Student Spotlight October 2020

Marcel Pambo is a first-year Planning, Governance and Globalization Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech working with Professor Max Stephenson, Jr. Before entering the PGG program, Marcel completed a Master's in Senegal from Le Centre des Hautes Etudes de Défense et de Sécurité (CHEDS; The Center for Advanced Studies of Defense and Security, a unit of Université Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar), where he conducted his thesis on the topic of "Lessons Learned from Peacekeeping Operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, and Mali: The UN Facing States' Sovereignty."

Marcel believes that the dependence on external assistance for security is a major challenge to the autonomy of any country and that the principles of Good Security Sector Governance (SGG) offer substantial possibilities to address this concern. His research interests include West Africa’s Regional Security Organizations, Security Sector Governance, financial dependence and accountability issues. He is particularly interested in the impact of external assistance on regional security structures in West Africa.

Before coming to the United States in January 2020, Marcel served as an intern to the Peace and Security Centre of Competence Sub-Saharan Africa of the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung (German Foundation). The Foundation funds studies on peace and security issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. Marcel joined the “Security for All” Project, a three-year initiative implemented in four countries (Senegal, Mali, Nigeria and Cameroon) and co-funded by the European Union. The project sought to identify actions and institutions to help secure more equitable and responsive security provision in the nations on which it focused. It provided an opportunity to create, inter alia, a Regional Women's Platform on Security Sector Reform and Governance (RWP/SSRG) for women's participation and representation in the security sector in the four nations.

Marcel believes that although the objectives, activities and indicators of externally funded projects can be helpful, they are often harmful as well, insofar the projects’ broad guidelines and policies are defined from the outside by donors, according to their perspectives and/or external policies and do not always match with the realities in the field.

When Marcel is not reading or writing, you can find him writing gospel songs, playing the piano, playing soccer or biking. His goal for Fall 2020 is to record all his songs.