Sundeep Waslekar

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Sundeep Waslekar
Sundeep Waslekar at the Horasis Global China Business Meeting 2009
Born	Mumbai, India
Nationality	Indian
Alma mater	Oxford University
Known for	Peace and conflict studies, Global Future, Water Diplomacy
Scientific career
Fields	Governance, Peace and conflict studies
Institutions	Strategic Foresight Group, Centre for Policy Research, International IDEA

Sundeep Waslekar is an Indian thought leader on conflict resolution and global future. He is the President of Strategic Foresight Group and has authored three books on governance and several research reports on managing future challenges. Sundeep Waslekar is known for developing policy concepts for peaceful change and his ideas have been discussed by the European Parliament, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom and House of Lords,^[1] the Indian Parliament, forums of the United Nations including the United Nations Security Council,^[2][3] World Economic Forum meetings at Davos ^[4] and Dead Sea, and other institutions. Sundeep Waslekar is a signatory to the Normandy Manifesto for World Peace, along with 4 Nobel Peace Laureates (Jody Williams, Mohamed El Baradei , Leymah Gbowee, Denis Mukwege)and an eminent philosopher, Anthony Grayling.^[5] He is also the author of a bestselling book in Marathi Eka Dishecha Shodh that has sold 23 editions since it was first published in 2009.

Education[]

Sundeep Waslekar spent his childhood in Dombivli, a suburb of Mumbai, India. He obtained the Master of Commerce degree from University of Mumbai. As soon as he graduated from Mumbai University, he published an independent article on reforming global financial system in Financial Express. It generated interest in international academic circles. When he was 20, he was invited to an international seminar on North South Dialogue hosted by Liberal International to present his views. Later on, he was awarded a full scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at St. John's College, Oxford University. While at Oxford, he was invited by several institutions in Europe and North America to deliver talks on global development issues. When he completed his studies, Indira Gandhi, who was then Prime Minister of India, wrote to him, which encouraged him to return home.

In December 2011, he was conferred D. Litt. (Doctor of Literature, Honoris Causa) of Symbiosis International University at the hands of President of India.

In 2014 he was elected Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflicts at Harris Manchester College of Oxford.

Peace processes[]

In the 1980s, Waslekar contributed essays and features to newspapers such as the Ottawa Citizen, San Jose Mercury News, Hamilton Spectator and Toledo Blade. When the United Nations declared 1985 as the International Year of Peace, he led an Eight Nation Peace Mission from Rome to Ottawa. On his return to India, he joined the Centre for Policy Research to work on economic collaboration as means of conflict resolution in South Asia. In 1991, he founded the International Centre for Peace Initiatives, the first conflict resolution institution in South Asia which assisted with diplomatic efforts between India and Pakistan.

Following the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the War on Terror, he facilitated dialogues between Western and Islamic leaders in collaboration with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in the European Parliament^[6] and the League of Arab States. In 2009, he launched dialogue processes to use water to promote collaboration between traditional enemies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

In the early 2000s, Waslekar and Ilmas Futehally led the Strategic Foresight Group to prepare cost of conflict models for India-Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Middle East.^[7] In 2015, he created the Water Cooperation Quotient to quantify the quality of cooperation within trans-boundary river basins worldwide. In 2017, a revised version of the Water Cooperation Quotient was launched, covering all 286 shared river basins of the world. It has political support from the InterAction Council of Former Heads of State and Government.

United Nations Security Council[]

In late 2015 Sundeep Waslekar proposed to Senegal which had been elected as a non-permanent member of the UNSC to put water on agenda, considering outstanding track record of Senegal in fostering in the Senegal and Gambia river basins. The Government of Senegal accepted this suggestion and convened a series of meetings in the UN Security Council on Water, Peace and Security.

On 22 November 2016, under Senegal's chairmanship, UNSC convened an open debate in its meeting 7818 on water and peace linkages. The representatives of 69 countries participated in the debate. Sundeep Waslekar was invited to brief the session, along with Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General; Danilo Turk, Chair of Global High Level Panel on Water and Peace; and Christine Beerli, Vice President of ICRC. In his briefing Sundeep Waslekar urged the UNSC to declare water as a “strategic asset of humanity” which would make crimes against water equivalent to crime against humanity. He also proposed new diplomatic tools to deal with violence against water infrastructure.

Governance[]

Waslekar has been addressing governance issues at global, regional and national levels since 1990. During the period when the world was in transition, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the end of the First Gulf War in 1991, he sought perspectives from 40 world leaders across all continents to prepare a blueprint of the architecture of global governance in the post Cold War era. His book, The New World Order, was one of the first international efforts to define global governance after the fall of the former Soviet Union.

In the second half of the 1990s, he wrote two books on India and the neighbouring countries - South Asian Drama: Travails of Misgovernance, and Dharma Rajya: Path-breaking Reforms for India's Governance.^[8]

In 2002, he developed a new categorisation of the Indian economy based on consumption patterns rather than income levels.^[9]

In 2005, he was associated with the initiative of Paul Martin, then Canada's Prime Minister, to create a G-20 framework for global governance.^[10] It was labelled as L-20 and fructified only at the end of 2008 in response to international financial crisis.

Global Future[]

In December 2005, Waslekar was invited to deliver the Nelson Mandela Benefit Speech in Dubai, when he presented the concept of An Inclusive World as a framework for collaborative and harmonious global future based on co-existence of all cultures.

In an article in India's The Economic Times in August 2007 and in the Strategic Foresight Group report on Emerging Issues: 2011-2020 in January 2008, Waslekar warned about the possibility of the collapse of the global financial system. The Emerging Issues report identifies 20 drivers of change that will impact the next decade.

In his speeches at conferences of the Aspen Institute Italy and the Bertelsmann Foundation organised to reflect on global economic crisis in 2009, he presented ideas for a framework for economically inclusive and environmentally sustainable future of the world.

In 2011, he co-authored a book of essays Big Questions of Our Time ^[11] with Ilmas Futehally. The book raises important questions that will face humanity from 2010-2060 over a wide spectrum of issues from philosophy to politics and science to security.

Partial bibliography[]

• The New World Order, 1991, Konark Publishers Pvt Ltd ISBN 81-220-0241-2
• South Asian Drama: Travails of Misgovernance, 1996, Konark Publishers Pvt Ltd ISBN 81-220-0416-4
• Dharma Rajya: Path-breaking Reforms for India's Governance, 1998, Konark Publishers Pvt Ltd ISBN 81-220-0528-4
• The Final Settlement [1]: Restructuring India-Pakistan Relations, 2005, International Centre for Peace Initiatives ISBN 81-88262-06-4
• An Inclusive World: In which the West, Islam and the Rest have a stake, 2007, Strategic Foresight Group ISBN 81-88262-09-9
• Cost of Conflict in the Middle East [2], co-authored with Ilmas Futehally, 2009, Strategic Foresight Group ISBN 978-81-88262-12-0
• Eka dishecha Shodh ^[12] (एका दिशेचा शोध)
• Big Questions of Our Time [3] co-author with Ilmas Futehally, 2011, Strategic Foresight Group, ISBN 978-81-88262-16-8
• Big Questions of Our Time: The World Speaks [4] co-author with Ilmas Futehally, 2016, Strategic Foresight Group

References[]