Non-Resident Associate Fellow
Mark Webber
Mark Webber is Professor of International Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK. Formerly the Head of the Department of Politics, History and International Relations at Loughborough University, he was also the Head of the School of Government and Society at Birmingham from January 2011 – July 2019. He was Chair of the British International Studies Association (BISA), 2019 – 2020 and is currently the Association’s Honorary President.
From September 2022 to January 2023 he was a Senior Eisenhower Defence Fellow at the NATO Defence College in Rome.
Mark did his PhD (awarded 1991) on Soviet policy toward southern Africa. During the 1990s he wrote and researched on Russian foreign policy and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The main outcomes of this period were a monograph on The International Politics of Russia and the Successor States (Manchester University Press, 1996), a Chatham House paper (1997) on CIS Integration Trends: Russia and the former Soviet South and an edited book on Russia and Europe Conflict or Cooperation? (Palgrave Macmillan 2000).
For the last twenty years, Mark has worked on NATO, European security and transatlantic relations. He is the author or co-author of The Enlargement of Europe (Manchester University Press, 1999), Foreign Policy in a Transformed World (Pearson Education, 2002), Inclusion, Exclusion and the Governance of European Security (Manchester University Press, 2007), and NATO’s Post-Cold War Trajectory: Decline or Regeneration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is co-editor (with Adrian Hyde-Price) of Theorising NATO: New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Alliance (Routledge 2016). His latest book (co-authored with James Sperling and Martin Smith) - What’s Wrong with NATO and How to Fix It - was published by Polity Press in March 2021. He is currently co-editing (with James Sperling) the Oxford Handbook on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. This 54-chapter volume will be the most comprehensive survey of the Alliance published in the last two decades.
Mark’s work on NATO has been published in the journals International Affairs, European Journal of International Security, Review of International Studies, European Security, West European Politics, Defence Studies and Journal of European Integration. He is currently editing a special issue of International Politics on UK foreign policy and Brexit.
At Birmingham, Mark teaches courses on global history, the politics of international cooperation, and American strategy and foreign policy. He has been involved for twelve years in organising student delegations attending the annual International Model NATO in Washington DC. In 2019, 2021 and 2022 he was the academic lead for the London Model NATO held at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and co-sponsored by NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division (see: https://theconversation.com/we-got-students-to-model-natos-reaction-to-an-earthquake-in-the-mediterranean-heres-what-happened-126722). He has also organised Model NATO (2021 and 2022) in conjunction with the UK embassy in Lisbon. He was also involved in designing and delivering background video recordings for ‘NATO Engages’, the official outreach event of the 2019 NATO Leaders’ meeting https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhmPz0vZubxiz34UYuE8e0gDMXIbAV1ko
Mark has lectured at the NATO Fusion Centre (Molesworth), the UK Defence Academy (Shrivenham), and the Royal College of Defence Studies (London). He has given evidence on NATO to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee and the House of Lords Committee on International Relations and Defence: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/6bbbc4d5-7baf-40f1-bb40-aba90f51bde4