Politics

The U.S. rebalance to Asia continues to stir debate in South Korea. This debate has thus far been carried out via the discussion of the political elite on what the…

On Korea vol 7 provides great examples of the breadth and depth of issues centered on Korea and those that affect the U.S.-Korea alliance. These papers are original pieces written…

The Greater Tumen Initiative (GTI) is a regional cooperation mechanism among Republic of Korea, People’s Republic of China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Mongolia, and Russian Federation which is supported…

The North Korean government pursues illicit avenues to satiate the appetites of its top leaders, continue to develop Pyongyang’s weapons programs, obtain currency, and strengthen the elite’s allegiance to the…

There is a long tradition of considering North Korean leaders’ public appearances as a potential source of information on the regime’s priorities (see for example: Haggard, Herman, and Ryu; Pyo and Hur; Kim and Lee).  We now have ten full years of this data for Kim Jong-un through the South Korea Ministry of Unification portal,…

In the 2022 presidential election, the conservative opposition candidate Yoon Suk-yeol won the race with a 0.8% margin. During the campaign, Yoon received endorsements from five former senior military officers who had served in the Moon administration. They attributed the endorsement to “[their] faith in Yoon’s national security policies,” including his controversial remark that Seoul…

In December 2021, Yoon Suk-yeol’s campaign released a short candidate clip. Looking and sounding just like the candidate, the ‘man’ in the video says, “hello, it’s ‘AI Yoon Suk-yeol,’ are you surprised at how much I look like [him]?”  Since then, the campaign would go on to release short clips of the candidate responding to…

In a previous post, we asked the question of whether the Korean electorate was becoming more polarized, looking at the ideological differences across all citizens and those who identified most strongly with the two major parties. Our findings were that politics was becoming somewhat more polarized, but more sharply among partisans than the general public.…