TED Community » Parag Khanna

About Me

Parag Khanna is Director of the Hybrid Reality Institute and Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is co-author (with Ayesha Khanna) of Hybrid Reality (TED Books) and the international best-sellers How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance" (Random House, 2011) and The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (Random House, 2008). During 2007 he was a senior geopolitical advisor to United States Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2002-5, he was the Global Governance Fellow at the Brookings Institution; from 2000-2002 he worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva; and from 1999-2000, he was a Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

In 2008 he was named one of Esquire’s 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century, and one of fifteen individuals featured in WIRED magazine’s “Smart List.” He also served in the foreign policy advisory group to the Barack Obama for President campaign. He serves on the Board of Directors of Independent Diplomat.

Parag holds a Bachelor of Science in International Affairs and a minor in Philosophy from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, a Masters Degree from Georgetown’s Security Studies Program, and a PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics.

Parag’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Forbes, Newsweek, Harper’s, BusinessWeek, The Guardian, Policy Review, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Times, Prospect, Esquire, Slate.com, The New Republic, Die Zeit, Survival, Current History, GOOD, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, New Statesman, Strategy+Business, Washington Times, The National, Daily Star, Indian Express, India Today, OpenDemocracy.net, TheGlobalist.com, and Correspondence. He has been featured on CNN, BBC, PBS, Al Jazeera International, National Public Radio (NPR), and other media.

Parag has traveled in close to 100 countries and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In 2009 he was honored as a Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. He had been a Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin (2008), Next Generation Fellow of the American Assembly (2007-8), Visiting Fellow at the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore (2006), Non-Resident Associate of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University (2004-5), and a Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, India (2004). In 2002 he was awarded the OECD Future Leaders Prize. He speaks German, Hindi, French, Spanish, and basic Arabic.