Samuel Makinda

Biography

I am Professor of International Relations and Security Studies in the School of Business and Governance at Murdoch University. The bulk of my work has been undertaken with three types of audience in mind: fellow academics, public policy makers, and members of the public. Along the way, I have collected a few trophies. My biggest reward came in December 2011, when Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki awarded me the medal of Elder of the Order of the Burning Spear (EBS) for my “distinguished service rendered to the nation”. It is one of Kenya’s highest civilian honours. A decade earlier, I had been elected a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Science in September 2001. That same year, I was appointed the Distinguished Lecturer for the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa. My latest trophy came in August 2012 when the Celebration of African Australians Inc named me one of the top 100 most influential African Australians. In academia, my biggest achievement at Murdoch University in the past decade has been the establishment of the Security, Terrorism and Counterterrorism studies program, which I launched in 2005. It was the first undergraduate degree of its kind in Australia, and, apart from earning the University more than $1 million every year for about a decade, the program has created jobs for three new academics. With regard to research, I have published five books and numerous book chapters, refereed journal articles, as well as newspaper columns, but I prefer to highlight the new ideas, concepts and theories that I have invented or championed. In security studies, I was one of the earliest scholars to promote the idea of non-military security in the early 1980s in the face of considerable resistance. When the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London) decided at its 1988 annual conference to pursue research in non-military security, I was among the first researchers invited to take up a Research Associateship in 1989. I subsequently published Adelphi Paper No. 269, Security in the Horn Africa, which explores instability in the region from a non-military perspective. At the level of meta-theory in International Relations, I was the first scholar (together with Rudra Sil) to publish articles in the year 2000 advocating the need to go beyond paradigms and embrace eclecticism. Since then, an increasing number of scholars in security studies, international political economy and other areas of IR have taken up eclecticism. My approach to eclecticism was inspired by Ali Mazrui’s work and by the ideas of two of the founders of the English School (ES) of International Relations, Hedley Bull and John Vincent, who taught me in the early 1980s. When efforts were made in the late 1990s to re-establish the ES, I participated and I have been acknowledged as one of the “contributors”. I was the first ES scholar to distinguish between the primary and secondary institutions of international society in 2001. This distinction is now part of the lexicon in the ES. As humanitarian intervention became prevalent in the 1990s, I was among the few scholars that engaged in the deconstruction of sovereignty. Dismissing the idea that state sovereignty was absolute and indivisible, I delineated three types of sovereignty, which are separable: juridical, empirical and popular. It was against this background that I championed particular views of global governance and human rights from the late 1990s. My latest idea, which I have expressed in two publications, is about the global interpretive community. I view an interpretive community as any group of people who consistently provide justification and legitimating principles for particular ideas, institutions, values, norms or practices. It is the interpretive community that provides the language, frameworks and other tools that enable us to explain, comprehend and debate such global phenomena as democracy, governance, globalisation, human rights, security, and sovereignty. I have taught at the Australian National University, the University of Western Australia, Flinders University, the University of Nairobi, and the Australian Defence College. In addition, I have been a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC; the Global Security Programme at the University of Cambridge; St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford; and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta. In the public policy arena, I served on the Australian Foreign Minister’s National Consultative Committee for International Security Issues from 2001 to 2008. I was also a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Parliamentary Research Service at the Australian Federal Parliament in the mid-1980s. Moreover, I participated in the design of the syllabus for Kenya’s National Defence College in the mid-1990s and helped establish Kenya’s Foreign Service Institute in 2007. I have always endeavoured to reach out to ordinary members of the public mainly through the media (television, radio and newspapers) and community organisations. My career started in Nairobi in the media when I worked as a journalist with The Weekly Review and later as an editor with the Daily Nation.

Research Interest

I currently research in the following three broad areas of political science: Security, counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency issues Global governance, democratisation and the United Nations International Relations theories. I am researching a book on “Understanding Global Governance: The role of the interpretive community”, which touches on all the three areas of my research interest.