Peter Lawler

Distinguished Professor

Prof. Lawler is a Distinguished Professor in International Politics at the Brussels School of Governance. He retired in 2019 as Professor of international politics, at the University of Manchester, England. He has taught international politics for nearly 40 years, primarily in Australia and the UK but also on graduate and undergraduate programmes in Spain, Russia, Austria, India, and Switzerland (mostly in the fields of international ethics or conflict and peace studies). He has supervised 23 PhD students to successful completion. In the last few years of his career, he took a leading role in the design and development of interdisciplinary degree curricula at Manchester and also in cooperation with a range of British and European universities. His early research was in peace research, centring on a critical theoretical analysis of the work of Johan Galtung, the founder of modern peace research. This led principally to the publication of what is still the only English language research monograph on Galtung’s work: A Question of Values: Johan Galtung’s Peace Research (Lynne Reinner, 1995). His subsequent research has focussed subsequently primarily on the theoretical and practical relationship between ethics and the foreign policies of Western states, principally through exploration of the idea of “the Good State”. This has led to a range of book chapters in edited collections and articles in journals, including MillenniumThe Journal of Common Market Studies, Co-operation and Conflict, Review of International Studies, International Politics, Government and Opposition, and Peace Review. He is currently finalising an introductory textbook on theories of international politics to be published by Oxford University Press in 2021.