Francis Fukuyama

For more than three decades, Francis Fukuyama has shaped how governments, institutions, and intellectuals understand democracy, identity, and the fragility of the liberal order. He is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy, and a professor of political science.

Fukuyama first came to global attention in 1992 with The End of History and the Last Man, a landmark work that argued liberal democracy represented the final form of human government. It appeared in more than twenty foreign editions and ignited one of the most significant intellectual debates of the post-Cold War era.

His subsequent books — among them The Origins of Political Order, Political Order and Political Decay, Identity, and Liberalism and Its Discontents — trace the full arc of his thinking. Together, they form one of the most serious and sustained examinations of democratic life written in the modern era. His forthcoming memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, due in autumn 2026, intertwines his own life with fifty years of political history.

Earlier in his career, Francis Fukuyama served on the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State and was a member of the RAND Corporation’s Political Science Department. He later served on the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and sits on the boards of the RAND Corporation, Freedom House, and the Volcker Alliance. He is also editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal dedicated to the defence of liberal democracy.

On artificial intelligence, Fukuyama cuts through the noise with characteristic precision. He dismisses apocalyptic Skynet scenarios as absurd. Yet he takes seriously the risks that are easier to overlook: the concentration of power in the hands of a few large corporations, the erosion of institutional trust, and the near-impossible challenge of designing regulation that keeps pace with technology. On democracy, he is a rigorous diagnostician who has watched the liberal order he once celebrated come under sustained pressuere. He continues to argue, with evidence and without sentimentality, that it is worth defending.

Francis Fukuyama speaks with authority on the state of democracy, the governance of technology, and the future of the international order.