Markos Kounalakis

Bio

Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D. has been a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution since 2013. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Media, Data, and Society at Central European University and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oregon-UNESCO Crossings Institute.

He is California's "Second Gentleman" and an award-winning, nationally syndicated foreign affairs columnist, author, and scholar.

Books authored by Dr. Kounalakis are wide-ranging – topics ranging from the Silicon Valley’s global technological revolution to America’s geopolitical struggles with China and Russia. “Freedom isn’t Free: The Price of World Order” (Anthem Press, 2022) is his most recent book and takes an analytical look at political, economic, social and moral trade-offs in a world in flux.

His most recent Hoover Institution Press book is “Spin Wars & Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering” (2018). In this volume, he makes clear that China and Russia’s global media organizations operate as both intelligence-gathering networks and diplomatic outposts. His research and advocacy actively supported a policy (since enacted) to subject Russian and Chinese media to the U.S. Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

Dr. Kounalakis earned his Political Science Ph.D. summa cum laude in the International Relations subfield from Central European University, MSc at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and his Political Science BSc at the University of California, Berkeley. As an International Journalism Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, he studied and researched in Guatemala and Cuba and at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. He was a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Europe, studying at both the Bundesakademie für öffentliche Verwaltung in Bonn, Germany, and the École Nationale d'Administration in Paris.

In 2017, President Barack Obama appointed Dr. Kounalakis to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. He has been a Trustee of The Asia Foundation since 2020 and joined the Advisory Board of the Council for International Relations in Greece in 2021.