About me

Karl Gustafsson is associate professor (docent) and senior lecturer in international relations at Stockholm University and senior research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. Karl’s research interests include security, power and the role of collective memory in International Relations. He is also interested in issues related to research design and how material generated on the internet can be used for IR research purposes. He has acquired several research grants, including a four-year grant from the Swedish Research Council for a project on apologies and recognition in international politics and another four-year grant from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation for a project on knowledge, memory and power on the Internet in East Asia. Karl has previously held a post-doc position at Lund University. He has been a visiting researcher at Tokyo University, Osaka University, Keio University (Tokyo), Academia Sinica in Taipei and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen.

In Sepember 2019, Karl was named a Top Peer Reviewer in the social sciences in the Global Peer Review Awards.

Karl’s peer-reviewed article ‘Memory Politics and Ontological Security in Sino-Japanese Relations’ won the Wang Gungwu Prize for best article published in Asian Studies Review in 2014 and his doctoral dissertation won the Stockholm University Association’s award for best dissertation (out of 66) in the Social Sciences in 2011. He has published peer-reviewed journal articles in European Journal of International Relations, International Politics, International Relations, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Journal of International Relations and Development, Survival, European Political Science, Memory Studies, Review of International Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, China: An International Journal, Global Affairs, The Pacific Review, Asian Perspective and Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift.

Recently published articles

Returning to the Roots of Ontological Security: Insights from the existentialist anxiety literature https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354066120927073

Understanding the persistence of history-related issues in Sino-Japanese relations: From memory to forgetting https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41311-020-00219-7

International reconciliation on the Internet? Ontological security, attribution and the construction of war memory narratives in Wikipedia https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0047117819864410

Narrative power: How storytelling shapes East Asian international politics https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09557571.2019.1623498

Long live pacifism! Narrative power and Japan’s pacifist model https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09557571.2019.1623174

Temporal othering, de-securitisation and apologies: Understanding Japanese security policy change https://rdcu.be/bflrT

Japan’s Pacifism Is Dead https://iiss.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2018.1542803#.XHzqSS0lBZ0

What is the point? Teaching graduate students how to construct political science research puzzles https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/S41304-017-0130-Y

Chinese collective memory on the Internet: Remembering the Great Famine in online encyclopaedias https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1750698017714836

Routinised recognition and anxiety: Understanding the deterioration in Sino-Japanese relations https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210515000546

Recognising recognition through thick and thin: Insights from Sino-Japanese relations https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0010836715610594

The struggle over the meaning of Chinese patriotism in the 21st century https://muse.jhu.edu/article/629022/summary