Börje Ljunggren has a lifelong commitment to human rights behind him. Since 2006 he has been a member of RWI’s Board of Trustees. We met with him to talk about responsibilities, international adventures, and the Chinese dream.
Ljunggren came to Lund in the early 1960’s to study social sciences. “I already then had an international interest, the Vietnam War marked many of my generation,” he says.
After he graduated, he continued studying Political Science in the United States. “I got the opportunity to do ‘area studies’ of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, and when I returned to Sweden I started working at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). I worked with Asia, as my responsibility became my destiny and a life-long commitment,” Ljunggren says.
Ljunggren’s academic interest also led to the opportunity for him to spend a year at Harvard University to finish a doctoral thesis on the reform process in Indochina, with a focus on Vietnam. “Reform Issues became my main interest, and some years later I became ambassador in Vietnam and got to combine theory and practice, which I found very exciting,” he says.
Then followed work focused on Asia at the Foreign Ministry in Sweden, an Ambassador job in China 2002-2006 and, in recent years, work and writings with special focus on China. Last spring, Ljunggren’s second book about China came out, “The Chinese Dream – challenges for China and the world.”
“The adventure continues, and human rights remain central,” he says.
During a period in the late 1980s, Ljunggren was in Sida’s executive group responsible for human rights and was organizing a major conference where all lawyers in Sweden were invited to engage in international human rights work. “That was the first time I met Professor Göran Melander, who raised the question of support from Sida to RWI,” Ljunggren says. Soon this became a reality, and Sida still accounts for the major part of RWI’s budget.
“Over the years I have worked in three countries – Laos, Vietnam and China – all with embossed Leninist one-party systems. That has made human rights a central importance to me. And it was when I returned from China in 2006 that I was invited to join the RWI board,” Ljunggren says.
“The knowledge about human rights across the world is much greater today than a few decades ago, but the development is far from unambiguously positive. Much work remains, and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute continues to have an important role to play,” Ljunggren says.