Joseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe (born 1957), is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist, and public intellectual.

Mbembe was born in 1957 near Otélé in French Cameroon. He obtained his PhD in history from the Sorbonne University in Paris, France in 1989. He subsequently obtained a Diploma of Advanced Studies in political science from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. He has held positions at Columbia University in New York, the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, Duke University, and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal. He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a Visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He is currently Research Professor of History and Politics at Harvard University's W.E.B. Dubois Research Institute.