Announcement of a scholarship-funded PhD student opportunity in political science specialising in crisis management and security (with a particular focus on Japanese security policy)

Reference number Ö 368/2026

The Swedish Defence University is an internationally renowned university in the area of defence, crisis management and security. We offer a unique academic environment where military and civilian researchers, teachers and students interact. We educate and train top-level executives, experts, and researchers for the task of analyzing and managing current and future crises, security issues and conflicts. The university educates all military officers in the Swedish armed forces and leads the academic progression of the military profession. We conduct research in the areas of Law with a focus on International and Operational Law, Leadership and Command & Control, Military History, Political Science, Systems Science for Defence and Security and War Studies.

Political science research at the Swedish Defence University analyses how security and insecurity are created, who security is for, and how crises are prevented and handled in Swedish, European, and global contexts. We explore threats, conflicts, decision-making processes, communication processes, identity construction, and ethical dilemmas concerning the state, society, and individual, with a special focus on Sweden and the Nordic countries, the European Union, the United States, Russia, and East Asia.

The aim of our research and education is to contribute a more complex and nuanced understanding of the world. Our researchers regularly share their expertise in national and international media, advising policymakers, participating in commissioned training, and informing the public on current issues.

Research in political science at the Swedish Defence University can be divided into two overarching themes – security studies and crisis management – and several specialisations, which organise researchers as well as doctoral students.

Find out more about political science at the Swedish Defence University here.

Announcement of a scholarship-funded PhD student opportunity in political science, specialising in crisis management and security (with a particular focus on Japanese security policy) based at the Department of Political Science in Stockholm.

The advertised PhD scholarship is linked to a research project focusing on Japanese security policy in a changing international order. The project addresses questions such as how Japan is reformulating its international role, legitimizing its security policy and developing relations with partners such as Europe, the EU and NATO. The doctoral project is carried out within an established research environment with expertise in international politics, security policy and East Asian studies, and with access to qualified supervision in Japanese security policy.

Duties

Doctoral students shall primarily devote themselves to their own education in Political Science at the postgraduate level. Postgraduate studies consist of working on your research project and following an individual study plan under supervision. Writing a doctoral thesis in Political Science is the central task (165 ECTS credits), but completing postgraduate courses is also part of it (75 ECTS credits). Postgraduate studies encompass 240 ECTS credits, i.e. four years.

Departmental duties (e.g. teaching or administration) is normally not included in a scholarship-funded doctoral position but may occur to a limited extent as part of a specific agreement.

Read more about postgraduate research programmes here.

Qualifications

General admission requirements:

• a completed master degree or equivalent, or
• completed courses equivalent to at least 240 ECTS credits, of which at least 60 ECTS credits must be at the advanced level, or
• otherwise acquired equivalent knowledge in Sweden or elsewhere.

Specific admission requirements:

• the completion of course requirements of at least 30 ECTS credits at the postgraduate level, within the primary field of Political Science with a focus on crisis management or security or an equivalent area of study,
• a passing grade on an independent thesis (degree project) in Political Science with a focus on crisis management or security or an equivalent work of at least 15 ECTS credits at the postgraduate level,
• the completion of course requirements of an additional 90 ECTS credits in subjects relevant to the course.
• An upper-secondary/high school grade equivalent to English 6 constitutes another specific admission requirement. Applicants who do not have grades from a Swedish upper-secondary school require a certificate of eligibility equivalent to English 6 from an internationally accepted language test (the TOEFL, IELTS or Cambridge ESOL).

Assessment Criteria

The selection is based on the applicant’s ability to successfully pursue and complete the doctoral research and education. Special emphasis will be placed on the relevance of the research plan to the focus of the position.

More specific criteria for the selection process (in order of priority) are:

• the scientific quality of previous work (for example master- and bachelor thesis) and relevant education,
• the quality, feasibility and relevance of the thesis subject and the research plan, and
• other merits relevant to the programme, including demonstrated ability to execute tasks within given time frames.
• documented knowledge of Japanese foreign and security policy.
• knowledge of the Japanese language.

Applications must be submitted via the Swedish Defence University’s recruitment system by clicking on the ‘Apply’ link. Read more about the admissions process here.
Please label your application with reference number Ö 368/2026.

Applications must include:

1. Degree certificates and grades from previous first and second cycle studies confirming that you meet the general and specific entry requirements for admission.
2. Curriculum vitae (maximum of two pages).
3. Contact details for two references.
4. Sample of exam work at an advanced level or other relevant independent work of a comparable level of difficulty and scope (maximum three texts)
5. Draft research proposal (no longer than 1400 words excluding references), with relevance to the focus of the call.
6. A description of how your project fits into the research environment at the Department of Political Science. This description should clearly state which of the department’s broad research areas, that is crisis management or security, the applicant’s research proposal fits into. The letter should also discuss explicitly how the proposed project relates to the department’s research.
7. If the applicant is not a Swedish citizen a copy of the passport must be included.

The complete application must be received by the Swedish Defence University by midnight on the closing date, CET/CEST (Central European Time/Central European Summer Time).
Only complete applications will be considered. It is the applicant’s responsibility to ensure that the application is complete and complies with the requirements set out in the advertisement.

