Godfrey Mwampembwa, is a renowned political cartoonist. Originally from Tanzania, Gado has lived and worked as an editorial cartoonist in Kenya for many years, and currently works for The East African Standard in Nairobi. His cartoons have also been published in Daily Nation (Kenya), Le Monde and Courrier International (France), Deutsc he Welle (Germany), and The Guardian (UK) among others. He is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Buni Media, an independent multi-media company based in Nairobi, where he produces the weekly satirical puppet show, The XYZ SHOW. Gado is a recipient of many awards including the Kenya National Human Rights Commission Award in Journalism in 2005 and 2007 and the prestigious Cartoon for Peace 2016 International Editorial Cartoon award. In 2011 Gado was among 12 extraordinary leaders to receive a Visionaries Award from Ford Foundation for their innovative efforts on the frontlines of key social issues. In 2014, Gado was named as one of the 100 most influential people in Africa by the New African.

Nic Cheeseman is Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham. In addition to numerous book chapters, he is the author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, failures and the struggle for political reform (CUP, 2015) and over twenty journal articles including “Rethinking the ‘presidentialism debate’: Conceptualizing coalitional politics in cross-regional perspective” (Democratization, 2014), which won the inaugural GIGA prize for the best article published in Comparative Area Studies. Professor Cheeseman is also the editor of the collections Our Turn to Eat: Politics in Kenya Since 1950 (2010), The Handbook of African Politics (2013), and African Politics: Major Works (2016), and two special issues of the Journal of Eastern African Studies on the Kenyan elections of 2007 and 2013. As well as being the former editor of the journal African Affairs, the #1 ranked journal in Area Studies, Professor Cheeseman is the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics, the Oxford Dictionary of African Politics, and the co-editor of the Handbook of Kenyan Politics (forthcoming). These days, he spends much of his time writing about contemporary events in Africa in a bi-weekly column for Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.

France is in mourning after three days of violence that saw 17 of its citizens killed. Violent events began on Wednesday 7 January with the brutal attack on the offices of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo and ended two days later with sieges on two hostage sites.

As the country begins to come to terms with what has happened, we will be joined by a panel to take a view of events and to discuss the repercussions for society and security in France. We will also be tackling the arguments around the use of freedom of expression.

Chaired by James Coomarasamy, presenter of Newshour on the BBC World Service and former BBC Paris Correspondent. He has just returned from Paris where he was presenting Newshour on the World Service and The World Tonight on Radio 4.

The panel:

Maajid Nawaz is co-founder and chairman of Quilliam. His work is informed by years spent in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group, and his gradual transformation towards liberal democratic values, documented in his autobiography Radical.

Natalie Nougayrède is a columnist, leader writer and foreign affairs commentator for The Guardian. She was previously executive editor and managing editor of Le Monde.

Peter Neumann is professor of security studies at the department of war studies, King’s College London, and serves as director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), which he founded in early 2008.

Nesrine Malik is a Sudanese-born writer and commentator, focusing on Middle Eastern politics and minority matters in the UK.