John Keane

John Keane

"Born in Australia and educated at the Universities of Adelaide, Toronto and Cambridge, John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). In 1989 he founded the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) . Among his many books are The Media and Democracy (1991), which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages; Democracy and Civil Society (1988; 1998); Reflections on Violence (1996); Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (1998); the prize-winning biography Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995); and a study of power in twentieth century Europe, Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (1999). Among his most recent works are Violence and Democracy (2004), and Global Civil Society? (2003).

"In recent years, he has held the Karl Deutsch Professorship in Berlin and served as a Fellow of the influential London-based think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). He was recently awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (more here). The Times of London has ranked him as one of Britain's leading political thinkers and writers whose work has "a world-wide importance". The Australian Broadcasting Commission recently described him as “one of the great intellectual exports from Australia”.

"His current research interests include the future of global governance; fear, violence and democracy; citizenship and civil society in Europe; the history of secularism; public life and freedom of communication in the digital age; eighteenth-century republicanism; the origins and future of representative government; and the philosophy and politics of Islam...

"A recent member of the American-based Institutions of Democracy Commission, he is currently completing a full-scale history of democracy - the first for over a century and the subject of a 30-part BBC Radio series to be transmitted in 2008."

He wrote the authorized biography of Vaclav Havel, and in 1998 Keane co-edited a book with Edward Newman.

Related Sourcewatch articles

 * Orwell Prize - first judge