scholarship
systems approaches to the world's biggest challenges
Nafeez Ahmed is Distinguished Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, where he has worked on the intersections between the COVID-19 pandemic, global socio-economic and political crises, and the breaching of planetary ecological boundaries. Previously he was Research Editor and Director of Global Research Communications at the technology forecasting think-tank RethinkX, where he led on strategies to communicate RethinkX’s data-led scientific research to mainstream audiences.
He is an Earth4All Commissioner at the Transformational Economics Commission of the Club of Rome, launched at the United Nations, where he is a contributor and advisor on its flagship 2022 annual report, Earth For All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. He was appointed a Full Member of the Club of Rome in 2024. He sits on the advisory board of the BioPhysical Economics Institute and was previously a Commissioner at the Cambridge Sustainability Commission on Scaling Sustainable Behaviour Change: State of Knowledge & Challenges for Societal System Transformations, Cambridge University; he sat on the Board of Stakeholders for the Modelling the Renewable Energy Transition in Europe (MEDEAS) research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme.
From 2015 to 2018, he was Visiting Research Fellow at the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University's Faculty of Science and Technology. The GSI fellowship supported the completion of his seventh book, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence, a scientific monograph on the systemic causes of civil unrest and political destabilisation in environmental, energy and economic crises.
Nafeez was previously a Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University where he designed and taught postgraduate courses in global history, international relations, and political science; and taught international relations at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies, from where he holds a PhD in International Relations. He completed his thesis on the systemic causes of mass violence and genocide in the context of a comparative historical sociological analysis of Spanish and American colonisation of the Americas.
Nafeez's other non-fiction books are A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It (Pluto/Macmillan, 2010); The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006); The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Interlink, 2005); Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society, 2003) and The War on Freedom: How + Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 (Progressive, 2002).
A sample of Nafeez's 30+ academic publications and working papers are available at his academia.edu profile, where his work is read by researchers at dozens of universities across the world, and cited widely across academic literature in hundreds of scholarly publications.
His book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: and How to Save It, is the first peer-reviewed study creating a social science framework to capture the interconnections between climate change, food crisis, energy depletion, economic instability, terrorism, warfare and state-militarisation. The book was the main text in the '21st Century Challenges' module of the postgraduate Masters of Strategic Foresight course at the Swinburne University of Technology, and is used in numerous university courses around the world.
Due to his expertise in conflict radicalisation and mass violence, Nafeez previously reported and researched extensively on counter-extremism and counter-terrorism issues. As a result, he was called to advise the MoD’s UK Defence Academy, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the British Foreign Office, the Metropolitan Police Service on delivery of the Home Office’s Channel Project and the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into UK counter-terrorism strategy - which extensively cited his written evidence in its final report and recommendations to government.