International Advisory Council /

Philip McDonagh

Philip McDonagh is Director of the Centre for Religion, Human Values, and International Relations at Dublin City University. He is also Distinguished Global Fellow at the Princeton-based Centre of Theological Inquiry.

In Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs, as Political Counsellor in London, Philip played a significant part in the Northern Ireland peace process in the build-up to the Good Friday Agreement. He later served as Head of Mission in India (accredited also to Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh), the Holy See, Finland, Russia (and the five Central Asian states), and the OSCE.  As a serving diplomat, and since retiring in 2017, Philip has been closely involved in bringing lessons from the Northern Ireland peace process to other situations, including Jammu and Kashmir (a joint Irish-British initiative), Sri Lanka (another Irish-British initiative, with the participation of John Hume), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ‘protracted conflicts’ of concern to the OSCE, and the situation on the Korean peninsula.  

Philip has published poetry and works for the theatre, including The Song the Oriole Sang (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2010) and Gondla, or the Salvation of the Wolves (Arlen House, 2016 – an adaptation of Nikolay Gumilev’s verse drama). His articles have appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Poetry Ireland Review, Studies (Dublin), Doctrine and Life (Dublin), Transnational Perspectives (Geneva), India International Quarterly (New Delhi), Logos (St. Paul, Minnesota), and the Balliol College Record. He is also principal author of the OSCE Academic Network Report on ‘Religion and Security-building in an OSCE Context’ (2018). With three co-authors, he is currently completing a book on religion in global diplomacy. 

Philip is a member of the Advisory Council of the Institute for Economics and Peace (Sydney) and a member of the Steering Committee of the OSCE Academic Network (Hamburg). He read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1972.

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