Paulo Duarte has been a long-time researcher of the Instituto do Oriente, Lisbon. He holds a PhD and a Master's in Political and Social Sciences, awarded by the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He is an expert in China’s One Belt One Road, on China, World Politics, and specifically Central Asia, where he carried out an extensive on-the-ground doctoral research (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) with a scholarship awarded from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.