Africa Rising: How Young Leaders are Shaping the Continent’s Future

Michelle D. Gavin is the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She has over twenty-five years of experience in international affairs in government and non-profit roles. She was formerly the managing director of The Africa Center, a multidisciplinary institution dedicated to increasing understanding of contemporary Africa. From 2011 to 2014 she was the U.S. ambassador to Botswana and served concurrently as the U.S. representative to the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

During Ambassador Gavin’s tenure, the United States and Botswana launched the most ambitious HIV prevention study in the world; Botswana hosted Southern Accord, the 1,400-strong joint SADC-U.S. military exercise; and the U.S. embassy helped to found Botswana’s first American Chamber of Commerce. Prior to that, she was a special assistant to President Obama and the senior director for Africa at the National Security Council, where she helped to originate the Young African Leaders Initiative and led major policy reviews of Sudan and Somalia.

Before joining the Obama administration, Gavin was an international affairs fellow and adjunct fellow for Africa at CFR. Earlier in her career she worked in the U.S. Senate, where she was the staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on African affairs, director of international policy issues for Senator Russ Feingold, and legislative director for Senator Ken Salazar.

Gavin received an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes scholar, and earned her BA from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she was a Truman scholar. She serves on the board of directors of Points of Light.

About our Moderator

Dr. Christopher Tounsel is a historian of modern Sudan, specializing in the functions of race and religion as political technologies. His first book, Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan, was published with Duke University Press in 2021. His second book, Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity, was published with Cornell University Press in 2024. Chosen Peoples, which explores the ways that Southern Sudanese intellectuals used Judeo-Christian Scriptures to frame their revolutionary work against the Sudanese state, was named a Finalist for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora's (ASWAD) Outstanding First Book Award and a Finalist for the Christianity Today Book Award (History/Biography). Bounds of Blackness, which unpacks the vacillating approaches that African Americans have taken to the Sudanese state from the late nineteenth-century to the Obama administration, was named a Finalist for ASWAD's 2025 P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize and received honorable mention for the International Studies Association Book Award (Diplomatic Studies section).

Tounsel serves as an associate editor for Global Black Thought and editorial advisory board member for the Journal of African History. His articles appear in journals including African Studies Review, Journal of African American History, and Journal of Africana Religions, and my research has received support from organizations including the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Council of Overseas American Research Centers.

In 2012, during South Sudan’s first year of independence, Tounsel participated in an archival organizing project at the South Sudan National Archive in Juba, South Sudan. Working alongside local and foreign scholars and staff, the project organized and preserved materials documenting the new nation’s history. He has provided interviews on Sudan and South Sudan for the BBC, PBS News Hour, Al Jazeera, and NPR's Throughline, and participated in the American Historical Association's 2026 Congressional Briefing on the "History of U.S.-Africa Relations."