Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Senior Research Fellow, the Toda Peace Institute, and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. His last post was Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the ANU. He was formerly Senior Vice Rector of the United Nations University (and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations). Educated in India (BA Honours, University of Calcutta) and Canada (MA, PhD Queen’s University), he has held full-time academic appointments in Fiji, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia and been a consultant to the Australian, New Zealand and Norwegian governments on arms control, disarmament and international security issues. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Global Governance (2013–18).

Professor Thakur was a Commissioner and one of the principal authors of The Responsibility to Protect and Principal Writer of Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s second reform report; a Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Foundation Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario; and Co-Convenor of the Asia–Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. His books include Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey (Indiana University Press); The Group of Twenty (G20) (Routledge); The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford University Press); Nuclear Weapons: The State of Play 2015 (CNND); Nuclear Weapons and International Security: Selected Essays (Routledge); The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect, 2nd Ed. (Cambridge University Press); Reviewing the Responsibility to Protect: Origins, Implementation and Controversies (London: Routledge, 2019); and The Nuclear Ban Treaty: A Transformational Reframing of the Global Nuclear Order (Routledge). He is also a regular media commentator.