How connectivity and geography will affect the future of global affairs
Parag Khanna, the well-travelled author of new book Connectography, can change the way you see the world, writes Kate Whitehead
YOU HAVE TO BE on the ball to keep up with Parag Khanna. The global strategist speaks fast and enthusiastically, bouncing from one idea to the next at lightning speed. Within minutes we’ve gone from banned books to growing up in Dubai and the global connectivity revolution. It is one long fluid conversation, the 38-year-old finding connections at every turn.
Khanna isn’t your average academic. His look is more Silicon Valley corporate cool (jeans, crisp white shirt and a jacket) than fusty professor. And sure, he’s got letters after his name and a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics (LSE), but his take on the world has come as much from a life lived and travelled as from libraries.
His background is well suited to his international-relations role – he was born in India, raised in Dubai and the United States, lived in Germany, where he passed his Abitur (final secondary school exams), and took degrees at Washington’s Georgetown University and LSE. He now lives with his wife, Ayesha, and their two children in Singapore.
We are in a snug corner of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, in Hong Kong’s Central district, and by the time our coffee arrives – 15 minutes into the conversation – we’ve already circumnavigated the globe a couple of times and my head is beginning to spin. Academics often speak slowly and deliberately, choosing their words carefully, but not Khanna. It’s as though the sentences are queued up in his head and he can’t get them out fast enough.
The original draft of his latest book, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilisation, ran to 240,000 words before publisher Random House carved off a big chunk about the types of government that are best equipped to cope with today’s world. He joined forces with Random House in 2004, after pitching an idea for a book about empires and how they influence the world order. The publisher gave him three years to travel and research the subject.
“I was young and single then; it was an amazing adventure,” Khanna says. “I backpacked all around the world, on buses and trains.”
