Folashadé Soulé

Folashadé Soulé is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, formerly as a Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow and currently as a Visiting Scholar at the Blavatnik School of Government. She holds a Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris.

During and since defending her Ph.D., she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Economics (LSE) and a part-time Lecturer in International Relations and Political Science (Africa and Global Politics, the Politics of Globalization, International Political Economy). Folashade’s current research investigates the negotiation practices of francophone African governments when dealing with China on infrastructure projects. It aims to challenge the prevailing wisdom in international relations that bureaucracies and governments of “weak” countries exert minimal influence when they negotiate with “strong” countries such as China, and will add precious empirical and theoretical knowledge to a small but growing body of research on small developing countries in asymmetric negotiations.

She has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Global Governance, Afrique contemproaine, Foro Internacional, and Cahiers des Amériques Latines. As a policy-facing academic connecting policy and research, she has been acting as an international strategy consultant for the OECD, the French Development Agency (AFD), the Presidency of Benin, and several consultancy firms, including Oxford Analytica, Ernst&Young, and Deloitte. She has also trained young diplomats and military civil servants in Bamako, Mali in methodology and analytical tools in international relations.

Last Updated: January 18, 2019

African Governments Need to Negotiate Better Deals With China. Here's How They Can Do It.

Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden & more
The problem with the “debt trap” theory is that it too often strips Africans of their agency in the negotiating process. That either they don’t know what they are doing or they’re simply negotiating bad deals. While both of those may be true, in...