Date: Friday, February 23, 2018
Location: London, England – Chatham House
Meridian International Center and Chatham House, with support from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, are partnering in London to host a conference to coincide with the centennial of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points – a set of principles for ending World War I and securing sustainable peace, delivered in a speech to Congress in January 1918. The gathering will be geared towards university students with the goal of preparing the next generation of global leaders for a complex future. The conference is the follow-on component of the Great War Alliance Forum, held at Meridian earlier this fall to commemorate the Centennial of WWI by exploring the key transatlantic alliances formed 100 years ago and their implications for today’s geopolitical climate.
Practitioners, policy-makers and the next generation of leaders will gather to explore lessons learned from 1918, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent slide into the Second World War. Participants will discuss the role of international institutions and multilateral efforts to resolve and prevent conflict today, examine how recent developments in the domain of cyber and communication technologies impact conflict and conflict prevention for the future, and deliberate on which of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points are applicable today. The interactive program will also focus on developing a new set of recommendations for sustainable peace and conflict prevention in the 21st century.
The conference will culminate with a program examining how President Wilson’s Fourteen Points influence international institutions and mechanisms today. Members of Meridian and Chatham House will join the conference panelists and participants to look at the current role and effectiveness of these intuitions in tandem with various mechanisms in resolving and preventing conflict. Collectively, program participants will offer a set of recommendations for new initiatives that might be necessary for preventing a future world war.
