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. 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 and Democracy and Civil Society (1988; 1998). 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 (IPPR). He was recently awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust. 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 in the digital age; eighteenth-century republicanism; the origins and future of representative government; and the philosophy and politics of Islam. A consultant to the United Nations and the Evolution of Global Values project at the University of Leiden and a recent member of the American-based Institutions of Democracy Commission, he has just completed a full-scale history of democracy - the first for over a century and the subject of a 3-part BBC Radio series to be transmitted in late 2010.