Politics

KEI’s 2021 Report on American Attitudes Toward the Korean Peninsula summarizes results from a survey commissioned by KEI and conducted by YouGov on August 30th to September 7th, 2021. The…

How has the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped or influenced China’s geopolitical outlook and its grand strategy for the years to come? This is a question that will determine China’s relationship with…

The COVID-19 pandemic poses significant geopolitical challenges and presents opportunities for the United States in the Indo-Pacific. The Trump administration bungled the crisis, damaging the U.S.’s standing as a paragon…

The national identity gap between China and the United States has become increasingly apparent. Under Xi Jinping, China has sought to reclaim its historical greatness and proclaimed itself to be…

A recent hearing by the Congressional Human Rights Commission expressed hopes for a breakthrough in South Korea’s refugee policies under the Yoon administration. Despite its growing international status and economic power, the country retains an extraordinarily low refugee acceptance rate of 1.5%. South Korea’s refugee policies have been so far shaped by political expedience, not…

South Korea’s political parties appear to be renewing their focus on identifying key voting blocs. The Democratic Party’s (DP) promotion and removal of 26-year-old women’s rights activist Park Ji-Hyun may reflect this effort in action. However, the identity of the leader still plays an outsized role while bottom-up demands often go unaddressed. 2022 marked the…

Spring recently became the season of presidential elections in South Korea after Park Geun-hye’s impeachment in 2017 forced elections to be moved up from December. But throughout the country’s twentieth-century political history, spring was a time for another political ritual: democracy protests. In particular, two dates stand above the rest in significance: April 19 and…

In this series, S. Nathan Park examined the much-caricatured South Korean liberal foreign policy outlook. Far from being “anti-American” and “pro-Pyongyang,” Seoul’s liberal administrations have responded forcefully against provocations from the North and bolstered the alliance with the United States through military deployments abroad and a bilateral free trade agreement. Reflecting their reading of Korea’s…