Professor Richard Gillespie
Richard Gillespie founded Mediterranean Politics, originally as a yearbook, while at the University of Warwick in 1994. It was an outgrowth of his interest in Spain’s external relations, leading to his work on Spain and the Mediterranean: Developing a European Policy towards the South (Macmillan, 2000). At the same time, it reflected renewed European interest as concern grew about Mediterranean trends that had potential to spill over into Europe, affecting the stability of the broader Euro-Mediterranean space.
Richard continues to research topics in Spanish politics but has added to this a wider interest in Euro-Mediterranean issues (particularly international relations and security challenges). He has also tried to go beyond his European starting point by looking at Euro-Med relations from the southern side of the Mediterranean as well. This approach was adopted in a research project on the crisis in Spanish-Moroccan relations leading to the Parsley Island dispute of 2002 and in more recent work on Euro-Arab relations in the context of the Union for the Mediterranean.
Today, holder of the established Chair of Politics at the University of Liverpool, where he created the Europe in the World Centre (www.liv.ac.uk/ewc), Richard continues as an editor of Mediterranean Politics, though he has consciously encouraged recent moves towards co-editorship, to guarantee the long-term sustainability of the journal.
