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Board of Directors
Professor Robert J. O’Neill, AO, FASSA
 Robert O’Neill has spent his working life in the field of international relations and the history of war. He graduated from the Royal Military College of Australia in 1958 and then the University of Melbourne (with an Engineering Degree and a Rhodes Scholarship) in 1960. At the University of Oxford, he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics before working for a doctorate of Philosophy in Modern History. He returned to the Australian Army in 1966 and four months later was at war in Vietnam, where he served as an infantry captain with the Fifth Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment, for twelve months, April 1966-April 1967. He was mentioned in despatches for his services as 5 RAR’s Intelligence Officer. His first book, The German Army and the Nazi Party 1933-39, based on his doctoral dissertation, appeared in 1966. While in Vietnam he wrote his second book, Vietnam Task, on his own and his battalion’s experiences in the war.
On his return from Vietnam he taught military history at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, from 1967 to 1969 (becoming a civilian in July 1968), and wrote his third book General Giap: Politician and Strategist. In December 1969 he moved to the Department of International Relations of the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, as a Senior Fellow. He remained at the ANU for the next twelve years. He became Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the ANU in 1971 and much of his work in the following eleven years was directed to building up this unit to become the leading forum in Australia and the South Pacific region for debate and research on defence issues. Working with his colleague Hedley Bull, O’Neill gave special attention to nuclear arms control and non-proliferation issues. During these years he also wrote the Australian official history of the Korean War, Australia in the Korean War 1950-53, which was published in two volumes, Strategy and Diplomacy (1981) and Combat Operations (1985). In 1977 he was appointed Professorial Fellow in International Relations and elected a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
In 1982 he was appointed Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, an independent research centre with a global purview and membership. He focused on reinforcing the Institute’s capacities in the fields of nuclear strategy and arms control and analysis of security issues in Asia and Africa. He also led efforts to raise an endowment for the IISS, conferring a degree of relief from short-term financial pressures.
In 1987, he became the Chichele Professor of the History of War and a Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford, where he taught graduate students in the fields of International Relations and the History of War. He was a co-founder of the All Souls Foreign Policy Studies Program and director of Graduate Studies for the Modern History Faculty. He was also the senior member of the Oxford Strategic Studies Group and chairman of the Delegacy for Military Instruction. He was a Rhodes Trustee from 1995 to 2001. Brasenose College elected him to an Honorary Fellowship in 1988.
Outside Oxford he served as a Member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission 1990-2001, a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum 1990-1997 and Chairman of Trustees 1997-2001, Chairman of the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies 1996-2001, a Governor of the International Peace Academy, New York, 1990-2000, Chairman of the board of the Australian Studies Centre, University of London, 1991-96, Chairman of the Council of the Centre for Defence Studies, King’s College, University of London 1991-96, and a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation. From 1993 to 1999 He was the Honorary Colonel of the 5th Battalion, The Royal Green Jackets. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the bicentennial honours list of January 1988. The Australian Government appointed him a member of the Canberra Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, 1995-96 and the Japanese Government appointed him a member of the Tokyo Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, 1998-99.
From 1971 to 2000 he was the Armed Services Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. During these years he edited sixteen books on international security and the history of war. In 2000 he became the founding General Editor of the Osprey series Essential Histories, which to date has produced seventy-one volumes on wars and warfare from classical times to the present.
Since returning to Australia in 2001 he has served as Chairman of the Council of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a board member of the Lowy Institute for International Studies, Chairman of the International Academic Advisory Committee of the United States Studies Centre of the University of Sydney and a committee member of the Blackheath History Forum. The Australian National University awarded him an honorary D Litt in 2001. The Australian Institute of International Affairs elected him a Fellow in 2008.
His wife Sally is also an historian and worked for the Australian Dictionary of Biography for thirty-four years. Their elder daughter Kate is an Associate Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, and their younger daughter Jenny is the Director of the Westport Historical Society, Massachusetts.
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