Ralph Pettman was educated at the University of Adelaide and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has taught at the Australian National University, Princeton University, Tokyo University and the University of Sydney and has held research appointments at the Australian National University, Cambridge University (UK), the Frankfurt Institute for Peace Research, and the New School for Social Research (NY). He has also worked for the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Foreign Aid Bureau, and the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
He is the founder of the first electronic journal on world affairs in the world: AntePodium; co-editor of a monograph series on constructivism for M.E.Sharpe, Inc.; a member of the editorial board of advisers of Global Change, Peace and Security; a member of the international advisory board of the European Journal of International Relations; and a member of the advisory boards of International Politics and Religion; Millennium: Journal of International Studies; and the International Advisory Council of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research.
This book provides an overview of the entire discipline of world affairs in a way that makes immediate sense. It is also a critique of the limits that rationalism sets on how we know world affairs, showing how we might transcend these limits by augmenting rationalist research with non-rationalist techniques.
International affairs are most commonly explained in terms of the flow of diplomatic traffic and the wealth-springs of foreign policy. This study complements the conventional debates with one cast in terms of an emerging world society.
In Reason, Culture, Religion, Ralph Pettman calls for wider recognition of, and greater commitment to, the ‘new’ international relations, a discipline much more comprehensive and cosmopolitan than the ‘old’.
This collection of essays explores in general terms the nature of the moral claims common in global politics and the phenomenon of partisan cosmopolitanism in particular.