David Peter Wright-Neville is a former Australian academic who specialised in international relations and terrorism. He was Deputy Director of the Global Terrorism Research Centre and an Associate Professor of Politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University until his resignation in 2009. His contributions to discussions on terrorism appear in Australian and overseas media In 2008, he was selected to participate in the Australia 2020 Summit.

Government intelligence career

Prior to entering academia, Wright-Neville worked as one of Australia's most senior government intelligence analysts in the Office of National Assessments, Australia's peak intelligence agency. Until mid-2002, he was one of Australia's most senior terrorism analysts, primarily assessing and reporting on terrorist groups in Asia.

Academia

His comments on a number of controversies in Australian politics have also attracted attention. In 2003, he supported his former colleague Andrew Wilkie, who resigned from the Office of National Assessments in protest against Australia's involvement in the Iraq War. Wright-Neville described Wilkie as "very competent, very capable and very trustworthy". In 2005, Wright-Neville publicly criticised the questioning of a Monash University politics student on the student's purchase of an academic text on terrorism. Wright-Neville alleged that the student had been unfairly targeted because of his Muslim background. Wright-Neville was also an outspoken critic of the Howard Government's treatment of Australian Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks. In an article in Melbourne newspaper, The Age, he described the treatment of Hicks as "outrageous in a human rights sense, and counterproductive from the perspective of counter-terrorism." He also described Hicks as "a sacrifice to the Bush administration".

Selected publications

Some of Wright-Neville's major publications include: