John Keane
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. Renowned globally for his creative thinking about politics, history, media and democracy, he is the author of the best-selling Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995), The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), Power and Humility (2018), The New Despotism (2020) and The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has been published in more than a dozen languages. He was nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize (Italy) and the Holberg Prize (Norway) for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences. His latest book is China’s Galaxy Empire.
John's recent articles
9 June 2024
Partners in crime: Germany, Israel and Genocide
Karl Marx, a rebel son of Jewish parents, famously remarked that in politics Germans had only thought what others had already done. His quip needs a flip: Germans are nowadays doing things others find unthinkable.
12 January 2024
That word terrorism
The term terrorism has become a fighting word in the arsenal of a declining world empire known as the United States of America. Its leaders endless talk of terrorism is in reality a desperate swansong, an indicator of the downfall of the United States as a global empire, its slow but irreversible disappearance from the headlines of world history, or so it seems to me.
26 April 2021
Open letter from John Keane about 'foreign interference' at Sydney University.
Dear Colleagues and Friends, Many of you will have spotted recent media reports that our University, the University of Sydney, contracted the chartered accountancy firm McGrathNicol Advisory, to provide an external audit of the patterns of foreign interference in the workings of our institution.