours include the US Foreign Policy Association Medal, the Singapore Public Administration Medal (Gold), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also been named one of the world’s leading public intellectuals by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines.

For the EMIC community, Professor Kishore Mahbubani exemplifies how the production of knowledge must evolve beyond old hierarchies. It is for a lifetime of reimagining global order, bridging East and West, South and North, and inspiring scholars and practitioners to navigate our disrupted world with courage and wisdom that we are honoured to present him with the 10th EMIC Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Organizing Committee
10th Anniversary Emerging Markets Inspiration Conference (EMIC)

The 10th Anniversary EMIC Lifetime Achievement Award Session pdf, 561.7 kB.