Professor Ramesh Thakur
Professor Ramesh Thakur is Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (CNND) in the Crawford School, The Australian National University and co-Convenor of the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN). He was Vice-Rector and Senior Vice-Rector of the United Nations University (and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations) from 1998–2007. Educated in India and Canada, he was a Professor of International Relations at the University of Otago in New Zealand and Professor and Head of the Peace Research Centre at the Australian National University, during which time he was also a consultant/adviser to the Australian and New Zealand governments on arms control, disarmament and international security issues.
He was a Commissioner and one of the principal authors of The Responsibility to Protect (2001), and Senior Adviser on Reforms and Principal Writer of the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s second reform report (2002). He was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo (2007–11), Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (2007–10) and Foundation Director of the Balsillie School of International affairs in Waterloo, Ontario.
The author or editor of 50 books and 400 articles and book chapters, Prof. Thakur also writes regularly for several newspapers around the world and serves on the international advisory boards of institutes in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Global Governance (2013-18). His books include The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey (Indiana University Press, 2010); The Responsibility to Protect: Norms, Laws and the Use of Force in International Politics (Routledge, 2011); The People vs. the State: Reflections on UN Authority, US Power and the Responsibility to Protect (United Nations University Press, 2011); The Group of Twenty (G20) (Routledge, 2013); The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2013); Nuclear Politics (4 vols.) (Sage, 2014); Nuclear Weapons: The State of Play 2015 (CNND, 2015); Nuclear Weapons and International Security (Routledge, 2015) and Theorising the Responsibility to Protect, co-edited with William Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Articles by Professor Ramesh Thakur:
10 December 2024
12.6 MINS
We need to go back almost 20 years to the time when the inaugural Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued the first dramatic arrest warrant for a sitting head of state. Will it prove a case of three strikes and you are out with respect to global governance?
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11 November 2024
8 MINS
The 868-page report of the official inquiry into Australia’s Covid-19 response, like the inquiry itself, is not fit for purpose. This is a report of, by, and for the public health clerisy.
15 July 2024
10 MINS
The relentless pursuit of Assange and subsequently of Edward Snowden were important milestones on the path, via the national security, administrative, and surveillance state, to the rise of the biomedical state in which we now find ourselves.
2 April 2024
10.4 MINS
The proposed pandemic treaty will turn the WHO from a technical advisory body into a supra-national public health authority exercising quasi-legislative and executive powers over states.
11 March 2024
6.8 MINS
The Parliament of Australia, representing the will of the people, owes it to them to establish a Royal Commission to inquire into and establish the truth of the Covid-19 years.
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17 May 2023
6 MINS
The pandemic has been an extended three-year “teachable moment” for many of us who previously had been content to go along with the public health messages from our nearly universally trusted medical experts, drug regulators and public health institutions. Safety Signals In a peer-reviewed recent [...]
27 March 2023
10.9 MINS
The Lockdown Files have dished up a curious exchange among Britain’s top policy advisers in early 2020. On 29 February, responding to a WhatsApp message from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings that Israeli scientists were just weeks away from developing a Covid vaccine and [...]
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17 March 2023
11.8 MINS
Matt Hancock was the UK Health Secretary in 2020 when the pandemic struck. A lockdown hawk and a moral pygmy, he was the author of draconian restrictions imposed on business, social, educational and recreational activities in England in a rolling series of lockdowns. He was [...]
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16 February 2023
4.4 MINS
The journey from liberal democracy to bureaucratic tyranny -- and iatrocide? Editor's Note: This incisive article by Ramesh Thakur highlights the inane rules to which ordinary citizens have been unjustly subjected through the course of the pandemic and beyond, and traces how governments came to [...]
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8 August 2022
5 MINS
Editor's Note: Former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur writes at the Brownstone Institute about how an unhealthy fear of COVID-19 has enveloped governments across the world. ___ I’ve had two big worries during the pandemic, starting from the very beginning and still ongoing. Both [...]
23 September 2021
9.6 MINS
A major study from the National Bureau of Economic Research in June, based on all-causes mortality data from 44 countries and all US states, concluded that earlier and longer lockdowns do not reduce deaths and if anything, lockdowns may increase deaths. Denmark lifted all restrictions [...]
