Parag Khanna is Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He is author of the international best-seller The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (Random House, 2008), which has been translated into over a dozen languages. He was a senior geopolitical advisor to United States Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before that, he worked with the Brookings Institution, the World Economic Forum in Geneva, and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Parag is a host of InnerView on MTV. He is also on the Executive Committee of the Young Lions of New York Public Library. 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.” In 2002 he was awarded the OECD Future Leaders Prize, and in 2009 he was honored as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.