Professional Affiliation

Senior Advisor, International Republican Institute 

Expert Bio

Mr. Mvemba Phezo Dizolele is a professorial lecturer in African studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and Senior Advisor at the International Republican Institute. He is a writer, foreign policy analyst, and independent journalist. Formerly, he was a Peter J. Duignan Distinguished Visiting Fellow and a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of the forthcoming biography, Mobutu: The Rise and Fall of the Leopard King (Random House). Dizolele’s analyses have been published in the Journal of Democracy, New York Times, Newsweek International, International Herald Tribune, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, New Republic, Forbes, St Louis Post-Dispatch, and other outlets. A frequent commentator on African affairs, he has been a guest analyst on PBS’s NewsHour and Foreign Exchange; NPR's Tell Me More, On Point, and the Diane Rehm Show; BBC’s World News Update; and Al Jazeera’s the Stream, NewsHour, and Inside Story. He has testified before various subcommittees of both chambers of the U.S. Congress, as well as before the UN Security Council. He was a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and covered the 2006 elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With the Pulitzer Center, he produced Congo’s Bloody Coltan, a documentary report on the relationship between the Congo conflict and the scramble for mineral resources. He served as an election monitor with the Carter Center in Congo in 2006 and 2011. He was also embedded with UN peacekeepers in Congo's Ituri district and South Kivu province as a reporter. Dizolele holds an International M.B.A. and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and he graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in political science and French from Southern Utah University. He is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, and he is fluent in French, Norwegian, Spanish, Swahili, Kikongo, and Lingala and is proficient in Danish and Swedish.