Zhao Jun is the Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for African Studies, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies. His research focuses on the politics and history of the African Great Lakes region, and he was a visiting scholar at the University of Rwanda (2014–2015). He has published nearly thirty articles in academic journals such as World Economics and Politics, European Studies, and West Asia and Africa, several of which have been reprinted in full by Chinese Social Sciences Digest and China Social Science Excellence. He has led and completed several research projects funded by the National Social Science Fund of China and provincial- and ministerial-level programs. He has translated ten books on African history and politics, a representative one of which is The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 8: From c. 1940 to c. 1975, and his forthcoming book, Traditional Institutions and State Governance: Rwanda's Path to National Reconstruction, will be published by China Social Sciences Press.