Linus Hagström professor of Political Science
Linus Hagström, East Asia Programme Director at the Swedish institute of International Affairs (UI), has been appointed Professor of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University (SEDU). He remains affiliated with both UI and SEDU.
Hagström has worked at UI since 2003 and has been heading the East Asia Programme since 2008. Since he founded the programme it has developed into one of the most dynamic and innovative research environments for East Asian politics in Northern Europe, and the quality and quantity of its research output per researcher is on a par with top institutions around the world.
Hagström's research is focused on international politics in Northeast Asia, particularly Japanese foreign and security policy, Japan-China relations, and the North Korean nuclear issue. Theoretically, Hagström is interested in matters related to power, identity, interpretation and narrative.
Hagström's research has been published in journals such as European Journal of International Relations, Australian Journal of International Affairs, The Pacific Review, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, Journal of East Asian Studies, Chinese Journal of International Politics and Asian Security.
The East Asia Programme 2015 and ahead
In June 2014, Hagström and research fellow Mikael Weissmann, were granted funding from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation for the research project "Power Shift in East Asia: 'Soft Power' Analyses." The project will run until June 2019. It aims to explore the issue of an East Asian power shift, specifically by analyzing the exercise of "soft power" in China-Japan relations. The main question to be addressed is whether China affects Japan more than vice versa with regard to this kind of power. In particular, the project purports to develop a constructivist understanding of soft power, which combines the actor-focused perspective of earlier soft power analysis, with the structural, or discursive rather, power perspective that is inherent in the soft power concept.
The objective of the mentioned project above, as well as other research projects in the East Asia programme, is to challenge how East Asian foreign policy is portrayed in media and research, and to point out how particular interests seem to form that portrayal. Hagström believes that only through critical analysis it is possible to form our own line of thinking as to how East Asian international politics is constituted, and only derived from such an attempt, begin to define Swedish and/or European interests vis-à-vis East Asia.