Speaker biographies

Mauro De Lorenzo is a resident fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at AEI, where he studies entrepreneurship in developing countries as well as Chinese investment and political influence outside the Pacific region. In 2005, he worked with Afghan construction companies in Kabul, and prior to that 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 Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. In 2002–03, he researched and was associate producer of a BBC documentary film about U.S. food aid to Africa and the misdiagnosis of famine.

Ken Menkhaus is professor of political science at Davidson College and specializes in conflict and development in the Horn of Africa. In 1993–94, he served as special political advisor in the UN Operation in Somalia, and in 1994–95 was visiting civilian professor at the US Army Peacekeeping Institute. He is a frequent consultant to the UN, the U.S. government, and nongovernmental organizations. In 2002 he was recipient of a US Institute of Peace grant to study protracted conflict in the Horn of Africa. He is author of numerous studies of Somali politics, including “Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism” (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2004).

Gérard Prunier is a research professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, and was director of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa until summer 2006. His specialty is the contemporary history and politics of East Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Great Lakes region, where he has worked and studied for almost thirty-five years. His books include La question indienne en Ouganda (ADPF, Paris, 1990), The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (Columbia University Press, 1995), and Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2005). He has also edited books on the politics and history of Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia, the next of which, Contemporary Ethiopia, will be published in April 2007 by Hurst & Co., London.

Eunice Reddick is director of the Office of East African Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, she began her Foreign Service career in 1980 and was posted in 1981 as consular officer to the American Embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe. In 1983 she returned to the State Department and was assigned to the Bureau of Population, Refugee and Migration Affairs to monitor U.S. government assistance to African refugees. From 1986–88 she served as country officer for Tanzania and the Indian Ocean countries in the Bureau of African Affairs. Following that assignment, she was a senior watch officer in the secretary’s twenty-four-hour operations center.

David H. Shinn served in the U.S. Foreign Service for thirty-seven years, completing tours of duty in Lebanon, Kenya, Tanzania, Mauritania, Cameroon, and Sudan. He also served as a U.S. ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. His Washington assignments included U.S. State Department coordinator for Somalia during the UN intervention and director of East African affairs. He has been an adjunct professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University since 2001. He serves on the board or as an advisor to a half dozen nongovernmental organizations in the Horn of Africa and writes and speaks frequently on Africa. He is the coauthor of Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2004).

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