Ghani 2nd on list of top 100 thinkers

KABUL’s top 100 thinkers for 2013 by a British magazine.

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist, tops the Prospect’s list for the current year. He is also prolific on Twitter, with more than half a million followers.

In a tribute to Ghani, the magazine said few academics got the chance to put their ideas into practice. But after decades of research into building states at Columbia, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, followed by a stint at the World Bank, Ghani returned to Afghanistan.

He served as finance minister and advised the UN on the transfer of power to the Afghans. He now heads the Afghan Transition Coordination Commission and the Institute for State Effectiveness, applying his experience in Afghanistan elsewhere.

Ghani is already looking beyond the current crisis in Syria, raising important questions about what kind of state it will eventually become.

Harvard professor Steven Pinker is in the third slot, followed by Iraq’s minister of trade Ali Allawi and noted economist Paul Paul Krugman.

Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek, India’s Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, English physicist Peter Higgs, former director general of International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei and psychologist Daniel Kahneman are also among the top 10 thinkers.

The inclusion of Ghani, Allawi and ElBaradei reflects the importance of their work on fostering democracies across the Muslim world after foreign interventions and the Arab Spring.

After more than 10,000 votes from over 100 countries, the magazine said, the results of Prospect’s poll were in. “The top 10 offers a snapshot of the intellectual trends that dominate our age,” it wrote.

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