Banning Garrett

Expertise: Works at the intersection of policy, technology, long-term global trends, urbanization, and geopolitics

Banning Garrett is adjunct faculty at Singularity University, Senior Fellow with the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils, Senior Fellow with Global Urban Development, co-founder and Chief Strategist with nR LLC, a nano RFID company, and strategic adviser to several technology startups.  Garrett has more than four decades of experience as a strategic thinker, writer, consultant, speaker, program director, and entrepreneur. He has made keynote presentations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe as well as the United States on accelerating technological change, long-term global trends, and urbanization.  Most recently, he has spoken to the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development meeting in Budapest; an Irish Government international conference on technology and agriculture 2035 in Dublin; and international innovation conferences in Porto Alegre and Florianopolis Brazil and Santiago, Chile. 

Through May 2014, Garrett was Strategic Foresight Senior Fellow for Innovation and Global Trends at the Atlantic Council, where he worked for nine of the previous eleven years.  He was Director of the Asia Program (2003–2012) and in 2006 established and subsequently led the Council’s cooperation with the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in production of the NIC’s unclassified, quadrennial long-term global trends assessments, including Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (2008) and Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (2012). Garrett was founding director of the Council's Strategic Foresight Initiative and created and led the Council’s program on the foreign policy implications of emerging technologies and its Urban World 2030 program. In addition, Garrett created and directed the Council’s US-China joint assessment of long-term global trends project and was co-author of the project's 2012 report, China-US Cooperation: Key to Global Future.

Garrett was founding Executive Director of the Institute for Sino-American International Dialogue at the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver (2007) and Director of the Asia Society’s Initiative for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate (2008) and co-author of the Initiative’s 2009 report, Common Challenge, Collaborative Response: A Roadmap for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change. Garrett was a consultant for twenty-two years to the US Department of Defense and other US government agencies carrying on a strategic dialogue with China. He was also a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a founding board member of the US Committee for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (USCSACP), and an adjunct professor of political science at The George Washington University.  In the 1970s, Garrett was co-founder and CEO Internews, an international news service, Asia Editor of Ramparts magazine, and Senior Associate at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Garrett has written extensively on a wide range of issues, including exponential technologies and their impact; long-term global trends; Sino-American relations and US-China cooperation on climate change, energy, and other strategic issues; globalization and its strategic impact; US defense policy and Asian security; and arms control and nuclear strategy. He has been published in more than two dozen journals and media outlets, including Arms Control Today, Asian Survey, The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, Beijing Review, ChinaDialogue, China-US Focus, CNN.com, EuroAtlantic Journal, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Globalist, Global Policy, Global Times, The Globalist, Huffington Post, International Security, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Asia Contemporary Southeast Asia, The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, Le Monde Diplomatique, the New York Times, Scientific American, The Washington Quarterly, and YaleGlobal.  He has also contributed to many edited volumes on Asian and strategic affairs and is co-author of War and Peace: The Views from Moscow and Peking (1984).

Garrett has made sixty trips to China since 1981 for consultations with Chinese officials and analysts as well as numerous similar visits to Russia, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. He has also traveled with the National Intelligence Council on more than a dozen trips to most of the G-20 countries for global trends consultations. 


Garrett received his BA in the History of Social Thought and Institutions from Stanford University and his PhD in Politics from Brandeis University. 

 

Everything stays the same until it doesn't

Expert Information

Expertise

Works at the intersection of policy, technology, long-term global trends, urbanization, and geopolitics

Location

Washington D.C.

Experience

Current Experience

Independent Consultant

Past Experience

  • Strategic Foresight Senior Fellow for Innovation and Global Trends at the Atlantic Council
  • Director of the Asia Program at the Atlantic Council

Education

  • PhD in Politics from Brandeis University
  • BA in the History of Social Thought and Institutions from Stanford University