Yohei Takahata received his B.A. from Hosei University in 2007 and his M.A. in International Studies from Waseda University in 2009. He joined the Japan Forum on International Relations (JFIR) in 2009 and has since held various research positions, including Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow. He currently serves as Operational Director / Executive Director and Distinguished Research Fellow at JFIR. Since 2023, he has also served as Senior Researcher at the Keio Research Institute at SFC. He is President of the Global Forum of Japan (GFJ), having previously served as Editor-in-Chief of e-Forum and Executive Secretary of GFJ.

His research focuses on international relations, Japanese foreign policy, Eurasian regional studies, and polar governance. His recent work examines how states and regions navigate relations with competing great powers and overlapping institutions amid the transformation of the international order. Building on his research on the survival strategies of “states caught between great powers,” he has developed the concept of a “partitioning international order” to analyze an emerging international system in which strategic competition, institutional fragmentation, and selective cooperation increasingly coexist.

More recently, he has examined the Arctic as a leading case of emerging patterns of international order, while also exploring new directions for Japanese diplomacy through Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and human security.

His major publications include Survival Strategies of States Caught Between Great Powers (co-edited with Yoko Hirose, Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2026); Topics in International Politics: Theory, History and Regions (co-author, 2023); and Japan’s Diplomacy in Eurasian Dynamism (co-author, Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2022).

His recent articles and commentaries include “The Partitioning International Order and the Arctic: A Precursor Model of Order Formation in the Era of Climate Change” (2026), “A Reformulation of New Theory of War in the Reiwa Era: A Compass for Japanese Foreign and Security Policy in a Multipolar Age” (2025), and “Japan’s Choice for ‘Eurasian Diplomacy'” (2022), as well as other publications on Japanese foreign and security policy, Eurasian affairs, WPS, and the changing international order.