Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is Full Professor of Political Science at CERI Sciences Po. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance, University of Oxford. Soares de Oliveira is also joint editor of OUP’s Oxford Studies in African Politics and International Relations and a fellow of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He was previously Professor of the International Politics of Africa at the University of Oxford and joint editor of African Affairs, the journal of the Royal African Society. He was awarded a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship in 2023 and a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship in 2011.

Soares de Oliveira has conducted extensive fieldwork on the international political economy of African states with a focus on 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 (2008) and The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States (2011). He is currently writing a book titled Africa Offshore: The Global Offshore Economy and the Reshaping of African Politics (under contract with Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press US).

Soares de Oliveira has worked with organisations such as the World Bank, the European Commission, Catholic Relief Services, UNCTAD and Oxfam. His individual and collaborative work has received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the ESRC, the Joffe Trust, the Volkswagen Foundation, DFID/FCDO, the British Academy, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, among others. Soares de Oliveira has been 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.