John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Tom Paine: a Political Life (1995), The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), Power and Humility (2018), The New Despotism (2020), and The Shortest History of Democracy (2022)—which has been published in more than a dozen languages. He was nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize (Italy) and the Holberg Prize (Norway) for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences. His latest book is China’s Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, And Peace In The New Chinese Century (2024). His interest in the subject goes back to when he participated in the “flying university” apartment seminars of the 1980s in then-communist Eastern Europe.