Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is Professor of the International Politics of Africa at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford; Official Fellow of St Peter's College; and a Fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin. He is a former editor of African Affairs, the journal of the Royal African Society, and co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance. He has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust/British Academy Senior Research Fellowship for 2023-24.

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 (2008). He is currently writing a book titled Africa Offshore: The Global Offshore Economy and the Reshaping of African Politics (under contract with Hurst and Oxford University Press USA).

Soares de Oliveira has worked in the field of governance and the extractive industries for organisations such as the World Bank, the European Commission, UNCTAD, 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 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. 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.