The application must be completed in a Scandinavian language or English. Certified translations must be provided for documents in other languages. Applicants may be invited for an interview in early autumn 2026. The aim is to complete the selection process well before the end of 2026. The doctoral programme is due to commence in the spring term of 2027 (January).

Funding for the PhD programme

The PhD position is funded by a scholarship and comprises four years of full-time study within the doctoral programme in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University. The funding consists of a tax free scholarship that covers the PhD student’s living expenses during their studies, in accordance with the terms set by the funding body. The scholarship amounts to approximately SEK 27,500 per month and is supplemented by insurance cover and funds for literature and research-related costs.

The doctoral student is admitted to third-cycle education and follows the programme structure comprising 240 higher education credits. There is no employment as a doctoral student under the Higher Education Ordinance during the scholarship period.

Departmental duties (e.g. teaching or administration) are not normally included in a scholarship-funded doctoral position, but may occur to a limited extent by special agreement.

Further information information regarding the doctoral position is available from:

• Linus Hagström, Professor and project lead, can answer questions about the project: linus.hagstrom@fhs.se
• Karl Gustafsson, Director of Studies, can answer questions about the PhD programme: karl.gustafsson@fhs.se

From Midsummer onwards, response times to enquiries regarding the PhD student opening may be longer than usual due to the summer holiday period. Enquiries received during this period may, in some cases, not be answered until after the vacation period has ended.

We look forward to receiving your application by 31 August 2026!

To get in contact with union representatives please send an e-mail to saco@fhs.se, OFR/O@fhs.se and OFR/S@fhs.se

In the event of any disagreement between the English and the Swedish versions of this announcement, the Swedish version takes precedence.

Please do not send offers of recruitment or advertising services.

Please allow me to draw your attention to the newly released book Beyond Untranslatable: Theorizing Postcolonial Translation (Routledge, August 2026). This is not exclusively a Japan studies book, but it explores postcolonial studies from the perspective of translation studies, with particular attention to Japan and Asian experiences. It has the following four essays directly related to Japan.

Jun’ichi Isomae “Translating the Untranslatable: Inheritance of the Postcolonial Studies”
Gouranga Charan Pradhan “Politics of Translation in East Asia: Natsume Sōseki and his idea of Untranslatability”
Naoki Sakai “How to Count Languages; How to Classify Humanity”
Katsuya Hirano “Settler-Colonial Translation: “Civilization” and the Ainu Voice”

In addition to the aforementioned essays, the volume features four excellent contributions by Talal Asad, Gayatri Spivak, Hent de Vries, and Wang Hui, followed by a lightly edited version of a roundtable discussion from a conference on postcolonial translation that we held several years ago.

This link offers a free preview of the entire Preface and a part of Asad’s chapter. For more information about the volume, please visit the link to the right.

The volume will be of particular interest to readers with a broader interest in Asian studies, especially those concerned with Japan, translation theory, and recent debates on the problem of untranslatability.

The price is prohibitively high and certainly not what one would call affordable, but for those who are able to do so, I would encourage you to consider purchasing a copy for your library.

I wanted to share the publication of my first book, Japan’s Modern Immigration Regime: Contradiction and Continuity, out now with Routledge in the Contemporary Japan Series.

The book primarily asks why Japan continues to deny having an official immigration policy while steadily expanding the pathways through which foreign workers arrive. Drawing on a wealth of primary policy documents from the 1980s and 1990s, I reconstruct the policymaking process behind the “1990 system” — the cluster of reforms that established side-door pathways for lower-skilled workers while simultaneously reaffirming the no-immigration principle. Using historical institutionalism, I then proceed to trace how that status quo has been layered and incrementally reformed through to the 2019 amendment and the present, closing with an assessment of how it may change from 2027.

If any of the above is of interest—or if you are a scholar of migration policy, Japanese politics, or Japan’s policymaking process and the actors that exert influence over it—this book may have something to offer you! More infos can be found to the right.

It is my pleasure to announce the publication Rethinking Transcultural Interactions in Visual Art (De Gruyter, 2026). This edited volume presents 21 chapters on transdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary visual art, and includes scholarly articles, conversations, and artworks. It features a broad outlook from different geographical positions and viewpoints, all of them contributing to explore transcultural interactions in multilayered and transdisciplinary perspectives.

The publication contains seven chapters on transcultural perspectives on Japan:

– Gunhild Ravn Borggreen, “Ecofeminism as Transcultural Approach: Else Alfelt and Daoism”

– Minna Valjakka, “Transcultural Confluences: Contemporary Art by Japanese-born Artists in Europe”

– Kimihiko Nakamura, “Beyond Ethnonational Art History: The Displaced Life and Evolving Art of Vladimir Tamari and Simko Ahmed in Postimperial Japan”

– Sabrina Meißner, “Ongaeshi: Curatorial Reflections on a Transcultural Experiment”

– Paride Stortini, “Silk Road Nostalgia: Cosmopolitanism in the Art of Hirayama Ikuo”

– Wei Sun, “Transcultural Dimensions of Timeless Beauty: On Okamoto Tarō’s Personal Vision of ‘World Art History’”

– Mette Højsgaard, “In Search of a Common Ground: Morita, Jorn, Alechinsky, and the Il Gesto Exhibition”

The book is open access, so share the link with friends, colleagues and students!

