For Professor Pierre Englebert, the H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations, the Center for Global Engagement (CGE) is forming at a particularly salient time in his field of African politics and development.
He and his colleagues across the globe find themselves questioning whether any of the old theories and paradigms of a liberal world order still apply to Africa. These questions arise for them in an era when they see that some developed countries no longer feel responsible for providing aid, democracy no longer seems a priority and right-leaning, populist governments in the West, as well as new competitors in Asia and the Middle East, seem less constrained in pursuing other countries’ resources.
“We realized that it’s kind of a broad phenomenon, that we’re all rethinking how to make sense of African politics,” he said. “I can’t stress enough how things have changed.”
Addressing complex challenges from multiple perspectives is a key goal of the CGE. Englebert, as an Oldenborg Faculty Fellow and member of the Global Pomona Council, is helping to shape the center, and he is planning the “Africa After the End of History” symposium and course as an early CGE initiative.
“I imagine the CGE as a place to bring anything that represents a challenging issue, a question, whether it’s a research or policy question, that calls for multiple perspectives to be addressed properly,” he said. “It’s a facilitator, a framework, a multiplier of things.”
“Africa After the End of History” has its own global origins.
Englebert started discussing the sweeping changes in how the rest of the world now interacts with the continent with his colleague Catherine Boone from the London School of Economics. They then brought to a slightly larger group of scholars the idea of a workshop to consider reframing key concepts in their field. Many agreed that the foundational concepts of much of their scholarship may no longer apply and wanted the chance to collect their observations and discuss them.
Englebert offered to see if Pomona could host such a gathering. “We were starting to develop the CGE, I was on the Global Pomona Council, I work closely with Kara [Godwin, Assistant Vice President and Chief Global Officer] and when I asked her about hosting a conference, she was enthusiastic.”
The President’s Office, the Dean’s Office and the International Relations Department all provided funding to enable the conference to take shape. With support from across the institution, Englebert began developing his plan. In addition to the conference, he has designed a one-semester course for 12 students in the fall 2026 semester in which students will help plan and run the conference, produce their own scholarship for a poster presentation and help prepare works by the visiting scholars for publication.
Englebert said the class will put undergraduates at the forefront of taking a completely new look at decades of scholarship.
“These people at the top of the field are only just starting to think about it,” he said. “And we’re already doing a class about it.”