Petr Skalník is a senior research associate at the Department of Politics of the Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. He is the editor-in-chief of Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society, a journal published by the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Hradec Králové. Until recently, he was an extraordinary professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. Throughout his long career he has taught at universities in four continents. His field is political anthropology and African studies. He has edited two dozens of books and authored over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, and other academic publications. He served his country as ambassador to Lebanon.