Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is a university lecturer in comparative politics (African politics) at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University; fellow at St Peter's College at Oxford; and a fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2011-12. Prior to assuming his post at Oxford in September 2007, he was the Austin Robinson Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and an associate of the Centre of International Studies, Cambridge University. He has also been a Joseph C. Fox Fellow at the Centre of International and Area Studies at Yale University and a visiting scholar at both the Centre d'etudes et recherches internationales (Sciences-Po) in Paris and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

He has worked in the field of governance and the energy sector for the World Bank, the European Commission, Catholic Relief Services, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the French Ministry of Defence, among others. His research interests include African politics (particularly West and Central Africa), comparative politics and international political economy, especially in the fields of energy, natural resource extraction, state weakness and post-conflict reconstruction. Soares de Oliveira has focused on the issue of oil and governance in the Gulf of Guinea, where he has conducted extensive fieldwork. He is the author of Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea (Hurst Publishers and Columbia University Press, 2007; click here for reviews), a co-editor of China Returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace (with Daniel Large and Christopher Alden, Hurst/Columbia UP 2008; click here for reviews), The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States (with James Mayall, forthcoming 2011) and a contributing author to Bottom of the Barrel: Africa’s Oil Boom and the Poor (Catholic Relief Services, 2003).

He holds a BA in politics from the University of York, an MPhil in international relations and a PhD, both from the University of Cambridge.

Languages: Portuguese, English, French, Spanish.