The Asian Foresight Institute [AFI] was founded in 2008. The Founding Director is Distinguished Professor Dr Richard David Hames. The Institute is located within the International College at Dhurakij Pundit University in Bangkok - a university dedicated to new business and management knowledge.
Philosophically the AFI is successor to the pioneering Australian Foresight Institute established at Swinburne University in 1996 by Professor Richard Slaughter who is our Patron. Many of the original organization's alumni and staff directly and indirectly support the new Institute.
As a second generation foresight institute the AFI consciously integrates philosophy, foresight and strategy and fosters relationships across a broad spectrum of individual futurists, private think tanks and academic establishments. We have links with strategic foresight programs at universities in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, China, India and Taiwan.
The AFI is proud to include some of the world's leading foresight practitioners as honorary Fellows. They are: Richard Neville (Sydney); Luke Naismith (Dubai); David Rymer (Abu Dhabi); Bronwynne Jones (Canberra); Brett Peppler (Canberra); Mike McAllum (Brisbane); Anita Kelleher (Perth); Ken Wilber (Denver); Peter Tunjic (Melbourne); Richard Eckersley (Canberra); Chris Stewart (Melbourne); Roy Madron (Curitiba); Oliver Freeman (Sydney); Catherine Wilkinson (Stockholm); Joseph Voros (Ballarat); Peter Merry (Den Haag); Gill Ringland (Oxford); Albert Boswijk (Amsterdam); Marvin Oka (Hawaii); Ross Dawson (Sydney); Josh Floyd (Melbourne); Sohail Inayatullah (Taipei); Laurent Labourmene (Melbourne); Jose Ramos (Geelong); Nares Damrongchai (Bangkok); Ziauddin Sardar (London); Philip Sutton (Melbourne); Nick Fleming (Melbourne); Paul Ray (Michigan); Susan Oliver (Melbourne); Rohit Talwar (London); Graham Mitchell (Melbourne); Peter Hayward (Melbourne); Richard Bawden (Sydney); Patrick O'Leary (Melbourne); Paul Higgins (Melbourne); Jan Lee Martin (Sydney); Ervin Laszlo (Budapest); Alex Burns (Melbourne); Narelle Kennedy (Sydney); Paul Gilding (Sydney); James Quilligan (New York); David Martin (Charlottesville); and Fabienne Goux-Baudiment (Paris)
This extensive network of strategic foresight practitioners enables us to advise governments and business leaders and to inform the public about future patterns, trends and choices from inclusively global (rather than exclusively Western) perspectives. Thus the work of the AFI attempts to counterbalance the prevailing euroocentric paradigm of civilizational progress pursued within the guise of industrial economism (including its associated beliefs, ideologies, values and assumptions) that still underpins most global policy initiatives and which we believe to be fundamentally flawed.