Sophal Ear speaks At PCC
Scholar on international aid comes to PCC
On Wednesday, April 24, from 2-3pm, Professor Sophal Ear will speak at Sylvania Campus on how international aid threatens development and democracy.
Sophal Ear is an Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His research interests include post-conflict reconstruction, stability, transition, democratization, Southeast Asia, the political economy of governance, foreign aid, development, and growth, in particular, for Cambodia. His new book Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy questions one of the basic assumptions of current international practice: how international aid affects developing counties.
Ear earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at UC Berkeley. He has three master’s degrees: a Master of Science in Agricultural and Resource Economics, a Master of Arts in Political Science (both from UC Berkeley) and a Master in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. His undergraduate degree, also from UC Berkeley, was in Economics and Political Science.
In 2008, he won the International Public Management Network’s June Pallot Award for the best article in the International Public Management Journal published in 2007. A year later, he became a TED Fellow at TED2009 in Long Beach, where he delivered a TED Talk; in 2010, he spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum and served as a Fulbright Specialist at the Institute of Security and International Studies, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand; and in 2011, he gave a keynote at the International Baccalaureate Organization’s 25th Annual IB Asia Pacific Conference in Melbourne, was honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and was elected to a five-year term membership on the Council on Foreign Relations.
Currently he serves on the Advisory Board of the Master of Development Studies Program at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, the Editorial Board of the International Public Management Journal, the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement, and am Vice-Chair of Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, a non-profit organization that aims to build capacity for functional infectious diseases laboratory diagnosis by strengthening the infrastructure and technical capabilities of technicians and clinical microbiologists in the developing and developed world.