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Brody Forum - State of Democracy: The Case for a New Economic Order

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Join us for a Norman and Florence Brody Family Foundation Public Policy Forum with Mark Malloch-Brown.

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We live in an age in which the march of multilateralism has stalled and gone into reverse globally; and in which democracy, for all its ongoing signs of life, remains in deep recession. It is impossible to understand either without contending with the broken model of political economy that has prevailed over much of the past four decades. Mark Malloch-Brown, President of Open Society Foundations and former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, will share his thoughts on the fraught relationship between capitalism, democracy and international order. He argues for a new political economy, with a new and pluralistic conception of the active state, taking the world beyond the neoliberal era to greater justice and stability. 

Mark Malloch-Brown

About the Speaker

Mark Malloch-Brown is president of the Open Society Foundations, the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights.

He has worked to advance human rights, justice, and development for more than four decades in a variety of roles: with the United Nations, the World Bank, and as a British government minister, as well as with a range of civil society groups and business.

At the United Nations, Malloch-Brown spearheaded the global promotion of the UN Millennium Development Goals as head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) from 1999 to 2005, under the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. At the UNDP, and previously as head of external affairs at the World Bank, Malloch-Brown led reform efforts that were widely seen as increasing the impact of both organizations.

He later served as Kofi Annan’s chief of staff, and then as UN Deputy Secretary-General, before joining the British government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as minister responsible for Africa and Asia from 2007 to 2009. 

Malloch-Brown rejoined Open Society’s Global Board in 2009, reflecting a close friendship with George Soros that developed in the early 1990s when he was working as a political consultant in Latin America and later over relief efforts in Bosnia. In 1995, Soros backed Malloch-Brown and others’ idea of launching the International Crisis Group, an NGO focused on preventing and averting violent conflict, in response to the horrors seen in Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia. 

More recently, he chaired Best for Britain, a group that makes the case for Britain’s engagement with the European Union, and has among others led the boards of the Royal Africa Society, the UN Foundation, and the Business Commission for Sustainable Development.

Malloch-Brown was knighted for his contribution to international affairs and is currently on leave from the British House of Lords. Malloch-Brown is a Distinguished Practitioner at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, an adjunct fellow at Chatham House’s Queen Elizabeth Program, and has been a visiting distinguished fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.


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