Frederick Halliday, FBA (22 February 1946 — 26 April 2010, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain) was an Irish writer and academic specialising in international relations and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Cold War, Iran, and the Arabian peninsula.
Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1946 to an English father and an Irish mother, he attended the Marist School, Dundalk (1950—1953), Ampleforth College (1953—1963), the University of Oxford (1964—1967) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (1969—1969). His doctorate at the London School of Economics (LSE), on the foreign relations of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, was awarded in 1985, 17 years after beginning it (Sale 2002). From 1973 to 1985, he was a fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam and Washington. From 1969 to 1983 he served as a member of editorial board of the New Left Review.
In 1983, he took up a teaching position at the LSE and from 1985 to 2008 was Professor of International Relations there. After recovering from illness in the early 2000s, he was made Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the LSE in 2005, but in 2008 he retired and became an ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Barcelona Institute for International Studies, in Barcelona where he intensely collaborated with the LSE Catalan Alumni.
Halliday was a also columnist for openDemocracy and La Vanguardia. In 2002, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.
A committed linguist, and advocate of the centrality of language to understanding contemporary globalisation, Halliday was competent in twelve languages, including Latin, Greek, Catalan, Persian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, and English. From 1965, he travelled widely in the Middle East, visiting every country from Afghanistan to Morocco, and giving lectures in most. He met and interviewed several key Islamic fighters, rebels, and religious leaders and politicians over the years.
He reportedly supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as well as the two Gulf Wars, the interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, and the American-led war in Afghanistan which began in 2001. Influenced by Bill Warren, he came to consider that imperialism plays "a progressive role in transforming the world".
Iran: Dictatorship and Development, Penguin 1978, reprinted 1979 twice; Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish German, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Chinese translations.
Mercenaries in the Persian Gulf, Russell Press, 1979. Persian translation.
Soviet Policy in the Arc of Crisis, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, 1981: issued as Threat from the East? Penguin 1982; Japanese, French, Arabic translations.
The Ethiopian Revolution, with Maxine Molyneux, Verso, London 1982.
The Making of the Second Cold War, Verso, London 1983, reprinted 1984, 1986, 1988. German, Persian, Spanish, Japanese translations.
State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, edited by Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi, Macmillan, 1988.
Cold War, Third World, Radius/Hutchinson, 1989. Published in USA as From Kabul to Managua, Pantheon, 1989. Arabic and Japanese translation.
Revolution and Foreign Policy: the Case of South Yemen, 1967 1987, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Arabs in Exile, The Yemeni Community in Britain, I.B. Tauris, 1992.
Rethinking International Relations, Macmillan, 1994. Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese translations.
From Potsdam to Perestroika, Conversations with Cold Warriors, (BBC News and Current Affairs Publications, 1995.
Islam and the Myth of Confrontation, I.B. Tauris, 1996. Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Indonesian, Polish, Spanish translations.
Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power, Macmillan,1999. Turkish translation.
Nation and Religion in the Middle East, London: Saqi Books, 2000. Arabic translation
The World at 2000: Perils and Promises, Palgrave, 2001. Greek and Turkish translations.
Two Hours That Shook the World. September 11 2001, Causes and Consequences, London: Saqi, 2001. Arabic, Swedish translations.
The Middle East in International Relations. Power, Politics and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Italian, Polish translation.
100 Myths About the Middle East. London: Saqi Books, 2005. Arabic, Italian, Turkish, Portuguese and Spanish translations.
NPR, October 13, 1994: " ...the possible threat of another military showdown in Iraq."
Peter Snow, Interview: "About attempts to construct an alternative, broad based government to replace the Taliban", BBC, October 28, 2001.
John Humphrys, Interview: "Will the talks in Germany on the future of Afghanistan lead to a genuinely broad based government?," BBC, November 25, 2001.
Nadeem Azam, Interview: "Are Islam and the West at Loggerheads?," 1lit.com, undated 2001/2002.
Jennifer Byrne, Interview, ABC (Australia), April 9, 2002.
ESRC Society Today, 24 May 2005
Jonathan Sale, "Passed/failed: Fred Halliday, Academic and Writer. 'My PhD thesis on South Yemen took me 17 years'", The Independent, May 15, 2002.
