Markos Kounalakis

Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D. is an author, journalist, and international relations scholar.
Dr Kounalakis is both a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a Central European University senior fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society. His globally syndicated foreign affairs column appeared weekly in the Miami Herald and McClatchy. He recently served as president Barack Obama’s appointee to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Dr Kounalakis lives in San Francisco with his wife, California’s Lt. Governor, Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis. 

During the 1980s and 1990s, Dr Kounalakis worked as a foreign correspondent, covering wars and revolutions for Newsweek and as the NBC-Mutual News Moscow correspondent. He reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall and lived in the Soviet Union during its collapse. His assignments included the overthrow of communism in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. He covered the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the outbreak of ethnic strife and war in Yugoslavia. He was based in Rome, Vienna and ran Newsweek’s Prague bureau.

Dr Kounalakis became president and publisher of the Washington Monthly magazine and chairman of the Internews Network. He is the author of the recently published “Freedom isn’t Free: The Price of World Order” (Anthem Press, 2022)