David Jonathan Andrew Held (27 August 1951 – 2 March 2019) was a British political scientist who specialised in political theory and international relations. He held a joint appointment as Professor of Politics and International Relations, and was Master of University College, at Durham University until his death. He was also a visiting Professor of Political Science at Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli. Previously he was the Graham Wallas chair of Political Science and the co-director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics.

Together with Daniele Archibugi, Held had been prominent in the development of cosmopolitanism, and of cosmopolitan democracy in particular. He was an active scholar on issues of globalisation, global governance and was joint editor-in-chief of the academic journal Global Policy.

David Held was born to industrialist Peter Held and Gisela (née Wolff) in Britain where he spent most of his childhood. He took his undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester; upon completing his doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge. He held numerous visiting appointments in the United States, Australia, Canada, Spain and Italy, among other places.

Held co-founded Polity press in 1984, which has become a leading publisher in the social sciences and humanities across the world. He was also the general editor for Global Policy, an academic journal started in 2008 that focuses on bridging the gap between academics and practitioners on issues of global significance.

In January 2012, he succeeded Professor Maurice Tucker as Master of University College, Durham, alongside his chair in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University.

Held died in College on 2 March 2019 after suffering ill health. He is survived by his wife, Psychoanalyst and Filmmaker Francesca Joseph and their two children Jacob and Zachary Joseph Held. He is also survived by Rosa and Josh Held, the children from a previous marriage to the novelist Michelle Spring.

Since his first book was published in 1980 (Introduction to Critical Theory), David Held pursued a multilevel inquiry into the nature and changing form of national and international politics. This approach involved three kinds of work. First, it involved extensive empirical enquiry into the dynamic character, structural elements and governance failures of contemporary society. The empirical dimensions of his work included books such as Global Transformations (1999), Globalization/Anti-globalization (2007), Global Inequality (2007) and Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need it Most (2013). These books map the changing global context of politics, how the world has become increasingly interconnected, and how failures of leadership and negotiation at the global level are creating a breakdown of multilateralism and global governance.^{[citation needed]}

Second, he was investigating the changing nature and form of the modern state and the locus of the political good. Held examined the question of whether the nation state alone, as typically assumed by political theory, can be the sole home of democracy, accountability and the rule of law. This entailed a critical evaluation of the concepts of democracy, sovereignty, governance and cosmopolitanism, among other concepts. Books that have explored these themes include: Democracy in the Global Order (1999), Models of Democracy (2006), Cosmopolitanism: ideals and realities (2010). ^{[citation needed]}