Mark Albon was a Nonresident Fellow with Stimson’s Partnerships in Proliferation Prevention program. He is South African, and joined the Foreign Service in 1989 following two years of compulsory military service and a Bachelor’s Degree in History, Political Science and Industrial Sociology at the University of Natal. He left the South African Foreign Service in 2003, having served in a bilateral post in Israel, as a delegate to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland and as a delegate to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, The Netherlands. From 2003 to 2009, Mr. Albon worked in FTSE 500 companies in the South African Private Sector, while gaining his MBA degree (2007) in Corporate Governance and Strategic Corporate Finance from the University of South Africa Business School. He returned to international arms control in 2009 when he joined the OPCW first as the Head of Implementation Support and later promoted to Director for International Cooperation and Assistance. He was a member of the OPCW Leadership team in 2013 when the OPCW was Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in Chemical non-proliferation and disarmament. In 2015, Mark Albon was designated as the Head of the Investigation Unit of the UN/OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) investigating the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria. In 2017, he joined the Commonwealth Secretariat in London where he is responsible for multilateral Counter Extremism policy engagement and programs throughout the Commonwealth. Mark Albon is married and has two adult children.
