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Professor Andy Knight says Forum will cause a rethinking of the way we view our region

For Release Upon Receipt - May 1, 2015

St. Augustine


Forum on the Future of the Caribbean

 The Forum on the Future of the Caribbean will be held on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 at the St. Augustine Campus of The University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. The next two days of the Forum, May 6-7, will take place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Port-of-Spain. It will present a multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary platform to mobilise the Caribbean to establish a cohesive strategy as well as a practical agenda to solve its own problems. It is intended to provoke and generate disruptive thinking that can lead to innovative, actionable ideas and solutions.

Professor Andy Knight, Director, Institute of International Relations at The UWI St. Augustine, opens the conversation on global diplomacy in the Caribbean on May 7th, day three of the Forum. He had this to say:

"No longer can we hold on to old paradigms that aren’t working. 

It is time for the introduction of new paradigms that would position small Caribbean states as competitive players in an increasingly globalized and intermestic space.

The Caribbean Future Forum will cause a rethinking of the way we view our region. The desired outcome would be the charting of a new course for sustainable Caribbean economic and social development and for the embrace of a confident diplomacy that will allow Caribbean leaders to punch above their weight in multilateral arenas.

Critically, we must align more aspects of our education system with the imperative of wealth creation and redistribution. Driving our economies out of this recession must be a top priority."

This final session will examine diplomatic activity as it contends with a more plural and complex world experiencing tension from concurrent processes of fragmentation and integration. Presentations during this session will focus on the potential role for small states and explore the economics of new space diplomacy.

For further information on the Forum, please log onto http://caribbeanfutureforum.com/

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Professor. W. Andy Knight is Director of the Institute of International Relations (IIR) at The University of the West Indies and Professor and former Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. Based at the UWI St Augustine Campus in Trinidad from January 2013, a Barbadian by birth, Professor Knight has had a distinguished career as an academic and scholar in Canada, culminating in his heading the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta.

He serves as Advisory Board Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Welfare of Children and was a Governor of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) from 2007 to 2012. Professor Knight co-edited Global Governance journal from 2000 to 2005 and was Vice Chair of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS).

Knight has written and edited several books, book chapters and journal articles on various aspects of multilateralism, global governance and peace, and United Nations reform. His recent books include: The Routledge Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect (with Frazer Egerton) –Routledge 2012; Towards the Dignity of Difference?: Neither 'end of History' Nor 'clash of Civilizations' (with Mojtaba Mahdavi) – Ashgate 2012; and Global Politics (with Tom Keating) – Oxford University Press 2010. His work cuts across international relations, international law and global governance and is known for challenging the embedded orthodoxies of contemporary multilateralism. A much sought-after analyst, Professor Knight has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada – the highest honour afforded to Canadian academics. 

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