Indonesian political analyst Rizal Sukma is among the Top 100 Global Thinkers alongside US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and US President Barack Obama, according to Foreign Policy magazine.
In its first-ever annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers published in the upcoming December issue, US-based Foreign Policy ranks Rizal at 92nd place, shortly after globally-renowned British religious scholar Karen Armstrong at 87th and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 74th.
Bernanke tops the list for "staving off a new Great Depression", while Obama comes second for "reimagining America's role in the world", says the magazine.
Other figures making it to the top 5 of the list are Zahra Rahnavard, the brains behind Iran's Green Revolution and the campaign of her husband, opposition leader Hossein Mousavi; New York-based economist Nouriel Roubini; and chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra Pachauri on the 3rd, 4th and 5th place, respectively.
Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton are in the 6th position.
Rizal is honored by the magazine for "pushing a radical new view of Indonesia's role in the world".
"Sukma is a leading theorist of the relationship between Islam and the state, and the global role of his country, Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim *majority* nation," Foreign Policy says of the executive director of Jakarta-based think-thank Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The magazine also references Rizal's recently-published book, Islam in Indonesian Foreign Policy, which is said to outline the tensions that have existed between the Indonesian identity and the government's largely secular institutions since Indonesia's independence in 1945.
"With Indonesia still grappling with the legacy of Suharto's 32-year dictatorship, Sukma's ideas could help chart a course that firmly integrates Indonesia into the world - and finally disproves the canard that Islam and democracy can't mix," the magazine adds.
Myanmar pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi and Malaysia opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim are fellow Southeast Asians that make it to the list, though their ranks are far above that of Rizal with 26th and 32nd place, respectively.
Other noted figures included in the list are Microsoft Corporation chairman Bill Gates, Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, British climate economist Nicholas Stern, and Newsweek's international editor Fareed Zakaria.
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