Manuel Muniz – Keynote Speaker

Manuel Muñiz was until recently Secretary of State for Global Spain at the Spanish Foreign Ministry. In this capacity he led the Strategy and Foresight unit at the Ministry as well as the Economic Diplomacy team, and the Communications department, including the Office for Diplomatic Information.

Dr. Muñiz coordinated the crafting of Spain’s 2021-2024 Foreign Policy Strategy and led the efforts to craft the National Strategy on Technology and Global Order, a document aimed at launching Spain’s Technology Diplomacy. He also led work at the OECD on the approval of a global mobility framework aimed at minimizing the economic impact of Covid 19, and was the coordinator of Spain’s OECD Ministerial Presidency during 2020. Dr. Muñiz was also a member of the Prime Minister’s Covid19 task force. As the Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson he held dozens of press briefings and ran the Ministry’s communications efforts as well as those aimed at boosting Spain’s image abroad.

Prior to joining the government Dr. Muñiz was the Dean of the School of Global and Public Affairs at IE University and Rafael del Pino Professor of Practice of Global Transformation. Posts he held between 2017 and 2020. During that period he also founded and directed IE’s Center for the Governance of Change, an institution dedicated to studying the challenges posed by accelerated societal and technological transformation. Dr. Muñiz’s research interests fall within the fields of innovation and disruption, political economy, and regional and global governance.

From 2015 to 2017 Dr. Muñiz was the Director of the Program on Transatlantic Relations at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. And from 2017 to 2020 he was a Senior Associate at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as well as one of the promoters of its Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship.

Dr. Manuel Muñiz holds a JD (Law) from the Complutense University in Madrid, an MSc in Financial Markets from the IEB, a Master in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations from the University of Oxford. He is a recipient of a number of awards and recognitions including the Trilateral Commission’s David Rockefeller Fellowship, the Atlantic Council’s Millennium Fellowship, and the Eisenhower Fellowship. In 2016 he was appointed by Esglobal as one of the 25 intellectuals having the greatest impact on our thinking about Iberoamerica.