He designed and manages the Guinea Citizen Security Project with funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). He is seconded from the Senegalese Air Force, where he served as an adviser to the chief of staff. In 2009, he served as a Reagan-Fascell Democracy fellow with NED and a public policy scholar fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. His research is focused on reforming Africa’s armed forces.

He is a professorial lecturer in African Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He is a senior associate in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of the DRC Affinity Group. Previously, Dizolele was the Peter J. Duignan Distinguished Visiting Fellow and a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He is the author of a forthcoming biography: Mobutu: the Rise and Fall of the Leopard King (Random House UK). His analyses have been published in the Journal of Democracy, New York Times, Newsweek International, International Herald Tribune, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Forbes, St Louis Post-Dispatch and other outlets. A frequent commentator on African affairs, he has been a guest analyst on PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria, NPR's On Point and the Diane Rehm Show, the BBC World News, Al Jazeera’s The Stream and the Voice of America. He has testified before several subcommittees of the two chambers of the United States Congress, and the United Nations Security Council. Dizolele was a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and covered the 2006 historic elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With the Pulitzer Center, he produced Congo’s Bloody Coltan, a documentary report on the relation between the Congo conflict and the scramble for mineral resources.

Former executive editor of the intelligence-focused online startup The Cipher Brief (2017-18). She covered intelligence and national security for The Associated Press (AP, 2010-14) after 17 years as an award-winning CBS News foreign and national security correspondent. She held the 2014-2015 Gen. Omar Bradley Chair at the U. S. Army War College, Penn State Law and Dickinson College, being the first journalist and first woman in that post.

From 2005 to 2012, Mr. El Aynaoui worked at Bank Al-Maghrib, the Central Bank of Morocco. He was the Director of Economics and International Relations, where he provided strategic leadership in defining and supporting monetary policy analysis and strategy. He was also in charge of the Statistical and International Relations Divisions of the Central Bank, led the research division and was a member of the Governor’s Cabinet. Before joining Bank Al-Maghrib, Karim El Aynaoui worked for eight years at the World Bank, both in its Middle Eastern and North Africa, and Africa regions as an economist. He has published papers, books and articles in scientific journals on macroeconomic issues in developing countries. Recently, he co-authored a book outlining a growth strategy for Morocco and was the guest editor of a special issue on food price volatility in Oxford Economic Papers. Karim El Aynaoui is a board member of the OCP Foundation, a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) and a member of the COP22 Scientific Committee. He also participates in the Malabo-Montpellier Panel. Karim El Aynaoui holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Bordeaux, where he taught for three years courses in statistics and economics.