2004 Posts located
North Korea is a country easy to approach emotionally. For anyone with even a little twinge of conscience toward human rights, it evokes disgust. For many in South Korea, who…
“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies.” The words of the 19thcentury British statesman Lord Palmerstone seem to resonate in 21st-century Asia. For example, China and…
Since Kevin Rudd and the Australian Labor Party ended Prime Minister John Howard’s 11 1/2 years in office in late 2007, each new government in Canberra has faced a very…
China and India together account for one-third of humanity. Both were advanced civilizations when Europe was in the Dark Ages. Until the 19th century, they constituted the world’s largest economies.…
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…
This essay was part of a contest jointly organized by the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies and the Institute for Korean Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. The contest invited students to analyze a South Korean policy challenge and propose evidence-based solutions. The winning entries are published on KEI’s blog. South Korea’s healthcare system,…
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called to congratulate Donald Trump shortly after the US presidential election, telling the president-elect that the first Trump administration had set the foundation for US-Korea-Japan trilateral cooperation. Yoon later told the press he expected cooperation “would proceed well even during the [second] Trump administration.” Although some of the personnel…
The debate over sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) highlights the need and desire for nations to develop their own AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), tailored to their unique cultural and historical contexts. This idea has gained traction in Seoul, where US LLMs like ChatGPT have often fallen short in addressing questions that require a…
Contributors (last name alphabetical): Je Heon (James) Kim, Joo Young Kim This timeline is a second part of a series that covers “major events” in the aftermath of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law on December 3, 2024. This part covers the events from Prime Minister Han Duck-soo’s assumption of the…