The human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkol Karman has been ranked thirty-first globally and fourth regionally among the top figures in the Thought Leader ranking of 2016.

Toplist Global 2016 includes individual stars of various specialist areas such as religion, politics, biology, entrepreneurship, artist, ecology, novelists, economics and computer science, prepared by Swiss-based non-governmental think tank Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI). 

The study involved more than 600 candidates from around the globe, whose relationships were measured in three areas of the English-speaking infosphere: Wikipedia, Twitter and the internet.

With the exception of Tawakkol Karman who has been put at the thirty-first place, top-listed Arab personalities were absent from Toplist Global 2016 where Popes Francis and Benedict have come in first and fifth place, the Dalai Lama in second place and the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in fourth place. 

In 2012, GDI set about carrying out the first Thought Leader analysis in collaboration with the American Institute (MIT) and in partnership with the news website “THEWORLDPOST” being linked to the Huffington Post. 

It has been the first time to carry out a ranking for the Arab-speaking world since Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute started with the rankings in 2012. 

“The Arab Spring has laid bare deep divisions in the Arabic world, and the traces of this revolution are also visible in our rankings,” stated GDI. 

Egypt’s most popular TV preacher, Amr Khaled, and the 90-year-old principal theologian for the website ‘Islam Online’, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, hold pole positions together with the Genevan Tariq Ramadan. 

The Arab top list also includes well-known figures such as the Kuwaiti author Tareq Al-Suwaidan, the Saudi theologist Salman al-Awdah, and the Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi, the first chairman of the Syrian opposition Transitional National Council (SNC) Burhan Ghalioun, Arab public intellectual, political philosopher and author Azmi Bishara, co-founder of the Tunisian Ennahdha Party Rached Ghannouchi, the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei and etc. 

To identify the world’s most influential people, GDI has decided to choose another way-  by measuring their weight in global discourse – in order to avoid the impact of power, fans, and audience, 

Form GDI’s view, anyone who affects people’s thoughts must leave traces in their communications. And for those communications that are publicly available, it’s possible to measure how central certain people are.

“To do this, they have used the Coolhunting software supplied by Galaxyadvisors. This software not only measures whoever ‘shouts the loudest’ (i.e. has the most likes or followers), but can also calculate the strength of the relationships between the relevant people.” 

It pointed out that the so-called betweenness centrality measures the control a node has over the flows of a network – how often is this node on the path between other nodes? 

According to GDI, closeness measures how easily a node can access what is available via the network – how quickly can this node reach all others in the network?