Please allow us to share with you our new co-authored article on Esperanto and radio broadcasting in the Japanese empire.

The article examines what happened when the universalizing aspirations of Esperanto encountered the new medium of radio in the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing in particular on a 1928 “Esperanto Evening” broadcast from colonial Taiwan, we explore both radio’s promise for transnational communication and the colonial and linguistic hierarchies that constrained it.

If you’re interested, you can temporarily read the article for free using the link to the right (valid until the end of October)

I would like to take this opportunity to share the recent publication of the edited volume Esoteric Practices and Alternative Rationalities: A Global Perspective, edited by Andreas Nehring, Raquel Romberg, and Dominik Müller and published by Brill in July 2026.

While the volume is global in scope, my chapter focuses on Japan:

“Protest Deities and the Logic of Images: Images as Epistemic Agents in Japanese Religion”

The chapter asks how religious images can be understood not simply as representations of belief, but as epistemic agents and media of social negotiation. Focusing on religious images commissioned and circulated by commoner associations in 19th-century Japan, it examines how images enabled communities to articulate claims, negotiate religious authority, and challenge established social boundaries. The argument is closely connected to the questions of image agency and visual vocality that I am presenting at this year’s EAJS conference.

Further information about the volume and its contents can be found on the Brill website

EAJS members may be interested in our new publication which provides a detailed refutation of J.M. Ramseyer’s recent attack on the Ainu people, an essay that includes numerous misrepresentations of Ainu, Japanese and indeed world history.

The article is open access in Frontiers in Human Dynamics.

Please allow me to draw your attention to the revised and expanded edition of “Japanische Geschichte” (History of Japan, in German), published by Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart, in May of this year. The book is the result of collaboration between seven specialists in Japanese studies who at one time during their carrier were members of the teaching staff at the Institute of Japanese Studies at the University of Bonn. The first edition, published in 2012, sold over 20,000 copies in eleven print runs, leading the publishing company to include the book in the “Reclam Sachbuch Premium” series.

The book emphasises different paradigms within the socio-economic and political structures of various periods in Japanese history. This means that so-called ‘small dates’ become important, and the chapters often overlap. We have also tried to incorporate the traditions of Ryukyu and Ainu to give an idea of ‘one country, two peoples and three cultures’ (Yamato-Nippon, Ryukyu and Ainu).

The authors are currently based in Bonn, Duisburg-Essen, Halle-Wittenberg and CEEJA/Colmar. Please find further information on them and the table of contents via the button to the right.

We hope you find the volume useful for your studies, covering over 30,000 years from the first appearance of Homo sapiens in the Southwest Islands to the first female prime minister, Takaichi Sanae.

With best compliments

Josef Kreiner (editor)

Emeritus, University of Bonn

I am happy to announce the publication of my new book, this time in Japanese:
『石原莞爾 ─信仰に導かれた戦略家』(筑摩書房) about General Ishiwara Kanji (1889-1949), mastermind of the Manchurian Incident of 1931. In this book, I place Ishiwara Kanji in the religious and intellectual context of the time, especially the emergence of modern Nichirenist Buddhism, science and technology, the futurist imagination, women and gender, utopianism, as well as debates on military strategy. I argue that the idea of “world unity” (sekai tōitsu) was central to his strategic, religious, and socio-political thought, and explore why this idea inspired many pre-war radical Japanese activists.
The book also introduces a range of figures that inspired Ishiwara, such as the socialist Christian Kagawa Toyohiko, the Nichirenist Satomi Kishio, the naval strategist Satō Tetsutarō, as well as more grassroots-level followers of Ishiwara’s movement — young men, farmers in Tohoku, women, and Koreans — and asks why they came to follow him, even far into the postwar period.
Thank you for reading, and I hope the book proves useful to others working on this period.

Clinton Godart
Tohoku University

I am thrilled to announce that the first special issue on Muslim social activities in Japan was published. You can download all the papers from the following link.

I am happy to announce the publication of my book “Serving the Gods in Modern Japan – Women in Contemporary Shinto” by De Gruyter Brill. Based on my dissertation thesis, this monograph examines the identity and agency of female Shinto priests, shrine assistants (miko) and palace ritualists (naishōten), grounded in data from fieldwork, interviews and autobiographical material. The book also provides thorough introductions to each position, the wider socio-political framework and an excursion into the role of the so-called “shrine wife”.

Link to the publication on De Gruyter Brill’s website: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/9783111701431/html

PS: There is a 40% sale until August 11 which applies to this book as well.

I am pleased to share with you my new article, Undoing gender, doing intimacy: Rewriting gendered scripts through rezu fūzoku recently published in Sexualities (SAGE Journals).

The article is open access, and I would be very happy to receive your feedback and comments.

Thank you very much for your attention, and I wish you all a pleasant and refreshing summer.

Best wishes,
Marta

Dr. Marta FANASCA
Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellow
Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna