Professor Robert Walker

Robert Walker is an Emeritus Fellow of both DSPI and Green Templeton College.  He joined the Department as Professor of Social Policy in April 2006 when he also became a Fellow of what is now Green Templeton College.  He was formerly Professor of Social Policy at the University Nottingham and before that Professor of Social Policy Research, Loughborough University where he was Director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences Academy and, in 2012, was awarded an MBE for his services to social policy research.  

He took up a position at Beijing Normal University in October 2018 and is now professor there in the China Academy of Social Management/School of Sociology.  He was a 2020/1 Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.  His principal research currently centres on the experience of poverty in China during the era of the 14th Five Year Plan.

In 2026 Robert published a new book, Is China Right?, which investigates China’s claim that Western hegemony harms the international community. Using the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an evaluative framework, the book assesses the robustness and consequences of Western values and institutions and their legitimacy in the 21st Century. He analyses Western political, cultural, economic, technological and military policies and practices as forms of power and control of the world order and the consequences of this for human welfare and global inequality.