Indra Adnan

Catch Indra on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Dan Kieran 24th - 30th August 2026.

Indra Adnan is a psycho-social therapist, writer and founder of the Soft Power Network, and co-founder, with her partner Pat Kane, of The Alternative UK, a political platform built around the question: if politics is broken, what's the alternative? For over two decades, she has consulted for the World Economic Forum, the Indian, Finnish and Danish governments, NATO and the Scottish Executive on future politics, conflict transformation and the power of relationships over dominance. Her book, The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age, was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2021, and she is currently writing a new opening chapter for its second edition.

At the heart of Indra's work is what she calls the "onto-shift": a move away from left-brain, control-based ways of organising society towards ways of being that hold space for emergence, co-creation and interdependence. Trained by Johan Galtung, the father of peace studies, in the distinction between conflict resolution and conflict transformation, she argues we should not try to fix the old system but build a new one that makes it obsolete - one in which war, like patriarchy before it, becomes little more than outdated software with nowhere left to run.

In conversation with Dan at the Realisation Festival, Indra explores the difference between hope and optimism, the feminine practice of holding space for what wants to emerge, and why the deepest political work now may be learning, quite literally, to inhabit a different system altogether.