Chris Hughes is Professor of International Politics and Japanese Studies in PAIS, as well as a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation.  Previoiusly he was Research Associate at the Institute for Peace Science, Hiroshima University (IPSHU).  From 2000-2001 he was Visiting Associate Professor, and in 2006 he held the Asahi Shimbun Visiting chair of mass Media and Politics, both at the Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo.  He holds degrees from the Universities of Oxford (BA and MA), Rochester (MA), and Sheffield (MA and PhD).  He is an honorary Research Associate at IPSHU, and has been a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and Visiting Scholar at the East Asia Institute, the Free University of Berlin.  In 2009-2010 he was the Edwin O Reischauer Visiting Professor of Japanese Studies at the Department of Government, Harvard University, and is currently an Associate in Research at Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. Research Scholarships have been received from the Japanese Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, the European Union, the British Council, and the British Academy.

His research interests include Japanese foreign and security policy; Japanese international political economy; regionalism in East Asia; Japanese radicalism and terrorism; post-Cold War traditional and non-traditional security policy, and North Korea's external political and economic relations.

Currently Professor Hughes is working on projects which examine Japan's response to issues of globalisation and governance; the intersection of globalisation and security, with particular reference to the Asia-Pacific region;  the impact on regional and global security of missile defence; and the future of multilateral and bilateral security and trading arrangements in the Asia-Pacific.