Asia

The states of Southeast Asia are on the front lines of competition not only in regard to the balance of military and political power, as analyzed in Section I, but…

North Korea and Russia are seen as posing an increasingly dangerous military threat as we enter 2015, and the responses of other states to them are widely perceived as realist…

Over the past sixty years, the two Koreas have embarked on completely different paths in almost every respect. One developed into a successful example of democracy with remarkable economic growth,…

Moving from the powerful and abstract construct of ethnic homogeneity as bearing the promise for unification, this chapter instead considers family unity, facilitated by the quotidian and ubiquitous tools of…

June 25, 2020 marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. The conflict on the Korean Peninsula has been going on for so long that we sometimes…

2020 is starting off dramatically with the escalation of tensions in the Middle East – The world held its breath while the United States and Iran exchanged both blows and…

While it is frustrating to see North Korean projectiles flying out to sea and Pyongyang’s erratic, unpredictable reactions in negotiations, we cannot forget where things stood in 2017 – the…

30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people’s aspiration to establish a pluralistic liberal democracy appears to be under scrutiny around the world – anti-immigration policies dominate political…

By Troy Stangarone After more than a year of heightened tensions over the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island a proposed gas pipeline from Russia to South Korea through North Korea is potentially changing the factors on the ground.  Ever since Kim Jong-Il and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed in principal…

By Sarah K. Yun On Tuesday, September 20, KEI hosted a discussion on China’s changing relations with the two Koreas as part of a book launch for the 2011 edition of Korea’s Economy.  The event featured two of the book’s authors, Forbes.com columnist Gordon Chang and Senior Congressional Research Service Analyst Dick Nanto. While both authors discussed…

The September 15 KEI-Woodrow Wilson Center program on my trip to North Korea with Charles Armstrong (Columbia University) and James Person (Wilson Center) received much Korean media attention.  The program showed over a hundred photos from the group's 4000-5000 pictures taken of daily life in Pyongyang and other citiesin North Korea. Below are links to…

On June 8 - 18, KEI Vice President, Abraham Kim, visited North Korea with a group of American Asia experts.  The purpose of the trip was to analyze the efficacy of sanctions, conditions in the cities/countryside, the integration of technology, the prevalance of cell phones and political conditions.  The slide presentation were shown at the GRS Annual Conference in…