Visiting Fellows

Professor Roland Axtmann

After his PhD at the London School of Economics, Roland taught at the University of Aberdeen for 16 years. Roland joined Swansea University in 2005 as a Professor of Politics and International Relations. He held visiting appointments at Heidelberg University (Germany); Karl-Franzens University Graz (Austria); University of California, Los Angeles; and Deakin University, Melbourne. In 2011, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane (Australia). Currently, he is a Visiting Fellow at the Sydney Democracy Initiative at Sydney University

Roland has published widely in the areas of democracy, globalization, macro-political change and (international) political theory. He is currently working on questions concerning democratic governance and the legitimacy of global public authority structures, focussing on issues such as global constitutionalism, cosmopolitanism, representation and participation in global governance, and transnational democracy.

Roland also serves as Director of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Politics

Professor Paul Ginsborg

Professor Paul Ginsborg, born in London in 1945, is a leading authority on contemporary Italy. He taught European Politics at Cambridge University, before moving to Italy in 1992 to take up the chair of Contemporary European History at the University of Florence. Among his many works is a biography of Silvio Berlusconi (2003), which reached the top of the Italian non-fiction bestseller charts, and the Politics of Everyday Life (2005). In recent years he has been at the forefront of Italian civil society’s mobilisation in defence of democracy.

The major thread of research Professor Ginsborg is presently engaged in, is entitled Family Politics in the First Half of the 20th Century. It is a large, comparative and transnational piece of work on the relations between families, revolution and dictatorships. The countries examined are Russia – and then the Soviet Union, Turkey, Italy, Spain and Germany. The book is both political and social history and will be published by Yale and Einaudi in 2013.

After family politics, Paul will to turn his attention to writing the third volume of his history of the Italian republic – the first two being A History of Contemporary Italy and Italy and Its Discontents. More than a decade will have passed since the latter was published, so he is bringing the story up to date, for better or for worse.

• Listen to an interview with Paul Ginsborg about Italy,on ABC Classic FM
• Another interview with Professor Ginsborg about Italy's perspective on ABC Late Night Live

Professor Darius Rejali

Darius Rejali, professor of political science at Reed College, is a nationally recognized expert on government torture and interrogation. Iranian-born, Rejali has spent his scholarly career reflecting on violence, and, specifically, reflecting on the causes, consequences, and meaning of modern torture in our world. His work spans concerns in political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, and critical social theory.
Rejali has been a member of the Reed faculty since 1989. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from McGill University and a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College. He is a member of the editorial board of Human Rights Review. In 2009, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board awarded Reed College professor of political science Darius Rejali with the Danish Distinguished Chair in Human Rights and International Studies. In 2003, the Carnegie Corporation of New York named Rejali a Carnegie Scholar and awarded him a grant of $100,000.

Torture and Democracy (Princeton, 2007) is Rejali’s most recent book. It received the 2007 Human Rights Book of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association. It also won the biennial 2009 Raphael Lemkin Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, New York, for the best non-fiction work in English which addresses the causes of genocide and crimes against humanity. Rejali is also the author of Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran (Westview, 1994) as well as many recent articles on violence including masculinity and torture, media representations of torture, American public opinion on torture, the political thought of Osama bin Ladin, the history of electric torture, the practices of stoning and crucifixion, the treatment of refugees who have been tortured, and theories of ethnic rape. Rejali is currently working on torture prevention through a grant supported by the US Institute of Peace.

• Watch an interview with Darius talking about Torture and Democracy on ABC
• Read Daruish piece on the torture of Maher Arar for the Amnesty blog, The Dirty Secret About ‘Clean’ Torture
• Darius is profiled by Reed’s alumni magazine
• Professor Rejali Awarded USIP Grant

Nick Rowley

Nick currently works as a strategic policy consultant to a mix of business and NGO clients in Australia and overseas. Over the past fifteen years, Nick has worked at the centre of government on sustainability, climate change and broader policy and political strategy in Australia and the UK. In these roles he has developed new and innovative policy approaches in a number of areas from the funding of cutting-edge medical research, protecting public lands bordering Sydney Harbour to helping establish the seminal Stern Review into the Economics of Climate Change.
As a Founding Director of Kinesis, a bespoke climate change advisory and systems development firm, Nick was the Strategic Director of the Copenhagen Climate Council: an affiliation of climate scientists, business CEOs and policy practitioners brought together to make the case for a more adequate global climate treaty in 2009.
From March 2004 to January 2006, Nick worked at 10 Downing Street as an advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair. In this role he oversaw all domestic and international climate policy and was part of a small team advising the British Prime Minister on climate change prior to the G8 Summit at Gleneagles in July 2005. While at Downing Street he was involved in early discussions in 2005 about the potential of establishing a series of leaders debates in the UK.
From 1995 to 2004 Nick was advisor to Bob Carr, Premier of NSW (now Australian Foreign Minister), working primarily on policy on the environment, urban development and medical research.

As a Visiting Research Fellow at IDHR Nick's work concentrate on how to achieve more effective public engagement and debate prior to Australian elections through more effective Prime Ministerial televisions debates supported and enhanced by new media. For more information click here