CANZPS Visiting Scholar Appointed as New Zealand’s Ambassador to Sweden

CANZPS congratulates Dr Jon Johansson on his appointment as New Zealand’s Ambassador to Sweden. Foreign Minister Winston Peters announced the appointment on September 7, 2026. Johansson came to Georgetown in the fall of 2009 as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and spent that semester as a visiting scholar with the Center. He was then one of New Zealand’s most recognizable analysts of political leadership, and his time in Washington coincided with the first year of the Obama administration, a subject he wrote about in the years that followed.

Johansson taught comparative politics at Victoria University of Wellington for seventeen years, where he also earned his doctorate with a thesis on political leadership in New Zealand. He wrote or co-wrote six books, among them Two Titans: Muldoon, Lange and Leadership and The Politics of Possibility. He left the university in 2017 to serve as chief of staff to Winston Peters, and he returned in 2023 as senior specialist adviser on foreign affairs, joining the Minister’s engagements with counterparts around the world.

Congratulations, Jon. We wish you every success in Stockholm and hope you will visit the Center again when your duties bring you back to Washington.