William Maley, Professor and Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University, was the featured speaker at a lunch seminar on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 12:00 in 012 Bendheim Hall. Maley spoke on the topic of state-building during his presentation, "Comparing Transition Processes: Namibia, Cambodia, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq."

Maley is Professor and Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University, and has served as a Visiting Professor at the Russian Diplomatic Academy, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Refugee Studies Programme at Oxford University. A regular visitor to Afghanistan, he is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Co., 2006), and The Afghanistan Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); co-authored Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), and Political Order in Post-Communist Afghanistan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992); editedFundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York: New York University Press, 1998, 2001); and co-edited The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); From Civil Strife to Civil Society: Civil and Military Responsibilities in Disrupted States (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003); and and Global Governance and Diplomacy: Worlds Apart? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

He has published articles in The Modern Law Review, Political Studies, Australian Outlook, The Australian Journal of International Affairs, Soviet Studies, Asian Survey, Review of International Studies, Report on the USSR, Security Dialogue, The World Today, World Development,Nationalities Papers, Central Asian Survey, Global Governance, Griffith Law Review,Contemporary South Asia, Forced Migration Review, Pacifica Review, The Diplomat, Law in Context, and the Chicago Journal of International Law, as well as chapters in a wide range of books. He also produced a study of The Foreign Policy of the Taliban (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2000), and co-authored another study entitled Afghanistan: Reconstruction and Peacebuilding in a Regional Framework (Bern: Swiss Peace Foundation, 2001).