Bates Gill is an expert on Chinese foreign policy and a former Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Gill has a long record of research and publication on both international and regional security issues. These include arms control, non-proliferation, peacekeeping and military-technical development—and all mainly with regard to China and the Asia-Pacific region. In recent years his work has broadened to encompass other contemporary security-related trends including multilateral security organizations, the impact of domestic politics and development on the foreign policies of states, and the nexus of public health and security. Currently, his work focuses on Chinese foreign and security policy, U.S.-China relations, and the U.S. role in Asia.
Education
Gill received his Ph.D in Foreign Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in 1991. His thesis investigated the relationship between Chinese arms transfers and the country's foreign policy, and was entitled "Fire of the Dragon: Arms Transfers in Chinese Security Policy". He received his B.A from Albion College, Michigan with a double major in Political Science and French. He speaks, reads and writes Chinese, English, and French.
Professional life
Bates Gill has a 30-year international career as an educator, scholar, and policy advisor. An academically-trained and internationally respected China specialist, he has led a global top-ten think tank and held academic and research positions at world-leading universities and public policy research institutions in the United States, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. He is currently a Professor with the Department of Security Studies at Macquarie University and a Senior Associate Fellow with the Royal United Services Institute in London. He was previously the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Prior to this, he was Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Before being named SIPRI Director in 2007, Gill held the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. from 2002. He served as a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and inaugural Director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., from 1998 to 2002. Before his work at Brookings, Gill's previous assignments included directing East Asia programmes at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, in Monterey, California. He also held the Fei Yiming Chair in Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Chinese and American Studies, at Nanjing University in China. For his work with Johns Hopkins University and his subsequent accomplishments, he was inducted to the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars in 2007. In 2013, he received the Royal Order of the Commander of the Polar Star, the highest chivalric order a foreigner can receive in Sweden. It was bestowed by His Highness the King of SwedenCarl XVI Gustaf for Gill's service to Sweden.
Selected works
Books
Gill is author, co-author or editor of nine books:
China Matters: Getting it Right for Australia, co-authored with Linda Jakobson
Governing the Bomb: Civilian Control and Democratic Accountability of Nuclear Weapons, co-edited with Hans Born and Heiner Hänggi
Asia's New Multilateralism: Cooperation, Competition, and the Search for Community, co-edited with Michael J. Green
Rising Star: China's New Security Diplomacy
China: The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now about the Emerging Superpower, co-authored with C. Fred Bergsten, Nicholas Lardy, and Derek Mitchell
Weathering the Storm: Taiwan, Its Neighbors and the Asian Financial Crisis, co-edited with Peter Chow
China’s Arms Acquisitions from Abroad: A Quest for ‘Superb and Secret Weapons’, co-authored with Taeho Kim
Arms, Transparency and Security in Southeast Asia, co-edited with J. N. Mak
Chinese Arms Transfers
He was also the publisher of the SIPRI Yearbook during his tenure as SIPRI Director.
Professional Affiliations
Current affiliations
Senior Associate Fellow, Royal United Services Institute
Bates Gill has been married to Dr. Sarah Palmer, a virologist, since 1986. They have lived and worked for lengthy periods in the United States, Australia, China, Switzerland, Sweden, and Taiwan, and visited over 60 countries for professional and personal travel. He plays harmonica and sings for the Batesville Blues Band, a group formed among friends more than 30 years ago in Batesville, Virginia, south of Charlottesville, and which holds annual reunion appearances in the United States including in Big Hill, Kentucky, Missoula, Montana, Cashiers, North Carolina, Franconia, New Hampshire, and Charlottesville, Virginia. Since 2013, you will find him most weekends playing baseball for the North Sydney Bears.
