Military strategist Tom Barnett will present a lecture at the University of Alaska Southeast on Wednesday, April 4, and the University of Alaska Anchorage on Thursday, April 5, at 7:00 pm both nights. Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating will visit the UA campuses as part of the BP/ConocoPhillips Shared Voices program and as an International Polar Year visiting author.

Barnett has worked in national security affairs since the end of the Cold War. His first book, The Pentagon's New Map, which analyzed the post-Sept. 11 world, argued that the U.S. military should stop thinking of the world in Cold War terms and craft rules to deal with a new global reality. His latest book, Blueprint for Action, expands on these ideas by proposing strategic choices for the future. "I define that future as the progressive expansion of the global economy in a deeply connective and sustaining way around the planet, or the shrinking of those regions that currently are poorly or unfairly connected to that economy and thus present us with the most security issues," Barnett states.

A New York Times-bestselling author and a nationally-known public speaker who has been profiled on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Barnett is in high demand within government circles as a forecaster of global conflict and an expert of military transformation, as well as within corporate circles as a management consultant and conference presenter on issues relating to international security and economic globalization. An award-winning teacher, Prof. Barnett has written for Esquire, Wired, and the Washington Post, and has been interviewed in Rolling Stone, Epoca (Brazil), and Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japan?s Nikkei News). Having granted numerous interviews since 9/11, Tom Barnett has been described by U.S. News & World Report's Michael Barone as ?one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time."

Dr. Barnett is best known as the author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004). Described by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius as "a combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Karl von Clausewitz on war," the wide-ranging volume has generated an enormous amount of reaction from around the world, leading to foreign rights already being sold in Japan, Turkey and China, as well as profiles in London's Daily Telegraph, Denmark's Borsen, and Switzerland's WeltWoche. Mr. Barnett's book was likewise the subject of a Book Notes show on C-SPAN (with Brian Lamb), an On Point show on National Public Radio, and many other national TV and radio segments.

In addition to his speaking and consulting, Tom Barnett is a prolific blogger on current global events at his website www.thomaspmbarnett.com, where he counts among his regular readers representatives from all the major U.S. military commands, virtually all U.S. federal departments, numerous foreign governments, and major research and corporate entities the world over. His popular weblog has spawned a weekly newsletter based on his ideas and vision of "a future worth creating."