Parag Khanna is a leading global strategist, world traveller, and bestselling author. He is managing partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario based advisory firm. A world-renowned authority on globalisation, Dr. Khanna’s analysis is regularly featured in print and television media such as CNN, CNBC, BBC, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME, The Economist, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, Quartz, and Foreign Policy. Parag has been named one of Esquire’s “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century” and was recognised on WIRED’s “Smart List.”
Dr. Khanna is highly sought after by the world’s most important corporations for his prescient analysis, stunning, data-rich visualizations and engaging, confident delivery customised to focus on mega-trends, geopolitical shifts, economic competition, and technological dynamics — always informed by his firsthand experiences in more than 150 countries.
Parag has provided his expertise and foresight to over thirty governments, including serving as an advisor to the U.S. National Intelligence Council and on the Singapore government's Committee on the Future Economy. He currently serves on the advisory boards of GeoQuant, Graticule Asset Management Asia (GAMA), and Datarama, and previously on the Innovation Advisory Board of DBS Bank.
Parag’s newest book, The Future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, and Culture in the 21st Century (2019), earned high praise from Larry Summers, Jim Rogers, and many other luminaries. It was called “dazzling” by Kirkus Reviews and hailed as “authoritative… a standard reference,” by the Financial Times, which named the book to its Summer Books of 2019 list.
Khanna is also author of a definitive trilogy of books on the future of world order beginning with the bestsellers The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008) and How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (2011), and concluding with Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (2016). These books garnered accolades from Eric Schmidt, Nassim Taleb, Chuck Hagel, Fareed Zakaria, Mark Mobius, Niall Ferguson, Robert Kaplan, Kevin Kelly, Martin Sorrell, Dominic Barton, Klaus Schwab, and many other leading authorities. The New York Times Book Review hailed Parag as “a foreign policy whiz kid.”
Parag’s two other books are Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State (2017), which was strongly endorsed by notable intellectuals such as Tyler Cowen and Lawrence Lessig, and Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (2011) (co-authored with Ayesha Khanna), which was celebrated by Alvin Toffler, Peter Diamandis, Peter Schwartz, and others. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and received feature coverage in leading publications in all major countries of the world.
Prior to founding FutureMap, Parag was a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore, as well as a fellow at New America and the Brookings Institution. In 2007 he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior geopolitical adviser to U.S. Special Operations Forces. He also worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Parag was a featured speaker at TED in 2016 and TED Global in 2009, with his talks garnering more than three million views online. Dr. Khanna holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics, a Bachelor of Science in International Affairs and a Master of Arts in Security Studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Parag speaks German, Hindi, French, Spanish and basic Arabic. He has travelled to nearly 150 countries and been honoured as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.
