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• PhD (Birmingham)
• M.Soc.Sci (Birmingham)
• BA (Warwick)

Mark did his PhD (awarded 1991) on Soviet policy toward southern Africa. During the 1990s he wrote and researched on Russian foreign policy and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The main outcomes of this period were a monograph on The International Politics of Russia and the Successor States (Manchester University Press, 1996), a Chatham House paper (1997) on CIS Integration Trends: Russia and the former Soviet South and an edited book on Russia and Europe Conflict or Cooperation? (Palgrave Macmillan 2000).

For the last twenty-five years, Mark has worked on NATO, European security and transatlantic relations. He is the author or co-author of The Enlargement of Europe (Manchester University Press, 1999), Foreign Policy in a Transformed World (Pearson Education, 2002), Inclusion, Exclusion and the Governance of European Security (Manchester University Press, 2007), and NATO’s Post-Cold War Trajectory: Decline or Regeneration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is co-editor (with Adrian Hyde-Price) of Theorising NATO: New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Alliance (Routledge 2016). His latest book (co-authored with James Sperling and Martin Smith) - What’s Wrong with NATO and How to Fix It - was published by Polity Press in March 2021. He is currently co-editing (with James Sperling) the Oxford Handbook on NATO. This 54-chapter volume due to be published in early 2025 will be the most comprehensive survey of the Alliance published in the last two decades.

Mark’s work on NATO has been published in the journals International Affairs, European Journal of International Security, Review of International Studies, European Security, Defence Studies and Journal of European Integration. He has recently guest edited a special issue of International Politics on UK foreign policy and Brexit.

Mark has also published on the security and defence roles of the European Union, and has helped to develop the concepts of European security governance and collective securitization. In 2019 he guest edited a special issue of West European Politics on these themes.

Mark has been involved for fifteen years in organising student delegations attending the annual International Model NATO in Washington DC. Since 2019, he has been the academic lead for the sponsored by BISA and held at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He has also organised Models NATO in partnership with UK embassies in Lithuania, Finland, Portugal, and Sweden. In 2019, he was involved in designing and delivering background video recordings for ‘’ meting in London

Mark has lectured at the (Molesworth), the UK Defence Academy (Shrivenham), and the Royal College of Defence Studies (London). He has given evidence on NATO to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee and the House of Lords Committee on International Relations and Defence

From 2014 – 2019 he was an External Examiner on the officer commissioning course at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst

• Undergraduate option on Strategy, Leadership and Foreign Policy (co-convened with Professor David Dunn) 
• Convenor of a Masters modules on Global Cooperation on Global Issues and The Politics of NATO

Mark currently supervises PhD students in the areas of Russian foreign policy, NATO, diplomatic mediation, German-Russian relations and global internet governance

Research and academic interests

Mark is currently working on writing projects related to NATO and China, and the Western response to the war in Ukraine.

• The politics, history and theoretical interpretation of NATO 
• Foreign policy analysis
• Security governance
• EU Common Security and Defence Policy
• Comparative international organizations
• Russian foreign policy and the international politics of the former Soviet Union

Current and recent projects

• NATO after Afghanistan (ESRC Seminar Series, completed 2014).
• Theorizing NATO
• Europe after Enlargement
• NATO: Survival or Regeneration? British Academy (completed 2007)
• Inclusion, Exclusion and the Governance of European Security, Leverhulme Research Fellowship (completed 2004)
• Security Governance in the New Europe, joint holder, Economic and Social Research Council, ‘New Security Challenges’ programme (completed 2002)

Other professional appointments

• Chair of Board of Trustees of the British International Studies Association
• Member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs
• Member of the editorial board of European Security