Astrid Hedin
Associate Professor/Senior lecturer

Presentation

Astrid Hedin is an 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 visiting scholar 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.

Hedin’s researches communist state administration (see Communist State Administrative Structures, in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Public Administration, 2022) and specifically the travel controls under communist regimes; how these were used to try to influence perceptions and narratives in the West, and in effect constituted a state capacity in the everyday cold war struggle over discourse and narrative. (See the 2019 article ‘Illiberal deliberation’ in the journal Cooperation & conflict, 54:2).

Hedin has researched how the communism-inspired 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).

Hedin has suggested an analytical framework, inspired by the Stanford school of World Polity Studies, 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

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 Culture & Society Faculty Board and is a substitute for the faculty Appointment Board. 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

• Ph.D. in political science, Lund University
• Post-doctoral fellow of the Swedish Research Council
• Visiting scholar at the Scandinavian Center for Organizational Research (Scancor), Stanford University
• Visiting scholar at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (Creees) and the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
• Docent/Habilitation/ associate professor in political science, Uppsala University
• Anna Lindh fellow of the Europe Center, Stanford University, spring 2012
• Subject coordinator for political science 2012-2016, 2019-ongoing
• Acting GPS research coordinator, autumn 2015
• Temporary senior lecturer, Lund University, 2016-2018
• Online visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, 2021/22

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)