Biography
John F. Clark is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University (Miami). He specializes in the state-society relations of African polities, the international relations of sub-Saharan Africa, and the foreign policies of African states. Clark received his B.A. degree in Political Science from Georgia Southern University in 1986 (magna cum laude) and his Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1992.
He is an editor or author of six books:
- Political Reform in Francophone Africa (Westview, 1997), co-editor
- The African Stakes of the Congo War (Palgrave, 2002), editor
- The Failure of Democracy in the Republic of Congo (L. Rienner, 2008), author
- The Historical Dictionary of Congo (Scarecrow, 2012), co-author
- Africa’s International Relations (Lynne Rienner, 2018), co-author
- Political Identity and African Foreign Policies (Lynne Rienner, 2024), editor
He has also published over fifty articles and book chapters, including articles in Politics and Policy, African Affairs, the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, African Security, and the Africa Spectrum.
Prof. Clark has made multiple research trips to the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda since 1990. During the 1999-2000 academic year he was a Fulbright lecturer and research scholar at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Clark was a Fulbright Specialist consultant at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology in the summer of 2014. In July 2015, he co-organized a workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, on Violence and Peacemaking in Africa funded by the American Political Science Association ($320,000).
Prof. Clark has supervised the doctoral dissertations of 11 Ph.D. graduates from FIU, four of whom are now tenured professors. He has taught 10 different graduate courses, and 11 different undergraduate classes at FIU, including three for the FIU Honors program.
He was Chairperson of the Department of International Relations at FIU from 2002 to 2008, and Chairperson of the Department of Politics and International Relations from 2016 to 2020. In 2017, Clark and his spouse, Dr. Esther Alonso, endowed the Clark-Alonso Africa Scholarship in his Department at FIU.
Areas of Expertise
Sub-Saharan African Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, Politics and Democratization, State-Society Relations
Degrees
BA, Georgia Southern University, Political Science, 1986
MA, University of Virginia, Foreign Affairs, 1988
PhD, University of Virginia, Foreign Affairs, 1992