Pankaj Mishra
The post-1945 order has quietly stopped behaving the way most strategy decks assume. Power has shifted toward populations the West used to treat as peripheral, and the populism reshaping rich democracies has far older roots than the current cycle. Boards making long-horizon calls feel that change without a clear account of what is driving it.
Pankaj Mishra reads the populist anger and shifting global power of the present through the long arc of intellectual history, giving senior leaders a clearer account of the forces actually reshaping their operating environment.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Pankaj Mishra
- His Age of Anger thesis ties populist nationalism in the US, Britain, India, Russia and Turkey to the same 19th-century intellectual origins, giving boards a single coherent frame for what most analysts treat as separate national stories.
- He brings the perspective of the world’s majority, drawn from original archival work across India, China, Iran and Turkey, into rooms where geopolitical analysis is still calibrated to a Western-led order.
- He works at the level of cause. Most commentary explains what just happened; his books explain why this kind of thing keeps happening across very different countries.
- Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Weston International Award and a Royal Society of Literature fellowship sit behind two decades of essays in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy and the Guardian. The name carries weight in senior rooms.
- His 2025 book, The World After Gaza, is one of the most discussed treatments of the moral rupture in the global order since October 7, useful for any leadership team weighing reputational and political risk in a polarised market.
Biography highlights
- Author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012), winner of Germany’s Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in 2014, the first non-Western writer to take the prize.
- Author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire (2020) and The World After Gaza: A History (Penguin Press, 2025).
- Recipient of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction (2014) and the Weston International Award for career achievement in nonfiction (2024).
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
- Long-form contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Foreign Policy and Harper’s. Previously a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
- Past visiting fellowships at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library and the Department of English at University College London.
Biography
The populist nationalism remaking democracies from Washington to Delhi to Ankara to Moscow is usually told as four separate stories. The argument running through Pankaj Mishra’s books is that they share a single 18th-century origin. A slow global civil war over the meaning of progress has been underway ever since.
In Age of Anger (2017), he traced the rage and resentment of the present to Rousseau’s quarrel with Voltaire and the disappointed promises of European modernity. From the Ruins of Empire (2012), which won Germany’s Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, ran the same exercise in reverse. It followed the Asian intellectuals (Tagore, Liang Qichao, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani) who watched their civilisations being subordinated by the West. The intellectual apparatus they built shapes everything today, from Chinese state strategy to political Islam.
His latest book, The World After Gaza (Penguin Press, 2025), reads the post-1945 moral order through the present war and the global response to it. It has placed him at the centre of one of the most consequential intellectual debates of the moment. The book builds on the body of nonfiction that won Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and the 2024 Weston International Award for career achievement.
For senior audiences, the value is not commentary on the news. Mishra works the level beneath it: the long-running shifts in power and legitimacy that determine where capital and credibility actually go. The Weston jury described him as “a writer for and of this difficult and complex world we are creating.” That captures why his analysis is in demand whenever the meaning of the present moment is genuinely in question.
Key speaking topics
- The roots of populism and political anger
- Geopolitical risk and the post-1945 global order
- The view from the global majority
- Nationalism, identity and the politics of resentment
- India under Modi and the geopolitics of South Asia
- The intellectual history of modernity
- Decolonisation and its long aftermath
Ideal for
- Boards and CEOs setting strategy in markets where political risk and the shifting balance between Western and non-Western centres of power materially affect long-horizon decisions
- Investment committees, sovereign wealth funds and family offices with significant exposure across emerging markets and the wider Global South
- Senior leadership off-sites where the geopolitical context of capital allocation and major strategic decisions is on the agenda
- Audiences in financial services, energy, media, foreign policy and academia who buy serious intellectual content over motivational commentary
Audience outcomes
- A unified intellectual frame for the populism and political anger reshaping major democracies. Most coverage offers separate national stories; Mishra shows them as one connected phenomenon.
- A clearer sense of how the rest of the world reads the same shift in the global order, and what that means for organisations operating across the West and non-West.
- Historical context for the present moment that goes well beyond the news cycle, with arguments built from original archival research.
- Sharper questions to take into long-horizon strategic discussions, particularly on political risk and on operating in markets aligned to non-Western centres of power.