AustLit

Ralph Pettman has written many books on politics and human rights, including China in Burma's Foreign Policy (1975), Biopolitics and International Values (1981) and Commonsense Constructivism (2000). He received his BA (Hons) at the University of Adelaide in 1967 (with a thesis titled 'Factionalism in the Australian Party. A South Australian Case-Study, 1930-1933'). He received his PhD from the London School of Economics, writing about international relations. He was the foundation professor of international relations at the Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, (1994) where he taught world politics and aikido (having been an aikidoka since 1969). He has taught at the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, Princeton University and the University of Tokyo.

Pettman was a senior administrator with the Australian Human Rights Commission and Australia's foreign aid bureau, and has worked for the Parliamentary Research Library, the Australian Freedom from Hunger Campaign, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Moscow and the United Nations Centre for Human Rights. He has been a visiting Fellow at the New School for Social Research, Cambridge University, and the Frankfurt Peace Research Institute. In 2006 he joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne.