The Institute for Global Leadership is very pleased to welcome Manuel Muñiz to lead EPIIC, its foundation program, for the remainder of the academic year. He will have an appointment as a Professor of the Practice at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The topic of the 32nd annual EPIIC colloquium and symposium is “Order and Chaos: Diplomacy and Force in a Changing World,” and Manuel’s back ground is well-suited to this theme.
Manuel is a jurist and an international relations scholar, with his own research falling within the fields of strategic studies and integration theory. Manuel has studied European integration as a means of understanding how interdependent political units react to complexity; a topic of growing importance given the increased velocity of change produced by innovation and its impact on our societies.
He is also the Director of the Program on Transatlantic Relations at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where he leads activities and research on US-Europe relations. A local affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a member of the Alumni Board of Directors of the Kennedy School of Government, he is also a David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral Commission and a holder of the Atlantic Council’s Millennium Fellowship.
Additionally, Manuel directs the Fundación Rafael del Pino’s Program on Global Leadership, which aims to foster Spanish talent in the field of international affairs; and is a co-Founder and former President of The Altius Society, an Oxford-based organization gathering young scholars and practitioners with a desire to understand trends of change in the world, and to contribute to more effective global governance.
Manuel holds a JD from the Complutense University in Madrid, an MSc in Finance from the IEB, a Master in Public Administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and is in the final stages of a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations at the University of Oxford (thesis submitted). From 2012 to 2014, he was a Research Fellow at Science Po's Centre d’Études de Relations Internationales (CERI) and he has been a visiting researcher at a number of foreign affairs think tanks including the Institut Français des Relations Internationales in Paris, and the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin. He was also a consultant for the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), where he supported the Libyan National Dialogue by providing strategic recommendation on the content of the security track, as well as on policies to be adopted in the post-agreement phase.
On joining the IGL, Manuel said, "I am thrilled to be taking on EPIIC. It is a great opportunity to explore with the students the enormous changes and challenges we see emerging around the world. In particular, EPIIC will be a great framework to study the rise of populism and its impact at the global level. In the next months we will be looking in depth at the weakening of the liberal order and its major consequences. What will the future of the EU be? What are the implications of the questioning of the EU project for Europeans, Americans and for the rest of the World? What will the impact be of a Trump presidency on the transatlantic relationship? How will Brexit, the result of the recent Italian constitutional referendum or the upcoming French and German general elections impact global affairs? In order to answer these questions we will look at the impact of technology and globalisation on our economy, the effects of social media on public discourse as well the interaction of immigration and identity politics."