Olivier Sempiga, Ph.D. Candidate, Class of 2019

"My educational journey is full of adventures and stories that led me from my native Rwanda to Zimbabwe, to England, South Korea, and finally France, where I am completing my Ph.D. in International Relations and Diplomacy at the American Graduate School in Paris.

After studying philosophy and humanities at an undergraduate level in Zimbabwe and moral and political philosophy at a postgraduate level in England, in 2014 I obtained a scholarship from the government of South Korea to study toward a doctorate in International Politics at Dongguk University. At the same time, I got a scholarship from the Turkish Government but had to decline it in favour of the scholarship in South Korea. Prior to attending Dongguk I learned Korean language and reached level 3, which was required for a candidate to keep the scholarlship.

I started my Ph.D. in September 2015. At the same time I was working intensively on what would be my first novel, while also doing part time jobs in Yongin – a city outside Seoul, and working as an assistant to aprofessor in the department of political science at Dongguk.

I got married just after my first semester in January 2016. Since my wife was living in France, it became difficult for me to make journeys from South Korea to France, so I started the process of transferring to France. This is what led me to join the American Graduate School in Paris. AGS reminded me of the two colleges where I studied in Zimbabwe and England for they were quite small, as I told the late AGS president on my first day at AGS during registration.

The program in International Relations and Diplomacy at AGS was enriching for me. As someone who comes from a country that suffered the worst conflict of the 20^th Century in the 1994 genocide, I learnt a lot from the Strategy and Conflict Resolution course. I hope I will be able to assist societies in Africa in the process of peacebuilding and peacemaking.

The topic of my dissertation is “The Effect of Foreign Aid on Democratization in Rwanda.” From 1990 onwards, the third wave of democracy swept across Africa and many autocratic African nations embraced multi-party democracy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism that had been the inspiration and locomotive of many one-party African nations since independence was almost dead and aid that came with alignment with the Soviet Union ceased. Consequently, those African countries that wanted to receive aid from the West were encouraged if not obliged to embrace liberal democratic principles. A kind of systematic democracy promotion/assistance from the West took place in Africa. This way of promoting democracy by 'stick and carrot' makes us wonder whether since 1990 African countries – at least those that have been receiving large amounts of aid – have become more democratic. Rwanda is one of those African countries that has embraced multiparty democracy since the early 1990s. The dissertation measures the process of democratization in Rwanda through a series of questions and answers on many aspects of democracy like the electoral process, rule of law, human rights to mention but a few. The question that remains is whether Rwanda’s democratization has proportionally moved with the amount of aid that the country has received over the years.

All while pursuing my Ph.D., working at a full time job, getting married and raising a child, I followed my passion for writing and published two books. The first seeds of my writing ambitions were sown in Zimbabwe especially during the courses called African literature and World literature. In the two courses, we discovered writings of Shakespeare, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka, among others. After completing my master’s degree in the UK, I went back to Zimbabwe to the school where I did my bachelor’s degree to teach philosophy and African literature in French. I loved literature stories so much that I started writing my own stories in 2012. In 2016, I published my first novel, A Father to my Siblings (Partridge Africa). It was such a joy to hold a copy of my book and to see it in the library of my university. When I published my first book I was a doctoral student in South Korea at Dongguk University. That same year, I started working on my second novel, which was published last January under the title Birth of Another Heroine (Authorhouse UK). It tells the story of a woman who, after miraculously surviving the genocide against the Tutsi in which her family was exterminated, resiliently fights the odds and lives on to carry out her ambition: to transform her nation.

The heroine of my novel represents a generation of Rwandans that were born during the genocide and have inspired me to pursue my own ambitions. I would love to work in Non-Governmental Organizations that foster well-being and promote peaceful international relations among nations. I hope I will be able to assist my native Rwanda to sustain the development it has achieved in the past two decades and to build peace and move toward more democratization – a democratization not necessarily 'a la West'. During my time in Zimbabwe, I loved lecturing and hope to have an opportunity to do it again in the future as another way to be an agent of change."