Astrid Hedin
Associate Professor/Senior lecturer

Presentation

Astrid Hedin is associate professor of political science and public administration at the Department of Global Political Studies (GPS), Malmö University. In 2021/22, during the pandemic, she was an online visiting scholar of the The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a Sabbatical Scholar of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ). During spring 2024, she returned to be on site. She is also an active alumni of the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Rsearch (Scancor) and its' two centers on the campuses of Stanford and Harvard University.

Astrid Hedin researches communist state administrative structures (see the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Public Administration, 2022) and specifically the travel controls for employees. These were used to influence perceptions and narratives in the West, and constituted a state capacity in the everyday cold war struggle over discourse and narrative. (See ‘Illiberal deliberation’, Cooperation & conflict, 54:2).

Astrid Hedin has also studied how leftist trends during the 1960s and 1970s impacted on the Swedish model and how it was re-negotiated, re-interpreted and perceived, both at home and abroad (‘Origins and Myths of the Swedish Model’ 2016; ‘Before the Breakdown’ 2019).

Drawing on the Stanford school of World Polity Studies, Astrid Hedin has suggested a framework for how to investigate how the communist example helped propel and shape global policy trends during the Cold war era (‘Cold war isomorphism’ 2016, 2018, 'Global nyinstitutionalism', 2022).

Blog posts summarizing research articles

Lagging Impact: New Research on Communism Needs to Reach Textbooks on Insights, the online publication of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

How communist regimes directed global dialogue Blog post on the global, blog of the Geneva Global Governance Centre.

How did the Cold war help spur West European welfare state reform? Blog post on the global, blog of the Geneva Global Governance Centre.

Lessons from East Germany How authoritarian states can use international travelers to promote their interests. Blog post on EUROPP blog of The London School of Economics.

Service

At Malmö University, Hedin is a faculty representative and elected vice chair of the Faculty Board of Culture & Society. She is the coordinator for the Political Science program within the Department of Global Political Studies (GPS). Earlier, she has been an acting coordinator of the GPS research seminar.

Training and experience

• Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Sida, the Swedish International Development Agency, 2023-2024, appointed by the Government
• Visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, online 2021/22, on site spring 2024
• Subject coordinator for political science 2012-2016, 2019-ongoing
• Temporary senior lecturer, Lund University, 2016-2018
• Acting GPS research coordinator, autumn 2015
• Anna Lindh fellow of the Europe Center, Stanford University, spring 2012
• Docent/Habilitation/ associate professor in political science, Uppsala University
• Visiting scholar at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (Creees) and the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
• Visiting scholar at the Scandinavian Center for Organizational Research (Scancor), Stanford University
• Post-doctoral fellow of the Swedish Research Council
• Ph.D. in political science, Lund University

Current teaching

• Decision Making in Foreign Policy (Political science Master program)
• Organization Theory (Political science)
• Swedish Politics and Public Administration (Political science)
• Qualitative Methods (Public Administration program)
• Globalization and the Welfare State (Public Administration program)
• International Organizations as Public Administration (Public Administration program)
• The Power of International Organizations (GPSC-Master program)
• Swedish politics and democracy (Police Officer training program)
• The Swedish Institute Summer Academy for Young Professionals (SAYP)