Markos Kounalakis

Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D. is a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a Senior Fellow at the Center on Media, Data, and Society at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oregon-UNESCO Crossings Institute.

He is an award-winning, nationally syndicated foreign affairs columnist, author, and scholar. Wars and revolutions are where he cut his teeth as a foreign correspondent.

For nearly a decade, his columns appeared weekly in the McClatchy chain of 30 newspapers from Sacramento, California to Miami, Florida. His work remains in global syndication and is read worldwide. In 2018, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists recognized “Kounalakis’s world affairs columns not only offer strong prose and strong opinions, they offer an education.”

Newsweek and NBC-Mutual News posted him as a foreign correspondent in news bureaus in Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. Kounalakis covered dramatic political and military developments at the end of the 20th century, both in superpower capitals and regional outposts. He covered the fall of the Berlin Wall to the street protests in Budapest, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, revolutionary movements in Bulgaria, and the violent overthrow of the Romanian regime. He was present at the Warsaw Pact meeting where the organization was dissolved. As a war correspondent, his reporting assignments landed him in Yugoslavia during the early phases of the civil war before heading off to Afghanistan with the Soviets to cover the last stages of their military occupation and the rise of the Mujahedin.