Astrid Hedin

Astrid Hedin is a Swedish political scientist, and was a virtual visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. She authored the chapter ”Communist State Administrative Structures” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia (August 31, 2021). Currently, she writes on the East German administrative system for travel controls, as a case of communist state capacity in the cold war. She has also written on the propelling impact of the communist example on West European social policy reforms during the cold war, including shifts in the Swedish welfare state model during the early 1970s. Hedin was a postdoc of the Swedish Research Council, an Anna Lindh fellow of the Stanford University Europe Center, and a Sabbatical Scholar of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. She is an associate professor of political science and public administration at Malmo University, Sweden.