Mark Galeotti is senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague and a lecturer at the Department of Security Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. He is an expert and prolific author on transnational crime and Russian security affairs.
Previously, he was Professor of Global Affairs at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University. Before moving to NYU, he was head of the history department at Keele University, visiting professor of public security at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers–Newark (2005-6) and senior research fellow at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (1996–97). He has also been a visiting professor at MGIMO (Moscow) and Charles University (Prague).
Born in the UK, he was educated at Tiffin School in Kingston upon Thames and Robinson College, Cambridge University, where he read history, and then the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he completed his doctorate in the Government department, under Dominic Lieven, on the impact of the Afghan war on the USSR.
Between 1991 and 2006, he wrote a monthly column on Russian and post-Soviet security issues for Jane's Intelligence Review (formerly Jane’s Soviet Intelligence Review). He continues to write for various Jane's publications, as well as Oxford Analytica, for which he covers Russian security, transnational crime and terrorism issues. In July 2011, he started writing a regular column, Siloviks & Scoundrels, for the Russian newspaper The Moscow News, until the newspaper's closure in 2014.