Few thinkers have changed our view of politics and society as fundamentally as political science speaker Francis Fukuyama. A popular and enlightening keynote speaker, Francis Fukuyama offers remarkable perspectives on our economic and political order.

Francis Fukuyama’s seismic bestseller The End of History and the Last Man announced the conclusive triumph of neoliberal democracy. The book’s thesis inspired political leaders and launched countless debates on the unfolding international order. It was followed by Trust, The Great Disruption, Our Posthuman Future, and America at the Crossroads, each a bestseller. He later staked prescient new territory in 2011’s The Origins of Political Order and 2014’s Political Order and Political Decay. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, appeared in 2018.

Fukuyama is a former deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff and researcher at the RAND Corporation. He now serves as the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Spogli Institute for International Studies.

After earning his BA from Cornell in classics, Fukuyama studied comparative literature at Yale before pursuing political science at Harvard. He earned his PhD in 1981, writing his dissertation on Soviet policy toward the Middle East. He now serves on the Board of Governors of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and the Volcker Alliance.

His recent interests include the social changes wrought by technology, and also the role of culture and social structures on global economics.