Dr John Nilsson-Wright

John Nilsson-Wright is Korea Foundation Korea Fellow and Senior Research Fellow for Northeast Asia with the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House. He is also Senior University Lecturer in Japanese Politics and International Relations at Cambridge University and an official fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge.

He was head of the Chatham House Asia Programme from March 2014 until October 2016.

As Senior Fellow for Northeast Asia, his work focuses on security, political and economic relations between Japan, the Koreas, China and Taiwan.

In his newly established position as Korea Foundation Korea Fellow, he is responsible for a new five year initiative to expand the programme’s work on the Korean peninsula, that includes inter-Korean relations, the foreign policy and domestic politics of the Republic of Korea (ROK), and also ROK-Europe and ROK-UK relations. The Korea Fellowship is generously funded by a grant from the Korea Foundation and support from the Yeosijae Future Consensus Institute.

He has a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) from Christ Church, Oxford; an MA in International Relations and East Asian Studies from SAIS, Johns Hopkins; and a DPhil in International Relations from St Antony’s, Oxford.

He comments regularly for the global media on the international relations of East Asia, with particular reference to Japan and the Korean peninsula.

He has been a visiting fellow at Tohoku University, Yonsei University and Seoul National University, a member of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Agenda Council (GAC) on Korea and is a director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group.

He has testified on East Asian affairs to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, is a member of the editorial board of Global Asia and is a founding member of the European Japan Advanced Research Network (EJARN).