Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos is a Doctor in political science and a senior researcher at the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Paris as well as being Chief Editor of 'Afrique Contemporaine'. He has lived for several years in Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya. He was appointed a PRIO Global Fellow in 2014.

A specialist on armed conflicts in Africa South of the Sahara, he graduated from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (IEP) and has published some eighty articles and books, including Le Nigeria (1994), Violence et sécurité urbaines (1997), L’aide humanitaire, aide à la guerre ? (2001), Villes et violences en Afrique subsaharienne(2002), Diaspora et terrorisme (2003), Guerres d’aujourd’hui (2007), Etats faibles et sécurité privée en Afrique noire (2008), Les humanitaires dans la guerre (2013), La tragédie malienne (2013), Crises et migrations (2014), Boko Haram: Islamism, Politics, Security, and the State in Nigeria (2015), Un développement « humanitaire » ? Les ONG à l’épreuve de la critique (2016), Violence, statistics, and the politics of accounting for the dead (2016), Violence in Nigeria: A qualitative and quantitative analysis (2016) and L’Afrique, nouvelle frontière du djihad ? Paris, La Découverte, 2018 .