2004 Posts located
Korea is on the front line between two contrasting proposals for regionalism based on economic integration. On the one side is the Chinese effort to establish an exclusive economic bloc…
Changes in political leadership are often associated with readjustments or reversals of policy, the impact of which can be both wide-ranging in scope and long-lasting in duration. Foreign policy, which…
The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il on December 17, 2011 has prematurely set in motion the leadership changes that were anticipated in 2012. To be sure, a leadership…
The year 2011 closed with several symbolic events in predicting Japan’s relations with the Korean peninsula. When President Lee Myung-bak held summit talks with Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko on December…
Spanning nearly a century and multiple generations, Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel Pachinko tells the story of a Korean family struggling to find their place in Japan before, during, and after…
A woman in hanbok joyfully rises above Mt. Baekdu, arms raised, in a art piece entitled Umma Rises: Towards Global Peace. This is just one of many recent art pieces…
A group of women gossiping about the new neighbor. A feisty middle schooler using a homemade drone to prank his classmates. A young military officer seeking information from his past.…
With President Donald Trump finishing up his first official trip to Asia, including a stop in South Korea last week, this week's episode of Korean Kontext asks: what do South…
There is ample public opinion data suggesting a link between U.S. attitudes on trade and trade partners. Recent poll results show that Americans favor trade with countries like China less than with allies like South Korea and Japan. One consideration appears to be how Americans think about trade within the broader context of national security.…
The United States and South Korea scored nearly identical GDP results in the first quarter of 2025 according to newly updated but still preliminary data. Both showed slightly negative change from the fourth quarter of 2024; the United States declining at a negative 0.2 percent rate and South Korea at a negative 0.8 percent rate,…
After months of political uncertainty, South Korea has a new president. Lee Jae-myung, the former mayor of a wealthy Seoul satellite city who leveraged that experience into a governorship of the country’s most populous province and chairmanship of the Democratic Party (DP), won a decisive 49.4-percent victory over the ruling party’s leading candidate. Lee’s victory…
South Korea’s political vacuum has been filled by a politician with a mandate to lead but who faces innumerable simultaneous and overlapping domestic and international challenges. Democratic Party candidate Lee Jae-myung won South Korea’s snap election on June 3, 2025, in a race that was never seriously in doubt. Buoyed by a sizable majority in…