Maddalena Procopio is Associate Research Fellow at ISPI for the Africa Programme. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. She is currently political analyst for sub-Saharan Africa at Eni.

Maddalena taught courses on “Foreign Policy Analysis” and “Africa and Emerging Powers” at the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town between 2012 and 2014, and was Co-Director of the first LSE Africa Summit in 2014, which paved the way for the set-up of the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa, launched in 2016. She also taught at the Politics and International Studies department (PAIS), University of Warwick, modules on ‘African Comparative Politics’ and ‘Violence in East Africa’. Before then she was Research Officer in the Centre for Rising Powers and Global Development, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University; visiting scholar at Peking University in 2016, where she worked within the Centre for African Studies on Kenya-China trade union links; and associate researcher from 2012 to 2015 at the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche, working on the project “Chinese and African Spaces of Interaction”, focusing on Chinese soft power in Africa, specifically on Confucius Institutes in South Africa. She was Research Assistant for the project ‘Hybrid Justice: Resilience in Post-Conflict Societies’, jointly run by the LSE Institute of Global Affairs and Wayamo Foundation in 2016-2018.

Her research interests focus on Africa-China relations, foreign policy, state-society relations, governance, asymmetric negotiations, bureaucratic politics, emerging powers.