Professor Sohail Inayatullah /sə'heɪl ɪnaɪʌ'tʊla/, a political scientist, is Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies); Associate, Mt. Eliza Executive Education, Melbourne Business School, and Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Faculty of Social Sciences and the Arts). In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies. In 2010, he was awarded the Laurel award for all-time best futurist by the Shaping Tomorrow Foresight Network. In March 2011, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. He received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii in 1990. Inayatullah has lived in Islamabad, Pakistan; Bloomington, Indiana; Flushing, New York; Geneva, Switzerland; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Brisbane and Mooloolaba, Australia. Inayatullah is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Futures Studies and on the editorial boards of Futures, Prout Journal, East West Affairs, World Future Review, and Foresight. He has written more than 350 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and magazine editorials. His articles have been translated into a variety of languages, including Catalan, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Indonesian, Farsi, Arabic, and Mandarin. Inayatullah has also written and co-edited twenty-two books/cdroms, including: What Works: Case Studies in the Practice of Foresight; CLA 2.0: Transformative Research in Theory and Practice (2015); Questioning the Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation (2007); and, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change (1997). His latest (2018) book is Asia 2038: Ten Disruptions That Change Everything.
Six paradigms or discourses are used to understand possible responses to Covid-19. These move from the medical, to the anticipatory, to beyond meat, to leadership and climate change, to the end of capitalism. The final discourse takes the discussion to one where we can possibly create a new renaissance.