Professor Peter Vale Professor and Senior Research Fellow [email protected]

Professor Peter Vale is a senior research fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and the Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics Emeritus at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is also an honorary professor at the Africa Earth Observatory Network (AEON), of which he was a founding member. Notably, Professor Vale was the founding director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS); acting Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape; Director of Research at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA); Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes University, and Co-Director (with Rob Davies) of the Centre for Southern African Studies at the University of the Western Cape. 

He has served as UNESCO Professor of African Studies at Utrecht University, Professor of Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and Visiting Professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, a member of the Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, and a Fellow of the World Academy for Arts and Science. He was elected as a member of the African Academy of Science in 2015.

EXPERTISE

Professor Vale’s research interests include social thought, intellectual traditions in South Africa, the future and politics of higher education, and the origins of international relations in South Africa, and he has published extensively in all these areas.

Online Publications

• "Henry Kissinger at 100: history will judge the former US secretary of state’s southern African interventions to be a failure", The Conversation Africa, 10 February 2023.
• "Towards Shakespearean drama: a review of Nuclear: Inside South Africa’s secret deal", Litnet, 15 June 2022
• "Of paradigms and power politics: The NIICE convention and international order after Afghanistan", Litnet, 14 September 2021
• "When they came for me: The hidden diary of an apartheid prisoner by John R Schlapobersky: a book review", Litnet, 21 June 2021
• "The white people who spied during apartheid", The Conversation Africa, 27 August 2019.
• "Universities in South Africa need to rediscover their higher purpose", The Conversation Africa, 25 July 2019. 

All of Professor Peter Vale's articles on The Conversation Africa can be found here. 

Professor Vale's academic publications are available on Google Scholar.