John Keane

John Keane was born in Australia and studied at the Universities of Adelaide, Toronto, and Cambridge. He currently teaches at the University of Sydney and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). In 1989, he founded the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) in London. His body of work includes, among others, the books "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), "Tom Paine: A Political Life" (1995), "Global Civil Society?" (2003), "Violence and Democracy" (2004), and "The Future of Representative Democracy" (2010; co-authored with Wolfgang Merkel). Keane, one of today's leading political thinkers and scholars, has explored topics such as the future of international organizations, fear and violence, power and free communication in our era, the roots and future of representative democracy, and political thought in Islam.