I am the Founder and President of Autistic Minority International (www.autisticminority.org). Like many, I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome only as an adult, at age 38. A lifetime of struggle had finally found an explanation.
A national of Switzerland by birth, I hold Masters degrees in Public and Development Management, with specialization in Governance and Public Policy (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), and Roman Catholic Theology (St Augustine College of South Africa) as well as a Postgraduate Certificate in Comparative and Cross-Cultural Research Methods (University of Sussex).
Following doctoral studies in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex and Sciences Po/The Institute of Political Studies in Paris, I have been invited to present my research at institutions as diverse as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Tehran, the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, the London School of Economics, the European University Institute in Florence, the European Science Foundation, the European Consortium for Political Research, the American Political Science Association, and the World International Studies Committee, where I was an invited speaker in the opening plenary on "Global Values" at the triennial Global International Studies Conference in 2008.
The editor of a volume on "Anti-Democratic Thought" (Imprint Academic, 2008), I accepted invitations to serve as referee for the journals "Political Studies", "Philosophy and Rhetoric", "International Political Science Review", and "European Journal of Development Research" (as well as the now defunct "Philosophical Frontiers").
Despite a biography as non-linear and beset by adversity as that of almost all autistics, I bring to the task many years of professional experience in administration and finance, general and project management in the private, public and non-governmental sectors in Europe and Africa. Most recently, I was Managing Director of a research centre on the individual and society I co-founded in the UK in 2006.
Politics has been a special interest of mine for twenty-five years. I volunteered and was politically active in five countries and previously held office and leadership positions at the local, regional, national, European, and global level.
Autistic Minority International is the first and only autism self-advocacy organization active at the global political level. The NGO, founded as a non-profit association under Swiss law in 2013 and headquartered in Geneva, aims to advance the interests of autistics worldwide at and through the United Nations, World Health Organization, human rights treaty bodies, and other international organizations.
In November 2010, I participated as invited speaker in the International Conference on World Philosophy Day 2010 of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy (IRIP), at the National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Tehran (originally Ninth World Philosophy Day Congress of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, until UNESCO dissociated days before the event following an international academic and political boycott; btw, the keynote speaker at this perfectly scholarly gathering, subsequent to Otfried Höffe's withdrawal, was Gianni Vattimo, an openly gay[!] Italian philosopher and former Member of the European Parliament.)
