Bio
Folashadé Soulé is a CIGI senior fellow and senior research associate at the Global Economic Governance Programme, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. She is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Ghana. Her research areas focus on Africa-China relations, the study of agency in Africa’s international relations and the politics of South-South cooperation. She is a principal investigator in Negotiating Africa’s Digital Partnerships, a policy research project that examines Africa’s relations with rising partners in the digital sector. As part of this project, she is leading a series of interviews with African senior policy makers, ministers, and private and civic actors that aims to shed light on how African actors build, negotiate and manage strategic partnerships in the digital sector in a context of geopolitical rivalry.
She was a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics and a former Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow. Her research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including African Affairs, International Affairs, Global Governance and Foro Internacional.
Folashadé also teaches as a guest lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies.
As a policy-facing academic, connecting policy and research, she is the initiator of the Africa-China negotiation workshop series, bringing together African negotiators and senior policy makers to exchange and build better negotiation practices when dealing with China. She has also served as a policy analyst and consultant for several institutions and is currently acting as the Africa advisor to the Commission on Global Economic Transformation led by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence and hosted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.