2007 Posts located
After more than two years of negotiation, false starts, and delay, Korea announced in April its intention to fully open its market to imports of U.S. beef, subject to finalization…
For Korea watchers—and particularly for those of us who worked closely on events associated with President Lee’s visit to Washington—April was a very rewarding month. After multiple protocol meetings, site…
As reported in the previous issue of Korea Insight (“The Bulldozer Moves In: Lee Myung-bak is Inaugurated as the Republic of Korea’s President”), President Lee moved to streamline the government…
On February 25, Lee Myung-bak was sworn in as the President of the Republic of Korea. In front of a crowd of some 60,000 gathered, including U.S. Secretary of State…
Although it is happening more rapidly in South Korea, an aging society is a common feature in post-industrial societies around the world. With the number of retirees growing and the…
In March, Seoul suffered from the worst air pollution on record. Enough that the South Korean government has officially designated the problem as a "social disaster." But what is causing…
Over the past few years, Korea and Koreans have experienced incredible political, social, and diplomatic shifts. It is hard keeping up with all these new developments as a Korea Watcher,…
Even before the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, foreign policy practitioners and observers were talking about the difficulties of sequencing international sanctions relief for North Korea…
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…