Mark Galeotti (born October 1965) is a British historian, lecturer and writer on transnational crime and Russian security affairs and director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence. He is an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies,[1] a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute,[2] and an associate fellow in Euro-Atlantic geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy.[3]
Born in Surrey, England,[4] Galeotti was educated at Tiffin School (grammar academy) in Kingston upon Thames and Robinson College, Cambridge, where he studied history. He then switched to the London School of Economics and completed his doctorate, supervised by Dominic Lieven, on the impact of the Afghan war on the USSR.[5]
Formerly, he was a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague[6] and head of its Centre for European Security.[7] He remains a senior non-resident fellow with the IIR. Before moving to Prague, he was clinical professor of global affairs at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University.[8][9] Before moving to NYU, he was head of the history department at Keele University,[10] visiting professor of public security at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers–Newark (2005-6) and senior research fellow at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (1996–97). He has also been a visiting professor at MGIMO (Moscow) and Charles University (Prague). For the academic year 2018–19 he was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute.
On 14 June 2022, Galeotti was among the 29 people from the United Kingdom banned by the Russian government from travel in their land.[11]
Between 1991 and 2006, he wrote a monthly column on Russian and post-Soviet security issues for Jane's Intelligence Review (formerly Jane’s Soviet Intelligence Review). He continues to write for various Jane's publications, as well as Oxford Analytica, for which he covers Russian security, transnational crime and terrorism issues. In July 2011, he started writing a regular column, Siloviks & Scoundrels, for the Russian newspaper The Moscow News, until the newspaper's closure in 2014.[12] Since the start of the Ukraine War he has written regularly for The Spectator and was sanctioned by Russia largely on the basis of these publications.
He writes on his own blog, In Moscow's Shadows as well as guest writing for Raam op Rusland, EUROPP, oD:Russia, the International Policy Digest, and other blogs. He also contributes articles to The Moscow Times and War on the Rocks and is a contributing editor to Business New Europe.
Galeotti is a consultant to various government, commercial, and law-enforcement agencies and a senior analyst for Wikistrat. He is the Founding Editor of the journal Global Crime.[13] He is also a member of the international advisory board of the Mob Museum.
He has also worked on several Glorantha-related books and fanzines.[14] and wrote the HeroQuest (role-playing game)-engined standalone RPG Mythic Russia.[15] He is also the author of 1991's Cyberpunk 2020 RPG expansion guidebook Eurosource.
