Who is Heikki?

I am a 63-year-old social scientist and civic and political activist. I did my matriculation exam in Kuopio and studied economics, politics and philosophy in Turku, where I received my PhD for Critical Realism and World Politics in 1993 (having spent one year also at the University of Kent at Canterbury in preparing it).

Today I am a Professor of World Politics (Global Political Economy) in Helsinki and a Docent at the Universities of Lapland and Turku. I have worked as a full professor also at the Nottingham Trent University, UK (1998-2003); at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia (2007-10); and as a visiting professor or fellow at the Aberystwyth University in Wales (2009-11); Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto (2012); University of Cambridge (2019); and Bielefeld University (2024). In addition, I am a Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters (2018-) and Life Member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge (2020-). I am also a founding member of the Helsinki Centre for Global Political Economy (Helsinki-GPE), which was established in 2020, and served as the Vice Chair of the EuroMemo network for 2021-25.

Over the years, I have participated in many movements and organisations. In the late 1980s, I was involved for instance in the endorsement of the Green Party, but did not become a formal member and, over time, grew increasingly disillusioned about the Green Party line of economic policy. In the early 1990s, I took part in founding Radical Democracy, which was subsequently, by the end of the decade, transformed into NIGD (Network Institute for Global Democratisation ), one of the founding organisations of the International Council of the World Social Forum, amongst other things. I was also involved in the inaugural meeting of International Attac in Paris in December 1998. I have served as the chair of Attac Finland in three occasions, including in 2016.

In Spring 2014, I was running for the European Parliament, getting 3628 votes (no:6 on the Left Alliance list, and no:60 on the national list). In Spring 2015, I stood as a candidate for the Finnish Parliament, receiving 1,608 votes in the Helsinki district.

Currently, while a member and supporter of the movement-party DiEM25, I am developing and advocating the idea of world political party. Since Winter 2022, I have been involved in global scholar-activism also as an Associate Fellow of the Tellus Institute. Now in 2026, I am also involved in launching a new process: the Vienna Forum on the Cooperative World System.

For a list of academic publications and short CV, please see the University of Helsinki TUHAT-page. For a 92-pages long interview published in 2023 in Journal of Critical Realism covering all the main activities, themes, and works of my academic career, see Part 1 (since 1980s to 2006) and Part 2 (since global financial crisis).