NYU Professor, Bestselling Author, Award-Winning Cartoonist and World Economic Forum Expert Dr Maha Hosain Aziz is on a mission to help others make sense of a world of growing global risk in a dangerous era of shock events. She has been called a “global thinker to watch” by public intellectuals like Nouriel Roubini in a field largely dominated by men.
Maha is a professor focused on global risk and future trends at NYU’s MA International Relations Program, leading the annual global risk prediction project with Wikistrat, the world’s first crowdsourced consultancy. She has served on the Global Future Council on Risk at the World Economic Forum since 2020, researching global risks like climate change and artificial intelligence as well as strategies to tackle them.
Maha is the author of the seven-time award-winning bestseller, Future World Order (2020), which has been called a “must-read” by public intellectuals like Dr Ian Bremmer and Kishore Mahbubani; she donated 15% of her book profits to the Abid Aziz Fund for Syrian refugee youth in Jordan’s Za’atari camp via charity Peace and Sport to honor her late brother. Her two sequels include Global Spring: Predictions for a Post-Pandemic World (2024) and 10 Shock Events By 2030 (2024). Her ideas have been featured in outlets including the Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Forbes, CNN, Observer, Businessweek, Bloomberg and Tatler.
Maha is a keynote speaker to government, nonprofit and corporate audiences worldwide, speaking everywhere from COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, the United Nations in New York City and European Parliament in Brussels to the Bosphorus Forum in Istanbul, Petronas’ Energy Asia in KL and Cyfy Africa in Tangier. Her recent virtual and in-person speaking engagements have focused on predicting what’s next in a post-pandemic world in terms of geopolitical, political, economic and social risks and shocks, including the impact of the war, tech and climate this decade.
Maha’s childhood dream was to be a cartoonist! She drew her first, seven-time award-winning political comic book, The Global Kid, in 2016 to teach kids about the world, given her own childhood living in 7 countries by age 14. She then created the ten-time award-winning VR/AR political comic book sequel in 2021 for tweens (with edtech partner Musemio in London and collaborator AR Market in Rome). She is working on her first political comic book for adults on global extremism called Evolution (2024) using generative AI.
Maha was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ Institute of Global Affairs; a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute; chairwoman of the New Silk Road Generation, the first e-mentoring program for university students in Afghanistan; a senior teaching fellow in the Politics and International Studies Department, SOAS University of London; a columnist at Businessweek; and an investment banker at Credit Suisse. She is a Jordanian-born global citizen with Pakistani Muslim roots who grew up in the Middle East (Jordan, Saudi Arabia), Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia), Europe (UK, Greece) and the US. She is a social scientist who trained at Brown (BA), Columbia (MA) and the LSE (MSc, PhD), also earning a research certification in Leveraging Crowds in the Public Sector at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering.
“Dr Aziz has vision. Future World Order is the essential guide for every citizen to understand the major global risks we face – and consider how we may tackle them. With few female political thinkers today, Dr Aziz is a welcome addition. She is definitely a global thinker to watch.”
“It takes an engaged scholar activist like Dr Maha Hosain Aziz to adequately capture the worrying scope of today’s overlapping crises of legitimacy. But with her finger on the pulse of the next generation, [her work] highlights how technology can positively spur citizen engagement to bring about a new social contract – both at the national and global levels.”
“When it comes to political risk, it’s hard not to lose sight of the forest for the trees; this is not a problem for Aziz, making her [work] a must-read.”
“Dr Aziz has vision. Future World Order is the essential guide for every citizen to understand the major global risks we face – and consider how we may tackle them. With few female political thinkers today, Dr Aziz is a welcome addition. She is definitely a global thinker to watch.”
“It takes an engaged scholar activist like Dr Maha Hosain Aziz to adequately capture the worrying scope of today’s overlapping crises of legitimacy. But with her finger on the pulse of the next generation, [her work] highlights how technology can positively spur citizen engagement to bring about a new social contract – both at the national and global levels.”
“When it comes to political risk, it’s hard not to lose sight of the forest for the trees; this is not a problem for Aziz, making her [work] a must-read.”
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