About the Author

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. 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, 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 prestigious Karl Deutsch Professorship in Berlin and served as a Fellow of the influential London-based think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. 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 greatest 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; eighteenth-century republicanism; the post-communist regimes of central and eastern Europe; and the philosophy and politics of Islam. A member of the American-based Institutions of Democracy Commission, he is currently writing a full-scale history of democracy - the first for over a century.

For further information about John Keane, please visit his official website at http://www.johnkeane.net