Founder and Executive Director
In 2025, drawing on two decades of research and praxis, Dr Ahmed created the Planetary Phase Shift systems framework, articulated in the peer-reviewed paper ‘“Planetary phase shift” as a new systems framework to navigate the evolutionary transformation of human civilisation’ published in Foresight: the Journal of Futures Studies. Planetary Phase Shift theory is the first holistic systems framework integrating the dynamics of physical, biological, energy and information systems with the life-cycle of civilisations, societal change, and technology disruption.
Dr Ahmed launched the Planetary Phase Shift framework with a keynote at the UN Summit of the Future at the UN Headquarters in New York in 2024. In 2023, he chaired the Future of Sustainable Innovation Heads of State plenary panel at the UN COP28 climate summit, where he also delivered a keynote presenting his framework.
Ahmed 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. Previously he was Research Editor and Director of Global Research Communications at the technology forecasting think-tank RethinkX.
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 published by Springer Energy Briefs (Springer Nature, 2017).
Dr Ahmed 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, 'The Violence of Empire: The Logic and Dynamic of Strategies of Violence and Genocide in Historical and Contemporary Imperial Systems' on the systemic crises behind mass violence and genocide in the context of the colonisation of the Americas.
His book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: and How to Save It (Pluto, 2010), was 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.
Dr Ahmed's other non-fiction books include Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within (Byline Books, 2025); The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006); The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Interlink, 2005); and Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society, 2003).
A sample of Dr Ahmed'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.
A former Guardian and VICE journalist, Dr Ahmed uses the tools of investigative journalism and systems thinking to uncover the societal and civilisational implications of global trends for mass audiences. His work has reached over 100 million people worldwide, and been cited multiple times in the House of Commons and House of Lords. He has advised and been cited in parliamentary select committee inquiries and testified in US Congress.
He has advised and his work been used by numerous official agencies including the 9/11 Commission, the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into Prevent, the State Department, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts & Doctrines Centre, the EU’s European Strategy & Policy Analysis System, among many others. As a senior strategic communications consultant, he has led on projects for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (the world’s second largest intergovernmental organisation), Europe’s largest solar energy company Lightsource, Hamdi Ulukaya (the billionaire founder of Chobani and the Tent Partnership for Refugees), the Amal Foundation, Friends of the Earth UK, among many others.
