2004 Posts located
North Korea has recently shown signs of rapprochement with the outside world by agreeing to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula at the six-party talks. The changing dynamics of the…
Data from 2004 show the grain harvest in North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; DPRK) consisted of a bit more than 4.4 million tons. A nationwide campaign was announced…
A controversy has arisen over entrenched regionalism in Korean politics and its resolution. There are basically two opposing views: One is the top-down institutional approach that emphasizes reforms in the…
Social change may be evolutionary or revolutionary or, at times, both. Similarly, administrations may be caught up in and attempt to manage change, or institute it, or both. Although there…
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…
The Ukraine accounts for 11.8% of the world’s wheat market and has long been known as the “breadbasket of Europe.” However, the potential outbreak of conflict between Russia and the Ukraine has implications for Ukraine’s wheat trade with all nations, including South Korea. The Ukraine is the 2nd largest exporter of wheat to South Korea,…
North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, the country’s parliament, adopted the government budget for the new year at its session February 6-7. The budget law was approved with a pledge to develop the economy and improve the people’s wellbeing despite the “persevering struggle” against international sanctions and the COVID pandemic. A particularly noteworthy aspect of the…
This post was revised on August 21 , 2023 to reflect additional research by the authors. Additional analysis can be found in authors' article Political Polarization in Korea. Korea’s democracy is clearly a success story. Along with Taiwan, it is one of the few Asian countries that transitioned to democratic rule in the 1980s and…
One of the most prominent policy and social problems plaguing the Republic of Korea today is a declining birth rate. The nation fell below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 in 1983 and rested at 0.84 at the end of 2020. This sustained decline has negative implications for economic growth in the long run as…