In 2019, the Trump administration suffered a public embarrassment when Mina Chang, a senior appointee in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, was exposed as a fraud. Chang had fabricated key parts of her résumé—claiming to have spoken at major political conventions, studied at Harvard, served on a UN panel, and even doctored a Time magazine cover with her face on it. Her scandal revealed more than personal dishonesty; it exposed the negative effects of influence laundering industry on critical government organs such as the ones responsible for vetting.

Chang—who ran a military-linked NGO active in the Middle East and Africa—passed through what should have been a serious vetting process, thanks to Washington’s insular and self-reinforcing culture, where legitimacy depends less on expertise and more on the appearance of authority. Access, credentials, and influence are cobbled together through affiliations, short-term appointments, and think tank fellowships—exchanged within a closed circle of lobbyists, consultants, and political appointees. At the center of this network are think tanks—organizations that call themselves research centers but in practice operate as front offices for corporate, military, and geopolitical agendas.

Think tanks come in many varieties. Some, like the Cato Institute, focus on domestic policy. Others, such as the Atlantic Council, project international influence. While they claim to serve the public interest—championing peace, democracy, or global order—they in reality serve their donors: energy corporations, weapons manufacturers, lobbying networks, and foreign governments. These institutions are deeply aligned with the US security establishment and the broader neoconservative foreign policy consensus that has shaped American global behavior for decades.

Although Africa lacks a dedicated think tank ecosystem like those built around the Middle East or East Asia, this does not mean it is spared the influence-peddling machinery of Washington. On the contrary, it may suffer the worst of it. Treated as an appendage, Africa is handed over to some of the least-qualified actors in a field already infamous for low standards. In other regions, the presence of media scrutiny creates some pressure to strive for a veneer of credibility. Not so with Africa. Despite the continent’s centrality to US commercial, military, and geopolitical interests, it remains obscure enough that anyone with minimal savviness—military contractors, consultants, lobbyists, failed academics—can spin whatever narrative they promote, unchecked. In that vacuum of scrutiny, impostors thrive. One of the clearest examples is J. Peter Pham.

Pham epitomizes inflated credentials and fabricated expertise. Affiliated with the Atlantic Council, he presents himself as a former diplomat, an Africa expert, and an “author of more than 300 essays and reviews and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books.” In reality, his career is built not on expertise, but on the vacuum of scrutiny that surrounds Africa policy in Washington.

Pham’s prolific output, upon closer inspection, consists of little more than boilerplate opinion pieces in obscure outlets, recycling Washington clichés about the world, and repackaging neocon dogma as strategic insight. His books on Africa are entirely self-published, printed through print-on-demand platforms like Amazon’s CreateSpace, which publish anything submitted for a fee.

His book on Liberia was printed by a company that specializes in aviation stationery; Several of his other titles were released through different publishers that share one curious trait: none of them have a functioning website—or even the basic digital footprint that would suggest a legitimate, operational business. Generally speaking, the books themselves, are thin, poorly edited, and error-ridden publications. Although they gave him a career, they are hard to find on Google. One reviewer of the Liberia work wrote, “This may be the most poorly edited book I’ve ever read.” Another noted, “This reads more like a thesis paper than a book and is filled with grammatical errors.” Even the more generous reviewer admitted, “It didn’t go through any editing process.”

It’s easy to see, from reading them, why no publisher accepted them. Pham himself seemed aware of this. In an application for a faculty of the year in 2010 (he is an aggressive self-promoter), he claimed—falsely—to have two books forthcoming with Yale University Press: Liberia: The Restoration of a Failed State and Africa Matters: A Strategy for Winning the New Scramble. More than two fifteen years later, neither exists.

