John Keane (political theorist)

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin In 1989 he founded the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) in London. He is the Director of the recently founded Sydney Democracy Network.

Keane was born in southern Australia and educated at the Universities of Adelaide, Toronto and Cambridge.

In recent years, he has held the Karl Deutsch Professorship in Berlin, co-directed a European Commission-funded project on the future of civil society and citizenship, and served as a Fellow of the London-based think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). He recently held a Major Research Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and is a Fellow of the Fudan Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences in Shanghai.

During his many years of residence in Britain, The Times of London ranked him as one of the country’s leading political thinkers and writers whose work has “world-wide importance”. The Australian Broadcasting Commission recently described him as "one of the great intellectual exports from Australia".

His current research interests include China, the Asia and Pacific region and the future of global institutions; the twenty-first century enemies of democracy; fear and violence; religion and the history of secularism; philosophies of language and history; the origins and future of representative government; the history and politics of Islam;and (the subject of a forthcoming book) Power, Freedom of communication and media decadence in the digital age. In 2013, John Kean's decision to withdraw the invitation to host the lecture of the 14th Dalai Lama raised controversies and public protests. Following the protests that took place at the University of Sydney, IHDR reversed its decision on the invitation.

The term monitory democracy is introduced in Keane's The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). It claims that from around 1945 democracy entered a new historical phase. In the age of 'monitory democracy', the language and ideals and institutions of democracy undergo many changes. For the first time in its history, democracy has grown familiar to people living within most regions of the earth, regardless of their language, nationality, religion or civilisation. This process of 'indigenisation' helps explain why, again for the first time, there is an explosion of many different understandings of democracy (for many people, especially in poorer countries, it becomes synonymous with justice, electricity, sanitation and other public goods); and why there are references to 'global democracy' and much talk of democracy as a universal ideal. Democracy becomes globally accepted as the political governing form par excellence. For the first time as well, racial prejudice is said to be incompatible with the ideals of democracy. In contrast to the age of representative democracy, which ended just prior to World War Two, many democrats consequently feel embarrassed or angered by talk of 'naturally inferior', or 'backward' or 'uncivilised' peoples.

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