Research areas

August Danielson's research focuses on European foreign and security policy, with particular attention to diplomatic practices within international organisations and EU–NATO relations. He is interested in the unwritten rules that guide diplomatic conduct and how diplomats learn and reproduce them through their everyday work. His research examines how these practices shape relations between states and the possibilities for collective action. He also studies aesthetics and visuality in international politics, including how diplomatic protocol and material settings communicate status and hierarchies. His theoretical and methodological interests centre on how researchers can study forms of knowledge that practitioners of international politics understand tacitly or take for granted.

Current research

Danielson is part of the three-year research project Prepared Together? NATO–EU Cooperation and Sweden’s Societal Security, funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project examines how NATO and the EU cooperate in practice on critical infrastructure protection, hybrid threats and emergency response, and what this means for Sweden’s preparedness and societal resilience. It investigates how the two organisations’ strategic priorities and institutional arrangements shape cooperation, with particular attention to trust and working practices at the operational level. The project also examines how geopolitical tensions, including strains in transatlantic relations, affect their ability to work together.

His ongoing work on EU foreign policy examines how political disagreements are managed and transformed as issues move through different levels of decision-making. This includes questions about how organisational hierarchies shape the scope for political contestation, and how diplomats assess and respond to challenges to established norms of cooperation, including contested uses of the veto.

In his research on visual diplomacy, Danielson investigates how Sweden’s diplomatic settings and symbolism express different understandings of national identity. He examines how commitments to equality and modernity coexist with attachments to monarchy and historical prestige. This work also explores how photographs can be used in interviews to access diplomats’ often unspoken understandings of these settings.

Bio

Danielson is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and an Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Linköping University and as a desk officer at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He received his PhD in Political Science from Uppsala University in 2023.