Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author.
Background
Francis Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His paternal grandfather fled the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and started a shop on the west coast before being interned in the second world war.His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, a second-generation Japanese-American, was trained as a minister in the Congregational Church, received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, and taught religious studies.His mother, Toshiko Kawata Fukuyama, was born in Kyoto, Japan, and was the daughter of Shiro Kawata, founder of the Economics Department of Kyoto University and first president of Osaka City University.Francis grew up in Manhattan as an only child, had little contact with Japanese culture, and did not learn Japanese.His family moved to State College, Pennsylvania in 1967.
Dr. Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest, which he helped to found in 2005. He is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, and a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Global Development. He holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), and Aarhus University (Denmark). He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and member of the advisory boards for the Journal of Democracy, the Inter-American Dialogue, and The New America Foundation. He is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
Education
Fukuyama received his Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy under Allan Bloom.He initially pursued graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale University, going to Paris for six months to study under Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, but became disillusioned and switched to political science at Harvard University.There, he studied with Samuel P. Huntington and Harvey Mansfield, among others. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard for his thesis on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East.In 1979, he joined the global policy think tank RAND Corporation.
Fukuyama has been affiliated with the Telluride Association since his undergraduate years at Cornell, an education enterprise that was home to other significant leaders and intellectuals, including Steven Weinberg, Paul Wolfowitz and Kathleen Sullivan.
Fukuyama was the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University from 1996 to 2000. Until July 10, 2010, he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. He is now Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and resident in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
Career
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, The Origins of Political Order, was published in April 2011. Other books include America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, and Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States.