Abstract

Speaker details: Dr Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is a University Lecturer in Comparative Politics (African Politics) at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University, Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford, and a Fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin. Prior to assuming his post in Oxford in September 2007, he was the Austin Robinson Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and an Associate of the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. During the academic year 2006-07 he was a visiting scholar at the Centre d’etudes et recherches internationales (Sciences-Po) in Paris. Earlier, he was a Joseph C Fox Fellow at the Centre of International and Area Studies at Yale University. Soares de Oliveira 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 (NDI) 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 natural resource extraction, organized crime, state decay and post-conflict reconstruction. Most recently, 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 (Columbia University Press, 2007), a co-editor of China Returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace (with Daniel Large and Christopher Alden, (Columbia UP, 2008) and a contributing author to Bottom of the Barrel: Africa’s Oil Boom and the Poor (Catholic Relief Services, 2003). His recent individual and collaborative work has received the support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the China Universities’ Committee. 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.