Stern Center, Great Room, 12:00 p.m.
***Lunch provided, please RSVP to clarkeforum@dickinson.edu by noon on 11/13/24.
International Perspectives on 2024 Election
Panelists
Willibroad Dze-Ngwa, representing Yaoundé, Cameroon
Mario Guerrero, representing Mendoza, Argentina
Hilary Sanders, representing Toulouse, France
Konstantin Sonin, representing Moscow, Russia
Neil van Siclen, representing Bremen, Germany
Sarah Niebler (moderator), Dickinson College
The US presidential election is being watched closely throughout the world. Colleagues from Dickinson’s global programs will discuss the effects the results have for their countries and beyond.
This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.
Topic overview written by Bella Lapp ’26
Biographies (provided by the panelists)
Willibroad Dze-Ngwa is full professor and permanent faculty of political history, global issues and political sciences at the University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon. He studied political history and international relations in Cameroon and moved on to study political sciences at the Donahue Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA with a focus on peace and security studies. Professor Dze-Ngwa is senior fellow and consultant on terrorism and violent extremism with the New York-based Global Center on Cooperative Security. He is visiting professor of Universite d’Artois, France; and founding president of the Heritage University Institute of Peace & Development Studies, Yaoundé. He is CEO of Africa Network against Illiteracy, Conflicts and Human Rights Abuses (ANICHRA), and has taught in the SIT and Dickinson-Cameroon programme for several years.
Prof. Dze-Ngwa’s research interest includes: global issues, peace & conflict studies, humanitarian action, genocide studies, gender and migration studies, minority & human rights issues, democracy & good governance, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR), leadership and community development, comparative education & social research. He has received several national and international awards including the ERWACA Small Grant on Peace and Citizenship Education, the US State Department SUSI and Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence Awards. Dze-Ngwa has lectured at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Savannah State University, Georgia. He has published extensively in his area of interest.
Mario Guerrero is a postdoctoral fellow at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and the Universidad Nacional de San Luis (UNSL). He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM). Guerrero has participated in academic programs at Syracuse University (USA), Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia), University of Hradec Králové (Czech Republic), University of Texas at Austin (USA), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), and the University of La Verne (USA). Currently, he serves as the academic coordinator of the Centro de Estudios Internacionales y de Integración (CERIDI) at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (FCPyS) of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (UNCUYO). Guerrero is also a former Fulbright and AUGM scholar.
Hilary Sanders is an assistant professor of American studies, and assistant director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Americas (IPEAT), at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès. She received a doctorate in the sociology of migration and interethnic relations from the University of Paris – Diderot. A specialist of local policies related to immigration and ethnic diversity, she is co-editor of the volume Migrant Protection and the City in the Americas (Palgrave, 2021).
Konstantin Sonin is John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His research interests include political economics, economic theory, and conflict.
Sonin earned M.S and Ph.D. in mathematics from Moscow State University and M.A. in economics from Moscow’s New Economic School (NES). Before joining the University of Chicago, he served on the faculty and as a vice-president of the New Economic School and HSE University in Moscow. Over two decades, he has guest-lectured in dozens of universities, summer schools, and high schools across Russia and worked part-time as a teacher of economics in a high school.
His research has been published in leading academic outlets in economics and political science. In addition to academic work, Sonin blogs, tweets, and op-eds on Russian political and economic issues. In May 2023, he was put on the federal wanted list in Russia for posting information about the atrocities committed by its occupying forces in the town of Bucha in Ukraine, and was sentenced in absentia to 8.5 years in prison in May 2024.
Neil van Siclen was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1961. He studied German and economics at the University of Minnesota, later in Trier, Germany and Düsseldorf (MA). After his studies, he completed a training program as a translator and interpreter of English and German. After several years as a free-lance translator, he founded a translation agency 1993, which was soon supplemented by a language school and later a travel agency specialized in international educational travel. Today, Neil works as a business consultant and a public speaker, speaking on transatlantic topics. In addition to his professional work, he was president of Carl Schurz German-American Club in Bremen from May 2008 to June 2022. As such, he built a network of actors from diplomatic missions, business organizations as well as secondary, tertiary institutions and civil society. He is a regular guest on radio and television news shows and writes articles on transatlantic topics for the local newspapers.
Sarah Niebler is Associate Professor of Political Science. Professor Niebler’s research and teaching interests are in the area of American politics, specifically campaigns and elections, political behavior, and public opinion. She teaches courses on those topics as well as Mass Media and American Politics, Polarization and American Politics, and Research Methods. Her scholarly work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Communication, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, American Politics Research, and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. Additionally, her research and analysis has been featured on NPR’s “Hidden Brain”, and in The Hill and Roll Call, among others. Currently, Professor Niebler is working on a project examining the nationalization of American political campaigns, asking how much coordination and incidental compatibility is taking place between campaigns at the presidential, congressional, and state legislative levels in 2020.
Related Links
Heritage University Institute of Peace & Development Studies, Yaoundé