Politics

President Lee Myung-bak won a landslide victory in 2007. His popularity before the election was obvious, and it came as a surprise to almost no one that he won by…

Korea and Japan are two key allies of the United States in East Asia. These two countries are “window models” of postwar democratization and economic advancement in a free world.…

The world can only hope the recent U.S.-North Korean bilateral discussions will revive the six-power talks and lead to Pyongyang’s renunciation of its nuclear weapons ambitions. Hope, however, is not…

In less than a year, the fate of the six-party talks has swung around from the lowest ebb when North Korea conducted its nuclear test to the current high point…

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…