Francis Fukuyama is Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, and a director at the School of Advanced International Studies. His first international bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and was translated into over twenty languages. He is also the author of a number of other important scholarly and popular works including Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), and The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999) and America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006).

After graduating from Cornell University and Harvard Fukuyama was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation for over 10 years and professor of public policy at George Mason University. He worked in the US Department of State in Middle East affairs and was deputy director for European political-military affairs.

Professor Fukuyama is also a founder of The American Interest and writes frequently for a number of publications including The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Times Magazine. Fukuyama is best known as the populariser of the "End of History" thesis which posits that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies came to an with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the growing global consensus that liberal democracy is the preferred system of self-governance. Although closely associated with the neo-conservative movement in the 1990s and early 2000s, he become a harsh critic of U.S. invasion of Iraq and a supporter of Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2008 election.