Ricardo Soares de Oliveira

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is a professor on the international politics of Africa at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford; an official fellow of St Peter’s College; and a non-resident fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He is co-editor of African Affairs, the journal of the Royal African Society, and co-director of the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on African Governance.

Soares de Oliveira has conducted extensive fieldwork with a focus on the international political economy of African states, especially in regard to the extractive industries, the financial sector, conflict and post-conflict reconstruction, and African-Asian relations. He is the author of Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War (2015) and Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea (2007) and co-editor of China Returns to Africa (with Chris Alden and Daniel Large, 2008) and The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States (with James Mayall, 2011). He is currently writing a book titled Africa and the Offshore World.

Ricardo has worked in the field of governance and the extractive industries for organizations such as the World Bank, the European Commission, Catholic Relief Services, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and Oxfam. His individual and collaborative work has received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Volkswagen Foundation, DFID, the British Academy, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, among others.

His speaking engagements have included the Brazilian, UK, French, and German Foreign Ministries/​Policy Planning Units and the US State Department. His commentary has been published in the International New York Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Foreign Affairs, Politico, Times Literary Supplement, Folha de São Paulo, Foreign Policy, and the Financial Times. Interviews and references to his work have appeared in, among others, the BBC, New York Times, New Yorker, Le Monde, Economist, Wall Street Journal, Al-Jazeera, Washington Post, and the Sunday Times.

Soares de Oliveira has been visiting professor at Sciences Po in Paris, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and a visiting fellow at Yale University.