Ricardo Soares de Oliveira

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 Oxford University Press’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 received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 2005 and was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship in 2011 and British Academy Senior Research Fellowship in 2023.

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, forthcoming 2027). Soares de Oliveira has supervised twenty-one doctoral theses and co-supervised nine. He welcomes inquiries about doctoral supervision in his areas of research.

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 UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Joffe Trust, the Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, DFID/FCDO, the British Academy, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has been a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Christian Michelsen Institute, and a visiting fellow at Yale University. He is a member of the founding Advisory Board of the Gulbenkian Institute of Advanced Studies.

Africa Offshore: The Global Offshore Economy and the Reshaping of African Politics, forthcoming (under contract with Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press US).

“An Offshore Turn to Asia? Africa’s deepening links with Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong”, Oxford Martin School working paper, January 2026.

with A. Cooley & J. Heathershaw, “Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: Kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism”, European Journal of International Relations 30, 2 (2024). [Honorable Mention, best EJIR article of the year prize 2024].

with A. Pitcher & J. Heathershaw, “Authoritarian Regimes in the Global Economy”, The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024. 

with T. Prelec, “Enabling African Loots: Tracking the Laundering of Nigerian kleptocrats’ ill-gotten gains in western financial centers”, Journal of International Relations and Development 26, 3 (2023).

“Researching Africa and the Offshore World”, Journal of Modern African Studies 60, 3 (2022).

with J. Heathershaw, A. Cooley, T. Mayne, C. Michel, T. Prelec & J. Sharman, The UK’s Kleptocracy Problem: How servicing post-Soviet elites weakens the rule of law (Chatham House, 2021).

with N. Oppong & L. Patey (eds) “Special Issue: Governing African Oil and Gas: Boom-era political and institutional innovation”, Extractive Industries and Society 7, 4 (2020).

with M. E. Ferreira, “The Political Economy of Banking in Angola”, African Affairs 118, 470 (2019).

with H. Verhoeven, “Taming Intervention: Weak African States, Regime Survival and Political Order as Stabilization”, Survival 60, 2 (2018)

Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War, London, Hurst Publishers, 2015, 288p.

The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States, co-editor with James Mayall, London, Hurst Publishers, 2011, 320p.

China Returns to Africa: A Superpower and a Continent Embrace, co-editor with Chris Alden & Daniel Large, London, Hurst Publishers, 2008, 400p.

Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea, London, Hurst Publishers, 2007, 380p.

“Business Success, Angola-Style: Postcolonial Politics and the Rise and Rise of SONANGOL”, Journal of Modern African Studies 45, 4 (2007).

See all publications on Sciences Po Institutional Repository