Assessing China’s Belt & Road Initiative: Chinese and French Social Capital Networks in North Africa (Friday 10/29/21)
The next lecture for the Fall Semester in the series
Assessing China’s Belt and Road Initiative will present
“Chinese and French Social Capital Networks
in North Africa”
Friday, Oct. 29, 2021 from 9-10 a.m. ET
Speaker: Lina Benabdallah (Wake Forest University)
Discussant: Michael Woldemariam (Boston University)
Hosts: Global Development Policy Center & Center for the Study of Asia
To register for this free online Zoom event, click here
About the speakers:
Lina Benabdallah is assistant professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. Her current book project examines China’s multilateral foreign policy in continental Africa and seeks to theorize the power dynamics within the seemingly equal Global South diplomatic relations. Her fieldwork research areas include China, Ethiopia, and Kenya. At Wake Forest she teaches courses in international relations, African Studies, and international studies.
Michael Woldemariam is an associate professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies. He also 
serves on BU’s graduate faculty of Political Science and is a faculty affiliate at the African Studies Center. He previously worked as a research specialist with Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies program, and held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC and Penn State’s Africana Research Center. Woldemariam’s teaching and research interests are in African security studies, with a particular focus on armed conflict in the Horn of Africa. Woldemariam’s scholarly work has been published in the journals Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Terrorism and Political Violence, Journal of Strategic Studies, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. His popular essays have appeared in outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Current History. His first book, Insurgent Fragmentation in the Horn of Africa: Rebellion and Its Discontents, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018. In addition to his scholarly work, Woldemariam has consulted with a wide variety of international organizations, primarily on issues related to politics, governance, and security in the Greater Horn of Africa region.
Professor Woldemariam’s areas of expertise include comparative politics, international security, African politics, Horn of Africa, political violence and conflict, post-conflict governance and institution building, and identity politics.