The New Despotism: author meets critics

The political theory research group is pleased to host a seminar with Professor John Keane, University of Sydney.

Professor Keane will present parts of his forthcoming book, The New Despotism (Harvard U.P., 2020).

The presentation will be followed by remarks by Ditte Maria Brasso Sørensen, Andrew Poe and Jonathan Polk, after which we will open it up for questions and general discussion.

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. Renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy, he is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network.

Professor Keane has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appeared regularly in the London, Cambridge and Melbourne-based The Conversation.

Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and Media Decadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), Power and Humility: the Future of Monitory Democracy (2018), and his latest book, The New Despotism, on the global rise of anti-democratic regimes and the decline of democracy in the West, is to be published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.