Dr Paul Monk is Managing Director of Austhink Consulting. He is also an essayist on cultural and geopolitical affairs in the major media, public speaker and facilitator. His doctorate in International Relations was a study of the capacity of the United States government to learn and think in its Cold War counter-insurgency campaigns against Communism in South East Asia and Central America.

He has taught strategic studies and Chinese politics at university and is the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (Scribe 2005), which emphasizes the need for critical thinking in coming to grips with the rise of Chinese power in our time. It was shortlisted, in 2006, for both the Gleebooks Prize for non-fiction in New South Wales, and The Age Book of the Year in Victoria.

Paul is a public intellectual, whose essays on many topics have appeared over the past decade in Quadrant, the Friday review section of The Australian Financial Review,Griffth REVIEW and elsewhere. He is also the author ofFair Choices: Flexibility and Negotiating Power in the Workplace (Connor Court, 2007).