As the Julian Assange cases rumbles along, questions have been raised about Ecuador’s agenda. The decision to grant Assange asylum was it driven by global or local motives?

This week on Edelman Editions, Stefan Stern, director of strategy talks to Scott Thomson, deputy MD of the Corporate and Financial practice and Mark Leonard, co-founder & director of the European Council of Foreign Relations about the Assange case and the wider discussion around who drives the agenda – global or local? They talk about how events within the last five years have highlighted the shift in power from the west and what this has done for the global vs. local debate.

We are keen to hear your thoughts on this topic; what has the Julian Assange case done to the image of the countries involved? Who do you think controls the political and diplomatic agenda, global or local? Please feel free to comment directly on the track above, or in our comments field below.

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Podcast participants:

	Chair: Stefan Stern, Director of Strategy, Edelman Stefan has been writing and commenting on business and management for the past two decades. He wrote the Financial Times’s management column for over four years before joining Edelman in August 2010 as its new Director of Strategy. In October he was appointed Visiting Professor in management practice at the Cass business school.
	Mark Leonard, Co-Founder & Director of the European Council of Foreign Relations Mark is Co-Founder and Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think-tank. He writes a fortnightly column on European and Global issues for Reuters.com. Previously he worked as Director of Foreign Policy at the Centre for European Reform, and Director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think-tank he founded under the patronage of Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the age of 24. In the 1990s Mark worked for the think-tank Demos where his Britain™ report was credited with launching Cool Britannia. Mark has spent time in Washington as a Transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and in Beijing as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences. As well as writing and commenting frequently on global affairs in the media, Mark is author of two best-selling books. His first book, Why Europe will run the 21st Century, was published in 2005 and translated into 19 languages. Mark’s second book, “What does China think?” was published in February 2008 and translated into 15 languages.
	Scott Thomson, Deputy Managing Director, Edelman Scott is the UK lead and coordinator for Europe of Edelman’s global crisis network. In this role he delivers crisis preparedness and training services and has provided counsel and support to clients on crisis assignments ranging from product recalls in the FMCG, electronics and healthcare sectors, to legal proceedings against commercial, academic and third sector institutions, and labour union disputes in the textiles and manufacturing sectors.

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