Born in Chicago in 1952, Francis Fukuyama is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University. He has been a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation and a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, specializing in Middle East affairs and then in European political-military affairs.

His first book “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992, based on a 1989 essay), a best seller in many countries, declared the triumph of the Western capitalist system and the death of communism.

Liberal democracies, he wrote at the time, “are the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and “the final form of human government.”

His other works include “Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity” (1995), “The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order” (1999), “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution” (2002) and “State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century” (2004).