Dr Folashadé Soulé is a Senior Research Associate at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford where she is the co-principal investigator of the 'Negotiating Africa’s digital partnerships' policy research project since 2022. Previous to her current position, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Economics (LSE) and a Global leader fellow – a joint postdoctoral fellowship between Princeton University and the University of Oxford. She was also a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris where she earned her PhD in International Relations in 2014. Originally from Bénin, she speaks fluently French and English and has published and taught courses in both languages.

Her research areas focus on foreign policy analysis, diplomacy studies, negotiation, technology and international relations and more specifically the study of agency in Africa’s international relations, the politics of South-South cooperation, and Africa-China relations. Her research has been supported by several institutions among which the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has been published in several high impact peer-review journals and cited in various national and international outlets. She is the reviews editor at African Affairs journal and an editorial board member at International Studies Perspectives journal and African Affairs journal, both published at Oxford University Press.

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 policymakers to exchange and build better negotiation practices when dealing with China. She has also acted as a policy consultant for several institutions among which the OECD, the Mastercard foundation, and from 2019 to 2022 as the Africa advisor to the Commission on Global Economic Transformation (CGET) led by Nobel Laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence and hosted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). She was also a non-resident scholar (2022-2024) at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’ Africa programme.