Alastair Iain Johnston

Alastair Iain Johnston (PhD University of Michigan, 1993) is the Gov. James Albert Noe and Linda Noe Laine Professor of China in World Affairs in the Government Department at Harvard University. He has written on strategic culture, socialization theory, and identity and foreign policy, mostly with application to the study of East Asian international relations and China's international relations. Recently he has been working on how perceptions of identity difference and racialization may drive security dilemmas. Johnston is the author of Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton 1995) and Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980-2000 (Princeton University Press, 2008), and is co-editor of Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (Routledge 1999), New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy (Stanford 2006), Crafting Cooperation: Regional Institutions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge 2007), Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists (Cambridge 2009), and Perception and Misperception in American and Chinese Views of the Other (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 2015). He has published in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Perspectives on Politics, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, The China Quarterly, among other journals and edited volumes. From 2007-2024 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control.