Korea, South

In early July, the United States and South Korea announced that they had come to an agreement to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system near the city…

With Election 2016 well underway, KEI's very own Phil Eskeland has been closely following how both the Republican and Democratic parties have been talking about foreign policy and Asia. He…

In the late 1930s, nearly 200,000 ethnic Koreans were forcibly removed from the Soviet Far East, packed into trains and sent to Central Asia. More than 70 years later, their…

From nuclear power in the United Arab Emirates to new free trade agreement negotiations opening with Israel, to South Korean President Park Geun Hye's visit to Iran, 2016 seems to be…

In the last two posts on Korea and the war in Ukraine, I showed that Moon administration moved relatively quickly to join the international sanctions regime and was rewarded by inclusion on Russia’s  "unfriendly nations" list. I also argued that the costs of standing on international legal principle were softened by the fact that the…

A recent hearing by the Congressional Human Rights Commission expressed hopes for a breakthrough in South Korea’s refugee policies under the Yoon administration. Despite its growing international status and economic power, the country retains an extraordinarily low refugee acceptance rate of 1.5%. South Korea’s refugee policies have been so far shaped by political expedience, not…

Wavve, a South Korean streaming service, plans to release two LGBTQ dating shows in July 2022. While dating and romance reality programs are popular in South Korea, non-heterosexual couples have not been represented in programs developed by mass broadcast studios. Smaller, independent media companies like Wavve on the other hand are more responsive to these…

South Korea’s political parties appear to be renewing their focus on identifying key voting blocs. The Democratic Party’s (DP) promotion and removal of 26-year-old women’s rights activist Park Ji-Hyun may reflect this effort in action. However, the identity of the leader still plays an outsized role while bottom-up demands often go unaddressed. 2022 marked the…

Please join KEI and KIEP for a discussion about the first 10 years of KORUS and the future of the U.S.-Korea economic relationship.