Solange Guo Chatelard is a Research Associate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium. She has worked and published on rural development and everyday state formation in China and more recently turned her attention to contemporary Chinese relations with Africa Since 2008, she has focused on new Chinese migration to Africa through the case study of Zambia in Southern Africa based on long term ethnographic field work carried out in Zambia between 2008-2013. Her focus is on the interplay between two inter-connected but fundamentally different dynamics: bilateral state relations and private migration between China and Zambia. By looking at the everyday lives of migrants, backlit by a strengthening bilateral relationship with Beijing, her research explores local realities of global power dynamics, and reversely how ordinary local interactions translate and escalate into global political relations and tensions.

Solange Chatelard received a BSc in International Relations at the London School of Economics, and  MSc in Comparative Politics at Sciences Po Paris, where she is finalising her PhD in Political Science at the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI). She helped establish the world’s largest international academic network on China-Africa affairs, Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Research Network (CA/AC), and currently serves as a member of its Executive Board. Committed to research and public outreach beyond academia, Solange also works extensively with the media (BBC, ARTE, France 24, CNN, Al Jazeera, National Geographic etc) as an alternative platform to exchange ideas and experiences about China’s growing impact on the developed and developing world. In addition to her research she is also a film maker and has produced two film documentaries about China's growing presence in Africa, “When China Met Africa” (2011) co-financed by BBC and ARTE and winner of the 2010 Margaret Mead Film Award in New York,  and the investigative film documentary “King Cobra and the Dragon” (2012) for AL JAZEERA.   

Georg Lammich is an associated researcher in International Relations and African Politics at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany and holds a diploma in East Asian Studies. His research focuses on Interregionalism and China’s impact on regional integration, development and security in Africa. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Chinese Studies in Stellenbosch, South Africa and has conducted extensive fieldwork in China and various countries across the African continent.

Latest publication: Lammich, Georg 2019: Stability through Multilateral Cooperation: China and Regional Security in Africa, in: African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review 9, no. 1 (Spring 2019), 100–123

Dr. Stacey Links is a researcher whose work is focused on the nexus of critical international relations, critical human rights scholarship and development. Her research in her PhD trajectory focused specifically on the human rights dimension of Sino-African relations. Her doctoral research was conducted through Utrecht University and funded by the Dutch Foreign Office as part of a broader project.

More broadly, she is interested in how South-South cooperation can tackle regional challenges, looking at such cooperation in the light of a reconfigured global order. Her approach to International Relations is informed by postcolonial and decolonial insights, both of which often go untouched in international relations scholarship and practice.

Prior to the completion of her doctoral research, Stacey worked in the field of human rights and development in South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Haiti, and The Hague.

She completed her Masters in International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Leiden in conjunction with The Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Netherlands. She was awarded her bachelors and honours degrees from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa in International Studies and is a two-time recipient of The Nelson Mandela Scholarship.

Frank Sieren is „one of the leading German China experts” (Die ZEIT). He wrote for Süddeutsche, WirtschaftsWoche, Die ZEIT and the Handelsblatt about China. No other German Journalist has published more books than he did. In addition Sieren has authored many TV documentations for ARD and ZDF. Sieren has lived a quarter of a century in Beijing. His most recent work: “Zukunft? China!” (2018) was published at Penguin.