Professor Rob Watts, FASSA, is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University. He teaches policy studies, politics, the history of ideas, and applied human rights. He is a founding member of the Greens Party in Victoria, a founding editor of the journal Just Policy (1994-2006) and he established the Australian Center for Human Rights Education (ACHRE) at RMIT in 2008. His many books include The Foundations of the National Welfare State (1987) Arguing About the Australian Welfare State (with Considine, M. & Beilharz, P.) (1992), International Criminology: A Critical Introduction (with Bessant, J. & Hil, R.) (2009), Sociology Australia (3 editions), (with Bessant, J.), (2007) and Talking Policy: Australian Social Policy (with Bessant, J., Dalton, T. & Smyth, P.) (2007). Recent books include States of Violence and the Civilising Process: on criminology and state crime (2016), Public Universities, Managerialism and the value of the university (2017) and he co-authored The Precarious Generation: A political economy of young people (2018) Recent books include Criminalizing Dissent: the liberal state and the problem of legitimacy (2020). He is finishing off a major book (with Judith Bessant) on democracy and young people’s politics to be published in 2024.

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