It is a testament to the absence of standards for becoming an “expert” on Africa that Pham secured a professorship at James Madison University on such a flimsy record. The program he joined—nebulously titled Justice Studies—was less an academic department than a vocational pipeline, designed to prepare students for careers in law enforcement, corrections, and homeland security. It was structured to align with post-9/11 federal funding priorities and had little to do with traditional scholarship. Yet that didn’t stop Pham from marketing himself as a professor of justice studies, political science, and Africana studies.

Unsurprisingly, his teaching reflected the same “fake it till you make it” ethos that had propelled his entir career. Two of the courses he taught, as he explains in the faculty of the year application were “International Terrorism” and one titled “Perspectives on Comparative Justice ” In the former, students were assigned a terrorist group to monitor and report on throughout the semester—not to understand the political or historical context, but to rehearse surveillance logic. In the latter course, he claimed to draw on his own “experience” at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, based on a self-published book about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Pham proudly adds that many of his students went on to careers in national security. The classroom, like the rest of his career, served as a stage for performance—not critical inquiry or genuine engagement with Africa.

During this period, Pham also worked as an adjunct lecturer at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD)—a right-wing, neoconservative think tank closely aligned with the Israeli lobby and known for its aggressive, Islamophobic framing of global affairs. In that capacity, he wrote a number of blog posts on Africa, always seeking to draw tenuous links between US wars in the Middle East and events on the African continent. In at least two articles, he recycled standard FDD talking points, inciting against Lebanese Shia communities in West Africa. In one, he claimed that they were involved in the brutal civil war in Sierra Leone.

Pham presented himself as a US diplomat. The reality is less impressive: a two-year stint as Special Envoy to the Great Lakes region of Africa—a low-profile and largely symbolic post handed to him by Mike Pompeo as a political appointment. The role was not a recognition of diplomatic skill but a reward for tireless networking, conveniently attached to a portfolio with little authority or responsibility. Pham does  have some diplomatic experience but with the Vatican, but as usual, he is always exagerates. In some biographical introductions, he described himself as a “former United States Ambassador to the Vatican”—a claim that is entirely false. In reality, he was a low-level Vatican embassy staffer, serving as a priest in two or three countries.

True to form, Pham used even this marginal appointment to further inflate his profile on the global stage. Despite holding a largely ceremonial US envoy role, he somehow managed to collect the highest national honors from no fewer than five undemocratic African presidents—decorations typically reserved for liberation heroes, heads of state, or those with decades of meaningful service. These included the Commander of the National Order of Mali, the Commander of the National Order of Burkina Faso, the Officer of the National Order of Merit of Niger, the Commander of the National Order of Merit of Gabon, and the Commander of the Order of Friendship of Peoples of Burundi.

What’s striking about Pham is not merely his lack of genuine expertise, but the cartoonish way he imagines what expertise in Africa looks like. His writing belongs to the lowbrow strain of a long-standing Western genre: the adventurer-hero intervening in a continent defined by misery, chaos, and backwardness. The highbrow version of this fantasy is epitomized by Heart of Darkness, where Conrad’s narrator doesn’t see Africa as a place with people, history, or thought—but as a formless backdrop of jungle, echoing drums, and unknowable savagery. Even in his moments of sympathy, Africans appear only as groans, shadows, or primal impulses—never as full human beings.

This colonial fantasy has endured for over a century, shaping the worldview of a certain type of Western adventurer. These are not scholars, but self-styled “Africa experts” whose knowledge is stitched together from NGO brochures, war memoirs, and Hollywood tropes. They remain oblivious to the continent’s intellectual traditions and the African thinkers who have long dismantled these narratives. Instead of moving past them, they seek to reenact them—often in more sensationalized form. A recent example is In Congo’s Shadow, a book that drew attention for repackaging colonial clichés as humanitarian concern.

Pham belongs squarely in this tradition. His version of Africa is a landscape of failure and violence, of disease and disaster, waiting for someone like him to impose order. There is no interest in the continent’s internal debates, historical legacies, or political visions. What Pham offers is not analysis but reenactment—one more performance of the colonial gaze, dressed up in the language of security, state failure, and counterterrorism.

