Jon Marks
Managing Director

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Jon is chairman of Cross-border Information, with special responsibility for maintaining editorial quality and developing business strategy. He is editorial director of CbI's African Energy, Gulf States Newsletter and other publications. Jon maintains a deep interest in Africa and the Middle East - he is especially known as a significant expert on North Africa and as a political scientist who has studied the energy and finance industries from that perspective. As well as his CbI responsibilities Jon is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and of the Royal United Services Institute, both in London.

He is author of several books and academic papers on North African politics, security and business, as well as on various aspects of finance - notably on issues associated with national energy industries and approaches towards debt. Jon holds a BA (Hons) in politics from the University of Kent, Canterbury, and an MSc in African Government & Politics from the London School of Economics; he carried out doctoral research on Algeria's Mozabite community at London University's School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), which included fieldwork in Algeria and research in the Archives de la France d'Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. He taught an MA course in modern North African history at SOAS, still lectures regularly in Britain, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and writes occasional academic articles, book and peer reviews for journals such as Mediterranean Politics and Middle Eastern Studies.

Jon first arrived in Algiers in 1980 to work as an English teacher. He was with Middle East Economic Digest for a decade from 1986 and was an editor of the fortnightly International Trade Finance from 1986. In the early 1990s, Jon worked with the European Commission in Brussels, where he wrote a study of how the European Single Market and foreign policy worked, published in English and Arabic - the first time the EC had ever gone into Arabic. He also worked for the EC's then Mediterranean director Eberhard Rhein, carrying out missions to Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and other Arab states. In 1994-96, Jon was Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Sub-Committee on the European Communities, which carried out a ground-breaking enquiry into the EU's political and economic relations with North Africa. He has carried on this interest in a number of projects, working with organisations such as Chatham House and as the director of a number of events in Africa.

Listen to Jon Marks
on African oil.

(MP3 - 16.2mb)