Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting the Speakers for this year’s ECC Conference.

Thursday morning, we’ll hear from Parag Khanna, a leading global strategist and best-selling author. He is a CNN Global Contributor and Senior Research Fellow in the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is also Managing Partner of Hybrid Reality, a boutique geostrategic advisory firm, and Co-Founder & CEO of Factotum, a leading content branding agency. Parag’s latest book is Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (2016). Parag was named one of Esquire's "75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century," and featured in WIRED magazine's "Smart List." Parag has been an adviser to the U.S. National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 program, and served in the foreign policy advisory group to the Obama campaign. He was a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, he served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior geopolitical adviser to United States Special Operations Forces, he was the Global Governance Fellow at the Brookings Institution, he worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, and was a Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Dr. Khanna holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics, and Bachelors and Masters degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. In 2015-2016 he was awarded the Richard von Weizsaecker Fellowship of the Bosch Foundation. He has been a Senior Fellow of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS, Senior Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, Distinguished Visitor at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin, Next Generation Fellow of the American Assembly, Visiting Fellow at the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, Non-Resident Associate of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. He has received grants from the United Nations Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Ford Foundation

You can find Parag on twitter at @paragkhanna and learn more about his book at http://www.paragkhanna.com/