James Patrick Francis Walston (28 July 1950 â 12 May 2014) was a British professor of international relations at The American University of Rome (AUR), specialising in Italian politics and modern history. He was chair of the AUR's Department of International Relations from 2002 to 2008. In 2008 he started the Center for Research on Racism in Italy together with Isabella Clough Marinaro. In 1997, he became the first non-Italian EU citizen to stand for election to Rome City Council.
Walston was the youngest son of the Labour Party (and later SDP) peer Henry Walston, Baron Walston, and his wife Catherine. He was educated at Eton and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read law and graduated in 1971. He later studied social and moral sciences as a postgraduate at the University of Rome, La Sapienza (Diploma di Perfezionamento, 1980), before returning to Cambridge to complete a PhD in political science, where he was supervised by Paul Ginsborg.
Walston had taught mainly in the US system abroad, starting with the University of Maryland programme for the US military in Italy and the UK, summer courses at Middlebury College, and at various US programmes in Rome including those of Temple, Trinity and Loyola universities. Since 1991 he taught history, politics and international relations at The American University of Rome. From 2004 until his death he taught and directed the University of Rome La Sapienza's Eurosapienza's international relations module for the Masters programme in state management and humanitarian affairs.
In 2003, he introduced on-site teaching of international relations which includes regular field trips to European institutional sites like Brussels, Geneva and Vienna, as well as to conflict resolution sites like the Basque Country, Northern Ireland, Montenegro and Kosovo, and annual Ghana trip.
Walston published regular articles in Wanted in Rome from 1989 until his death; he also wrote a regular column for Italy Daily (Italian supplement the IHT) from 1999 to 2002, for The Guardian and The Independent. His blog was Italian Politics with Walston.
Walston was one of the first academics who wrote about fascist Italy's role in ethnic cleansing and the internment of elements of the civil population in Italian concentration camps, such as under Mario Roatta's watch in the Province of Ljubljana, that are in the Italian media subjected to the repression of historical memory, and to historical revisionism especially in relation to the post-war foibe massacres.
Organised crime
Clientelism
Italian foreign policy
Italian history