Biography
From the University of Ibadan, where he had two of his degrees and started his lecturing career, Sheriff F. Folarin has gone on to teach in the university system for more than 25 years, reaching the rank of a full professor of international relations at Covenant University, Nigeria in 2017. He also serves as a visiting professor at the Center for Conflict Management at the University of Rwanda and the Rwandan Defense Force Command and Staff College, teaching students in the doctoral and Master’s programs respectively. In 2022, Professor Folarin served as a visiting scholar in the Department of Political Science (William P. Hobby Center for Public Service) at Texas State University, where he co-taught several courses with Professor Howard Balanoff and served (and still serves) as the associate editor-in-chief of the Good Governance Worldwide, an online, open-access journal of the Section for Public Management Practice (SPMP) of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). He has produced two editions each of the journal’s Africa Symposia Issue and Certified Public Manager Symposia Issue.
Professor Sheriff Folarin (PSF), a Member of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (MNIIA) and Citizen Diplomacy International (CDI), is an awardee of the 2024 Texas International Education Fund (TIEF) COIL grant. He was also a recipient of several fellowships/scholarships. These include the Study of United States Institute (SUSI) in 2007, when he served as a Visiting Fellow at the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina, Columbia; and the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program in 2015. He was a member of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Education for Justice (E4J) group of scholars from 2019 to 2023. Since 2018, he has been on the faculty of the Ife Institute of Advanced Studies at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. He is also a professor-at-large at the Institute for Peace, Security and Development (IPSD) of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Nigeria, where he teaches and mentors PhD and Master’s students.
Folarin has over 100 scholarly publications in competitive outlets, including books published by globally recognized organizations. These include Homeland Security and Terrorism in Nigeria (Bloomsbury, 2024), Declining Hegemonic Foreign Policies of Nigeria (Springer, 2024), and Rwanda’s Radical Transformation since the End of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Others include The United Nations and Sustainable Development Goals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) which was foreworded by the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres; and Religion and Global Politics (Lexington Books, 2022).
Folarin has mentored, taught, supervised, or examined over fifty (50) doctoral students, and produced 53 PhDs across Africa, with thirteen (13) of them being directly supervised by him. He has mentored and supervised over 200 Master’s candidates and taught thousands of undergraduates across two continents in the course of his career. His teaching philosophy is premised on inspiring students to excel and raising creative minds with life-applicable skills.
Folarin’s areas of research and teaching interest include broad fields such as international relations, international and comparative public administration/politics; and more specialized areas including, African governance & politics, soft power of African states, foreign policies of the powers (US foreign policy in particular), health diplomacy, gender studies, democracy and development, environmental politics, and Nigerian foreign policy.
In university leadership, Professor Folarin served as the founding head and later director of Covenant University’s International Office and Linkages, spearheading the internationalization of the institution through student and staff exchange programs, sealing cooperation with world-class institutions and international organizations with memoranda of understanding, and raising student teams for the Model United Nations, creating the literary and debating society and university tour guides. He served as the pioneer deputy director of the African Leadership Development Center in 2011 and became the Chairman of the Center’s Board between 2020 and 2023. He was head of the Department of Political Science and International Relations in 2012-2014 and 2018-2023, leading the department to internal cohesion, human and staff capacity development through the production of 23 PhDs across the two terms, and the development of an enabling environment for effective teaching and research-active endeavors.
Folarin served in a leading role among the official 5 University Orators and led the University Ceremonies Committee and University Media and Corporate Affairs Committee for two academic sessions each. In 2020, he chaired the committee for the United Nations at 75 International Conference hosted by the United Nations Information Center and Covenant University. At the national level, he has been nominated to numerous teams of the Nigerian Universities Commission for accreditation of programs and courses. In addition, he was elected President of the All-Nigeria Universities Debate Council and served meritoriously between 2019 and 2023. Before this time, he had served as the Vice President (2017 to 2019), and Southwest Coordinator (2015-2017).
Professor Folarin has headlined or graced several global academic, professional, and public affairs events, giving keynotes or talks, including at United Nations and Model United Nations conferences, Rwandan Defense Force National Security Symposia and Rwandan National Police College Symposia, and American Society for Public Administration conferences. He has granted many media (TV, radio, and newspaper) interviews, featured in numerous media shows, given public lectures, spoken at numerous student events; authored over 300 feature or column articles published in national dailies, and served as a member of the editorial boards of two national newspapers.
For more of PSF’s profile, look up Wikipedia: PROFESSOR SHERIFF FOLARIN