Mario Apostolov is Regional Adviser at the Economic Cooperation and Trade Division of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) working on trade facilitation and development and the UN Special Programme for the Economies of Central Asia. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies at the University of Geneva. He has been teaching a course on the Dynamics of Regional Cooperation and Diplomacy at the International Institute in Geneva for 16 years. He has previous degrees and has worked as a visiting scholar at the UN University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) in Bruges, Belgium, the Institute on Social Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen), in Vienna, Austria, Columbia University in New York, USA, and the State Institute of International Relations in Moscow, Russia. His publications cover such diverse areas as regional integration, trade facilitation, and the geopolitics of Christian-Muslim relations. His book The Christian-Muslim Frontier: A Zone of Contact, Conflict or Co-operation (Routledge 2004), is used as a reference on this subject.