2004 Posts located
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…
In this episode of Korean Kontext, I have the opportunity to speak with Richard V. Allen, who, in the weeks preceding his official instatement as National Security Advisor to President-elect…
In this episode we hear from author Mike Kim, who speaks with Korean Kontext about his experiences living and working with North Korean refugees on the China-North Korea border. Mike…
We bring the Korean Kontext studio to the U.S. Department of State to speak with Kathleen Stephens, current U.S. Ambassador to South Korea. Ambassador Stephens shares with us her personal…
In this episode we speak with Ambassador John Everard, who served as Ambassador of Great Britain to North Korea from 2006-2008. Ambassador Everard experienced firsthand life as one of only…
By Joy Kim South Korea is currently the world’s 15th largest economy. This fact strikes many as amazing given that Korea’s Gross National Product (GNP) per capita increased by more than 243 times over the span of 50 years, from $82 in 1961 to $20,000 in 2006. The baby boom generation who were born in…
By Nicholas Hamisevicz The surprise news to start the week is that Vice Marshall Ri Yong Ho, chief of the general staff of North Korea’s army as well as a member of the Political Bureau and the Central Military Commission, was relieved of all his positions due to “illness.” During the last year of Kim…
By Chad 0'Carroll Chosun Ilbo columnist Kim Dae-joong wrote yesterday that because South Korea is surrounded by three nuclear weapons countries (DPRK, China and Russia), it should consider acquiring nuclear weapons. He argued that new laws passed in Japan meant that Tokyo “wants to develop nuclear weapons”, leaving the ROK as the only country in…
By Elizabeth Hervey Stephen In a recent piece in the Asia Sentinel, which was re-posted in The Irrawaddy, Philip Bowring correctly noted that South Korea is facing a population crisis with sustained low fertility in the range of 1.2 children per woman. As one solution to the birth dearth, he proposes looking toward reunification with North…