Pauline H. Baker was elected to the Board of the Council for a Community of Democracies at its December 2005 meeting. Dr. Baker is President of The Fund for Peace, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that is dedicated to preventing war and alleviating the conditions which cause war. Dr. Baker has taught at the University of Lagos in Nigeria, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the Graduate School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at American University.

A political scientist who earned her doctorate with distinction from UCLA in 1970, Dr. Baker did her undergraduate work at Douglass College, Rutgers University. She specializes in U.S. foreign policy, African issues and international ethnic conflict. From 1964 to 1975,

she lived and worked in Nigeria. Upon her return from Africa, Dr. Baker became a professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She was staff director of the African Affairs Subcommittee and also covered committee activities dealing with the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and South Asia. Dr. Baker has also been a research scientist at the Human Affairs Research Center at the Battelle Memorial Institute and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she wrote and lectured on South and Southern Africa. She founded and chaired the South Africa Speakers Forum for eight years. She also served as Deputy Director of the Congressional Program at the Aspen Institute, on an educational program in which over 100 Members of Congress participated. The colloquia focused on developments in the new nations of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, post-Cold War issues, and the UN.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Women's Foreign Policy Group, and various other professional organizations, Dr. Baker appears frequently on the media, lectures widely and is well published. Her most recent work is "The Failed States Index," in Foreign Policy, July/August, 2005.