By Park Bong-gwon, Chung Wook, Lim Sung-hyun

The World Knowledge Forum (WKF), which marks the 16th anniversary this year, offers a list of sessions that will look into the rapidly changing global geopolitical landscape and help economic players to better respond to these changes.
 

The ‘Shifting Global Geopolitical Landscape & Korea’ session will invite the global geopolitics experts and predict how the rapidly changing global geopolitics will realign the order of global economy, politics, diplomacy and military.

What this session will cover includes: which will have the most profound impact on the new order of global geopolitics; how the landscape of new geopolitics will be realigned; whether the tension between Russia and Western nations will intensify; how much impact the volatile global geopolitics will bring to the global economy; and how Korea should address the fast-changing geopolitical environment.

Reading how the new order of global geopolitics will be shaped in preemptive manners is the key for nations and companies to bolster competitiveness.

The session will be attended by Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister & Foreign Minister of Sweden, who was involved in the Ukraine conflict, and Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense of the United States, who blamed President Obama’s Middle East policy via his autobiography ‘Worthy Fights’ and called for more active intervention.

Also on the list are John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago Professor who argued for offensive neorealism, citing all nations aspire to be the super power and thus cooperation is hardly achieved, and the world’s renowned historian Paul Kennedy, Yale University Professor, heralding heated debate during the session.

Leon Panetta will also share his insight on how to solve the North Korean issue, which becomes a global conundrum, during his own lecture, where he will reflect on an increasingly complex set of geopolitical challenges.

Atifete Jahjaga, the fourth President of Republic of Kosovo and the first woman to be elected to the office, will share her view on the geopolitical future of Europe in her lecture.

Theo Waigel, a former German finance minister, will be bringing his own view on the likeliness of the survival of the Eurozone and the European Union after the Grexit risk.

The geopolitical dynamics surrounding China will be discussed in the session of ‘G2 War: China in pursuit of a global rule setting country.’ A closer look into the North Korean regime, where its leadership increasingly resorts to brinkmanship, will be available through the session of ‘Reconciliation, Cooperation and Unification of the Korean Peninsula.’ This session will shed light on the future of the regime, which sticks to a closed door policy even at a time when the US shakes hands with Iran and Cuba. Some say that the North’s dependence on brinkmanship reflects its regime is very unstable.

Domestic and international experts on North Korean issues will share views on whether North Korea will follow the step of Iran and Cuba, how much China can control North Korea, the likelihood of the region’s collapse and what should be done to bring North Korea to the negotiation table again.

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