Professor Joanne Wallis

Joanne Wallis is Professor of International Security in the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Security in the Pacific Islands research program in the Stretton Institute for Public Policy at the University of Adelaide. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution.

Joanne is the author or editor of ten books, including Constitution making during State building (CUP 2014), Pacific Power? Australia’s Strategy in the Pacific Islands (MUP 2017), and Girt by Sea: Reimagining Australia's Security (with Bec Strating, La Trobe UP 2024).

Joanne is the chief investigator of the Regional Perspectives Project with researchers based in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. It is funded under a collaborative research agreement with the Defence Science and Technology Group.

She is also the chief investigator of a Defence Strategic Policy Grant analysing Pacific maritime security cooperation.

And she is co-chief investigator (with Maima Koro) of the Mapping Pacific Networks project, a collaboration led by the University of Adelaide with a team of researchers based in Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Australia, with funding from the Defence Innovation Partnership Activator Fund.

Finally, she is chief investigator of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project analysing the operation of the Australia-New Zealand alliance in the Pacific Islands. 

She has previously conducted Australian Research Council Discovery Projects on the impact of political reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific, and state-building in Melanesia, and led Defence Strategic Policy Grant projects analysing the potential of a networked security architecture in the Pacific Islands and how tools of statecraft are used in the Pacific Islands region.

Joanne is editor of the Australian Journal of International Affairs. She is on the editorial boards of Peacebuilding, and Global Studies Quarterly, and the international editorial board of The Round Table. She was previously on the editorial advisory committee of Asia Policy. Between 2019 and 2021 she was an Associate Editor of Peacebuilding.

Joanne is an affiliate of the Overseas Development Institute, and a member of the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab, the Advisory Group of AP4D (the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy, and Defence Dialogue), and the Advisory Board of Women in International Security - Australia. Joanne has been a visiting scholar at the Australian Civil Military Centre and regularly briefs government agencies, appears before parliamentary committees, and participates in international strategic dialogues. 

Joanne completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Poynton Cambridge Australia scholar. Joanne then spent more than eight years in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. She has also completed Masters degrees in Arts and Law at the University of Melbourne and prior to that was a lawyer at Allens Arthur Robinson (now Allens Linklaters). She is admitted as a barrister and solicitor in the Supreme Court of Victoria and High Court of Australia. 

Joanne has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina; a Visiting Scholar at the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project at the Australian National University; an Honorary Fellow of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne; and a Visiting Scholar the East-West Center in Honolulu.

Joanne has also taught on Australia’s strategic and foreign policy at the Australian War College, and in professional education programs for the Department of Defence, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of Home Affairs. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and was awarded the ANU Vice Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence, and has received a National Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.

Personal website: https://www.joannewallis.com/