Pham’s own account of how he came to the field of Africa studies exposes the absence of genuine intellectual engagement. In the faculty award application, he explained that after 9/11, he “found not only a research topic, but the pivot” around which to balance his roles as teacher, citizen, and scholar. That pivot, he claimed, was the idea that failed states “are not only the havens for terrorism, but also incubators of poverty, disease, violence, and injustice—all of which, in turn, feed into the vicious cycle of escalating violence that knows no borders.”

And yet, this outrageously caricatured vision works—especially in Washington. In fact, the more exaggerated and simplistic the narrative, the more believable it becomes. That is why Pham has been able to reinvent himself as a preeminent Africanist in the US capital. He is everywhere: on panels, in white papers, in policy briefings—any forum with “Africa” in its name, and many that have nothing to do with Africa at all. In those cases, he inserts himself anyway, claiming to bring “the African perspective.” And it works. In a system that rewards performance over substance, he delivers the right performance.

But the danger here is not merely the inflation of credentials or the reenactment of colonial fantasies. In the context of US Africa policy, these performances are far from harmless. They shape narratives, influence decision-makers, and ultimately crystallize into policy. And when that policy is driven by ignorance, opportunism, or someone else’s agenda, the result is not just distortion—it is real harm.

Take, for instance, Pham’s efforts to insert the Israeli agenda into West African politics by inciting against the Lebanese Shia community—fabricating links to regional conflicts to align African affairs with the priorities of Washington’s Middle East hawks. Or consider a more recent and consequential example: the Somali civil war.

Since 1991, the northern region of Somalia has claimed independence as “Somaliland” and sought international recognition. For much of that time, this claim was widely understood—even by its own leaders—as a political bargaining position rather than a settled fact. But this changed with the rise of the global war on terror and Washington’s practice of outsourcing its foreign policy to private actors and lobbyists. The secessionist leadership, through figures like Pham and his network of lobbyists and think tanks, found new access to US power by casting themselves as counterterrorism allies.

What had once been a complex but containable Somali political dispute was inflated into an international flashpoint. Like lawyers turning a family dispute into a scorched-earth divorce, these lobbyists rebranded the issue as one of global strategic importance. Somalia was painted as a Chinese proxy; Somaliland, as a besieged democratic partner. This act of narrative laundering injected fresh volatility into an already fragile situation—and helped reignite a civil conflict that Somalia was only beginning to move beyond.

In 2022, violence finally erupted when communities in northern Somalia opposed to the secession protested, and the secessionist security forces responded with live ammunition. A popular uprising followed, forcing the secessionist forces out of the city. In retaliation, secessionist forces shelled Las Anod for nine months, killing hundreds and displacing over a hundred thousand. The UN and Amnesty International condemned the attacks as indiscriminate. Secessionist leaders refused to talk in large part because they believed Pham and other lobbyists in Washington, DC, think tanks would deliver US recognition.

More recently, these same operatives floated a grotesque proposal: to ethnically cleanse the survivors of the Gaza genocide to the secessionist region of northern Somalia in exchange for US recognition. Desperate for legitimacy, the secessionist authorities expressed willingness to consider the plan. But it collapsed under near-universal condemnation—including firm rejection by the Somali government and by Palestinians themselves.

Pham is not exceptional. He is representative. He is part of a conflict entrepreneurship industry—former ambassadors, failed academics,  military contractors, freelance consultants, self-appointed humanitarians—who have repositioned themselves as Africa experts in a space that asks little and rewards spectacle. Their credentials are often stitched together from a series of inflated or misleading claims: a few weeks abroad turned into “field experience,” opinion pieces framed as research, and unpaid advisory roles described as government service. It’s the standard formula—just enough activity to build a résumé, just enough jargon to sound credible. They speak fluently about security, peacebuilding, or investment, but their real function is to repackage someone else’s agenda and sell it to Washington as expert insight.