Ryan Hartley is a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at Tohoku University’s School of Law in Japan.

His research focuses on Japan’s foreign policy and international politico-economic relations with Southeast Asia, in particular the Mekong region and its constituent countries and sub-regions. Dividing the year between Japan and the Mekong, he spends his time travelling around the region to meet with and interview Japanese elites operating there.

After completing a double-doctorate with Sheffield University’s School of East Asian Studies and Tohoku University’s School of Law, he remains at Tohoku University as a post-doctoral fellow where he is currently focusing on Japan’s relations with Burma/Myanmar and the further consolidation and challenges of the Mekong sub-regional project.

Broader interests include attempting to find ways of translating Critical Political Economy into practical taxonomic analyses of international affairs; power and the nightclubbing industry; and exploring regionalism/regionalisation as the contemporary manifestation of globalisation.