Asia

This paper provides an analytical assessment of the implications for North and South Korea of recent changes in the Chinese-Russian and U.S.-Japanese security relationships.The evolution of these two security relationships…

During the past few years, the United States has begun three important initiatives that alter its defense commitment to South Korea (Republic of Korea [ROK]). First, Washington started to decrease…

In October 2006, Kim Jong-il’s North Korea again seized international attention. With its claimed underground nuclear test, Pyongyang upped the ante in its confrontation with the United States and the…

2018 has been an incredibly eventful year for both the Koreas and the U.S.-Korea relationship: from North Korea’s participation in the Winter Olympics at the start of the year to…

Interest in the Korean peninsula is generally very narrow in the United States – it tends to be focused on North Korea and security issues, particularly the country's ballistic and…

Last Friday, on November 30, 2018, President George H.W. Bush passed away. In the days that followed, there were many discussions in the foreign policy community about the late president's…

What does a unified Korea look like? Beyond the question of whether the government of this new country will be a unitary or federal one, how will the people –…

By Jenna Gibson Seventy hours down, three hundred to go. The South Korean National Assembly is currently in the middle of its first filibuster in decades, already smashing the world record for longest filibuster and still going strong. Members of Korea’s opposition parties banded together on February 23 to start the filibuster in an attempt…

KEI Communications Director Jenna Gibson, host of Korean Kontext, recently interviewed Justice Michael Kirby who led the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea. The following is a partial transcript of that conversation. The rest of the conversation can be found at http://keia.podbean.com/. Jenna Gibson: It’s now been two years since…

By Mark Tokola Since the United Nations’ “Situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (usually shorthanded to “COI” for commission of inquiry report) came out in September 2015, commentators have sometimes hypothesized that one of its positive effects could be that North Korean prison officials might moderate some of their brutality…

By Troy Stangarone With the global economy slowing and Korean merchandise exports and imports down in 2015 we recently looked at how U.S.-Korea trade compared to Korean trade in general and U.S. trade more broadly. However, Korea has one of the world’s most expansive network of free trade agreements. In this post we explore how…