John Keane
John Keane is Research Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB) and Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. Renowned globally for his creative thinking about power, ethics, human rights and democracy, he was recently ranked by El País (Madrid) as ‘one of the greatest theorists of political systems’. During the years he lived in Britain, The Times of London described him as among the country’s leading political thinkers and writers whose work has ‘world-wide importance’. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) speaks of him as ‘one of Australia’s great intellectual exports’. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, and his books include the first full-scale history of democracy for over a century The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), Democracy and Media Decadence (2013), Power and Humility (2018) and The New Despotism (2020).
Born in southern Australia, John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). He is the co-founder and director of the Sydney Democracy Network (SDN). Renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy, John Keane was educated at the Universities of Adelaide and Toronto (where he was mentored by C.B.Macpherson) and King’s College, University of Cambridge. 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).
