Juan Manuel Santos

Juan Manuel Santos is one of the most consequential statesmen of the twenty-first century. As President of Colombia from 2010 to 2018, he achieved what many considered impossible: a negotiated end to more than fifty years of armed conflict with the FARC guerrilla organization, one of the longest-running civil wars in the world. For that achievement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded him the sole 2016 Nobel Peace Prize “for his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end.” The political speaker Juan Manuel Santos has since emerged as one of the world’s most authoritative voices on peace, global governance, and the kind of long-view leadership that polarized societies desperately need.

His path to the presidency was forged across decades of public service. He served as Minister of Foreign Trade, Minister of Finance, and Minister of Defense before winning the presidency in 2010. Under his two-term administration, Colombia became the fastest-growing major economy in Latin America, reduced poverty by nearly 8 percentage points, cut extreme poverty by half, and launched the most ambitious infrastructure program in the country’s history. He co-founded the Pacific Alliance, the most successful economic integration initiative in the region’s history, and was one of the original architects of the Sustainable Development Goals, formally proposing them at the Rio+20 Summit in 2012.

Santos has twice appeared on TIME’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World and received the World Economic Forum’s Global Statesman Award in 2017. He holds honorary doctorates from institutions including La Sorbonne, co-authored a book with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on The Third Way, and is co-founder of the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network alongside Nobel Economics Laureate Amartya Sen. He chairs the COMPAZ Foundation, which he created to advance peace, environmental protection, and poverty reduction through grassroots leadership.

Chair of The Elders

In November 2024, Santos was appointed Chair of The Elders, the organization of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, succeeding former Irish President Mary Robinson. Previous chairs have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Kofi Annan. In this role he represents the organization at the UN Security Council, the Munich Security Conference, and the UN General Assembly, and has led missions to conflict zones including Ukraine, where he met President Zelenskyy and visited the sites of Russian atrocities in Bucha and Irpin.

As a speaker, Juan Manuel Santos brings to the stage something no amount of executive coaching can manufacture: the experience of having actually done it. He negotiated a peace deal that the world said could not be struck, governed a country through profound transformation, and now operates at the center of the most urgent challenges in global affairs. His keynotes on leadership under pressure, the architecture of negotiation, sustainable development, and building consensus across entrenched divides draw on a career of decisions with real stakes, and leave audiences with frameworks they can carry into any room where complexity and courage are both required.