Asia

Growing up as a Korean-American, I was often asked, “Where are you from?” This question became a kind of standard line that opened or punctuated many first encounters. Sometimes, the…

In less than a year, the fate of the six-party talks has swung around from the lowest ebb when North Korea conducted its nuclear test to the current high point…

It may be premature right now to talk about post–free trade agreement (FTA) relations between the United States and Korea. The U.S.-Korea FTA still has some way to go before…

The past decade in the Korea-U.S. alliance relationship has not been smooth. Since the late 1990s, Koreans have been raising issues related to the past or current actions of the…

Growing up in Tennessee and Alabama, Dr. David Oh never imagined he would one day be leading a mission to explore a metallic asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. But…

In 2017, U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) will complete the move of nearly all troops and support staff from Yongsan Garrison in Seoul to Camp Humphreys, 50 miles south of the…

For the first Korean Kontext podcast of 2017, five members of the KEI staff sat down with host Jenna Gibson for a chat about the volitility of 2016 and what…

The last several rounds of UN sanctions against the DPRK have been called the "strongest ever," and the new sanctions passed on November 30 are no different. There are some…

By Nicholas Hamisevicz For the first visit by the leader of the Catholic Church to Korea in 25 years, there were numerous expectations for a variety of issues. Pope Francis’ popularity and different leadership style brought about the possibility that concerns regarding the difficulties of inter-Korean relations, a Korean society distraught over a tragedy and…

By Lisa Ji Computer science majors may have a larger role to play in promoting socio-political changes in North Korea than one may suspect. On August 2nd, computer programmers and human rights advocates gathered together in San Francisco, to discover new ways of providing information to and from the highly reclusive country, North Korea. In…

By Nicholas Hamisevicz Similar to previous months, inter-Korean relations remained tense, especially in the West Sea. South Korea claimed North Korea was renting out fishing grounds in the West Sea to Chinese fisherman, who then began to encroach beyond the Northern Limit Line (NLL) into South Korean territorial waters. Moreover, a South Korean military drill…

By Clare Hubbard While atrocious human rights violations continue in North Korea, the South Korean public remains focused on their daily lives. A prolonged separation and ideological division on the Korean peninsula has gradually produced two different peoples and the younger generations of South Koreans are losing more and more interest in their North Korean…