Professor Alvaro Mendez is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the LSE Global South Unit. He is a Senior Associate Fellow and the Academic Director of short programmes at LSE IDEAS. He is an Adjunct Professor and Foreign Expert at the Institute for Global Public Policy (IGPP) at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Prof. Mendez is also an Associate Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), and an International Advisory Board member of l’Observatoire Politique de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes at Sciences Po Paris. He teaches at LSE, Sciences Po, Peking University, and Fudan. He has won numerous teaching awards such as the 2003-2004 IR Departmental Teaching Prize in recognition of his teaching of International Relations at the LSE.
Prof. Mendez is a prolific writer and an author, co-author, or editor of numerous books, including Colombian Agency and the Making of US Foreign Policy: Intervention by Invitation (Routledge, 2017); The China-Latin America Axis: Emerging Markets and their Role in an Increasingly Globalised World (Palgrave, 2018); New Development Assistance: Emerging Economies and the New Landscape of Development Assistance (Palgrave, 2020); The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations: The AIIB Membership (Palgrave, 2020); and China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics (Bloomsbury, 2023).
He is also a former editor of Millennium – Journal of International Studies at the LSE. He has published articles in such journals as Geopolitics, Global Policy, Asia Business & Management, Sustainability, Journal of Business Research, The China Journal, Asia Pacific Business Review, Finance Research Letters, and Foreign Policy Analysis.