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Summer 2008 Student, Travis Wentworth, Published in Newsweek

Travis Wentworth, a rising senior at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and a summer 2008 BGIA student was published in a recent issue of Newsweek. An excerpt from his article can be found below.

"What do Vladimir Putin and Ban Ki-moon have in common?  As it turns out, they're the world's most trusted leaders, according to a new poll that assessed global opinion of public leaders.  It's no surprise that George W. Bush received low marks from respondents in 20 countries, who were asked to rate the trustworthiness of seven key leaders, but his peers in democratic countries don't fare much better. The highest ranked democratic leader, the UK's Gordon Brown, garnered only a 30-percent worldwide approval rating.  Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org and the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the survey, shared his reactions to the results with NEWSWEEK's Travis Wentworth."

For full text of his article, please click on the link below:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141797?tid=relatedcl

Alumni Profile: Clémentine B. Igilibambe, fall 2007

Clémentine B. Igilibambe attended BGIA during the fall 2007 semester, and interned at the New York State Attorney General’s Office. Clémentine is an International Studies and Human Rights major at the University of Dayton. Originally from Rwanda, Clémentine left her country in 1994 to escape the Genocide and civil war. At the age of eight, she fled with her parents and six brothers and sisters and lived in refugee camps and settlements in Congo and Kenya before she and her family got visas to move to the United States.

Clémentine attended Chaminade Julienne Catholic High school in Dayton, Ohio and received several scholarships to attend the University of Dayton. At the University of Dayton, Clémentine Founded the Afrika Club and was a member of the Human Rights Committee, The Student Leadership Council, The Student Achievement in Research and Scholarships and secretary for the Student Advisory Committee for Foreign Languages. She was also selected to be on a panel on Africana Studies at Stander Symposium and another panel on International Discrimination. Clémentine also volunteered at the American Friends Service Committee and Habitat for Humanity.

Alumni Profile: Özlem Gemici, spring 2006

Özlem is currently the Project Assistant at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) Foreign Policy Program. TESEV is an Istanbul-based, nongovernmental think tank and its areas of work are grouped under three titles: Foreign Policy, Democratization of Turkey, and Good Governance. The projects of the Foreign Policy Program focus on Cyprus, European Union, Armenian-Turkish and Greek-Turkish relations and the (broader) Middle East. TESEV is also one of the non-governmental partners of the Democracy Assistance Dialogue – a G-8 initiative aiming to bring together governmental and non-governmental actors in discussing democratic reform.


Özlem graduated from the Oberlin College in 2007 with a degree and honors in Politics and a degree in Neuroscience. While at BGIA during Spring 2006, Özlem interned for the International Crisis Group (ICG) as a legal assistant to the General Council and Special Projects Director. Following BGIA, she interned for No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ), an international NGO which works on international criminal justice, female genital mutilation and Middle East and North Africa Democracy. She helped the organization of two NPWJ conferences in Italy and Yemen and managed the thematic session 'Role of Women' at the Sana'a International Conference on Democracy, Political Reforms and Freedom of Expression, which was designed to create a discussion platform for government and civil society representatives of the (broader) Middle Eastern countries. After graduating from Oberlin, Ozlem spent four months at Damascus, Syria taking Arabic language courses from the University of Damascus. She now lives in Istanbul, working for TESEV.

Alumni Profile: Lyric Thompson, spring 2007

During her Spring 2007 semester at BGIA, Lyric interned with the Global Justice Center (GJC), an emerging international nonprofit working to uphold women's human rights in conflict and post-conflict situations. Throughout her internship, Lyric wrote winning proposals for program support and expansion in Iraq and Burma, and attended sessions of the 51st U.N. Commission on the Status of Women as a representative of the GJC, a member of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security. Lyric's writing was published in the Fall 2006 and Spring 2007 editions of BardPolitik, including pieces from her collegiate honors thesis work on political action and human rights in Ghana, West Africa. Over the course of her time at BGIA, Lyric was twice published by Newsweek International, and has continued to contribute to the news magazine. After graduating from BGIA, Lyric accepted a position in Washington, DC, backstopping a $52 million post-conflict, grants-based development project in Sudan, funded by USAID and implemented by Development Alternatives, Inc. She currently works for Women for Women International, an international organization that provides microfinance assistance to women victims of war. She is a Phi Beta Kappa, suma cum laude alumna of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.