Richard Tanter

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Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate, Nautilus Institute, and Honorary Professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Melbourne, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate subjects on ‘Nuclear Weapons and Disarmament’, Indonesia Rising?’ and ‘Australian Foreign Policy’. He is a former president of the Australian board of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2017.

From 2004 – 2010 he was Professor of International Relations in the Research and Innovation Portfolio, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and Director of the Nautilus Institute in Australia.

From 1989-2003 Richard was Professor of International Relations in the School of Environmental and Social Studies at Kyoto Seika University in Japan. After returning from Japan in 2003, he was Senior Curriculum Consultant to Deakin University for its Security Studies graduate program at the Australian Defence College’s Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies. His PhD dissertation for Monash University in 1992 was on Intelligence Agencies and Third World Militarization: A Case Study of Indonesia.

Richard has worked on peace, security and environment issues in East and Southeast Asia as analyst, policy advocate and activist since the 1970s. His research has focussed on militarisation and peace issues in Indonesia, Korea and Japan, as well as the wider politics of East and Southeast Asia. In East Asia he has written on questions of Japanese security policy, its intersection with US policy and relations with China, and, with Desmond Ball, on Japanese electronic intelligence capabilities. More recently he has focussed on Australian defence and foreign policy, and with Desmond Ball and Bill Robinson on a series of papers on the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap.

His most recent book, with Desmond Ball) is The Tools of Owatatsumi: Japan’s Ocean Surveillance and Coastal Defence Capabilities, Canberra, ANU Press, 2015.

Richard is a frequent commentator on international affairs in newspapers, radio and television, and has been quoted in the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Asahi Shimbun, Tempo, Jakarta Post, ABC, BBC, VOA, Al Jazeera, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, Straits Times, and Pravda.

Publications

Contact details

• Phone: +61 (0)40 7824336
• Email: rtanter@nautilus.org

Languages

• Interview languages: English, Japanese.
• Reading languages: Indonesian, French.

Education

• Monash University, (Politics), Ph.D – Intelligence Agencies and Third World Militarization: A Case Study of Indonesia, 1992.
• New School for Social Research, M.A. (Sociology), 1982.
• University of Melbourne – B.A. Hons (Political Science), 1971.

Richard Tanter’s recent publications include:

Full publication list

Talks