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-five 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 NATO. This 54-chapter volume due to be published in early 2025 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, Defence Studies and Journal of European Integration. He has recently guest edited a special issue of International Politics on UK foreign policy and Brexit.
Mark has also published on the security and defence roles of the European Union, and has helped to develop the concepts of European security governance and collective securitization. In 2019 he guest edited a special issue of West European Politics on these themes.
Mark has been involved for fifteen years in organising student delegations attending the annual International Model NATO in Washington DC. Since 2019, he has been the academic lead for the London Model NATO sponsored by BISA and held at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He has also organised Models NATO in partnership with UK embassies in Lithuania, Finland, Portugal, and Sweden. In 2019, he was involved in designing and delivering background video recordings for ‘NATO Engages’, the official outreach event of the NATO Leaders’ meting in London
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
From 2014 – 2019 he was an External Examiner on the officer commissioning course at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst