Speaker Biographies

Robert H. Bates is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on the political economy of development, particularly in Africa, and on violence and state failure. Mr. Bates has conducted field work in Zambia, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Colombia, and Brazil. Before coming to Harvard, he held faculty appointments at the California Institute of Technology and Duke University and was a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Nairobi; the Institute for Social Research at the University of Zambia; and Fedesarrollo in Bogota, Colombia. Mr. Bates currently serves as a researcher and resource person with the Africa Economic Research Consortium in Nairobi; a member of the U.S. government–sponsored Political Instability Task Force; and a professeur associé at the University of Toulouse’s School of Economics, where he has taught since 2000.

Deborah Bräutigam is an associate professor of international development at American University, where she is also an adviser for concentrations in development policy and in governance and democracy. Ms. Bräutigam has also held faculty appointments at Columbia University in New York and Silpakorn University in Thailand and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Liberia in Monrovia; the University of Mauritius; Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone; and the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. She has served as a consultant for the United Nations, the World Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and various sub-Saharan African countries. Ms. Bräutigam is currently working on a book about small states and globalization, with Mauritius as the central case, and a book on China’s “new” aid program in Africa, and she is coediting a volume on China and Africa.

Mauro De Lorenzo is a resident fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at AEI, where he studies private sector–based approaches to development in post-conflict and post-socialist countries; Chinese investment and political influence outside the Pacific region, particularly in Africa; and democratic accountability in aid-receiving countries. In 2005, Mr. De Lorenzo worked as a consultant to Afghan construction companies in Kabul, and prior to that he was a research associate at both the American University in Cairo and the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, focusing on refugee policy and the wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. In 2002, he researched and was associate producer of The Price of Aid, a BBC documentary about U.S. food aid to Africa.

Nancy Birdsall is the founding president of the Center for Global Development. Prior to launching the center, Ms. Birdsall served for three years as senior associate and director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. From 1993 to 1998, she was executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Prior to this, she spent fourteen years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as director of the policy research department. Ms. Birdsall is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs. She has also written more than seventy-five articles for books and scholarly journals published in English and Spanish.

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