Stephen Chan

Professor of International Studies at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, London University

Professor Stephen Chan is Professor of International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The firstborn son of Chinese refugees to New Zealand, Chan was a national student president, publisher, newspaper editor and international civil servant before he became an academic, first in Africa and later in Britain. Professor Chan has had a long-term involvement with African causes. He participated in the transition to independence of Zimbabwe, the reconstruction of Uganda after the fall of Idi Amin, and also advised and trained government ministries in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Kenya. He established a consortium that trained the Eritrean Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately before and after independence in 1993. He was also part of a consortium that trained the parliamentarians and ministers of post-Dergue Ethiopia from 1998-9. From 2006-7 he was a member of the Africa-China-US Trilateral Dialogue, an effort to establish a common set of principles to help govern the emerging trade wars involving the three continents.

He began his academic career as a lecturer in International Relations at University of Zambia in 1983 and has also worked at the Universities of Wellington, Kent, and Nottingham Trent. He joined SOAS in 2002 as Professor of International Relations and served as Dean of Law & Social Sciences for five years from 2002 to 2007. Chan is the author of 27 books on international relations and more than 200 articles and reviews in the academic and specialist press, as well as over 100 journalistic feature articles. Particularly notable are Robert Mugabe: A Life of Power and Violence, Kaunda and Southern Africa: Image and Reality in Foreign Policy, and Citizen of Africa: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai. His most recent work is The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism.

Chan was awarded an OBE for 'services to Africa and to higher education' in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2010.