Stanislav Markus is an associate professor of international business and a Business Partnership Foundation Fellow at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Professor Markus received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Moore School, he was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He has also spent time in visiting capacity at Copenhagen Business School, ESSEC (Singapore), Peking University (Guanghua School of Management), and UCSD.
Professor Markus works on political risk and non-market strategy, especially in emerging markets, and has a broad interest in the political economy of development. His projects explore property rights protection, stakeholder engagement, lobbying, corruption, expropriation, regulatory enforcement, party finance, institution building and the strategic use of secrecy in corporate political activity.
His book — Property, Predation, and Protection (Cambridge University Press, 2015) — was awarded the 2016 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research, one of the most prestigious book awards across social sciences. The book builds and tests a framework for analyzing political risk as well as effective firm-level protection strategies in under-institutionalized markets. His research has also been published in the leading peer-reviewed journals, and recognized through many awards including the Wilson Center Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the Harvard Academy Fellowship from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, the Jean Monnet Fellowship from the European University Institute in Florence, and the Luebbert Award for Best Article in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association.,, Professor Markus has lived in Russia, Ukraine, China and several West European countries. He has native fluency in Russian and German, proficiency in French and Ukrainian, and a basic understanding of Mandarin.
