South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has made strengthening the alliance relationship with the United States a key part of his foreign policy positions. At the same time, South Korea continues to maintain a decent relationship with China, pursuing a precarious position to decide its role in the context of the growing US–China rivalry. The US has made the trilateral cooperation and close coordination among the US, South Korea, and Japan the centerpiece of its Indo-Pacific strategy, while South Korea and Japan have maintained their contentious relationship. The articles in this special issue address the challenges that South Korea faces today, focusing on two major themes in the contemporary era: first, how the US–China rivalry and power competition affect South Korea’s security and economic foreign policies, and second, how the bilateral tensions between South Korea and Japan affect regional security and alliance capabilities.

With a security alliance with the United States and deep economic relations with China, South Korea faces complex foreign policy choices amid US–China competition. A critical decision is whether to join the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), a US-led grouping widely viewed as aiming to counter China in the Indo-Pacific. The choice depends on its domestic politics as much as its relationships with both superpowers. Using a public opinion survey with a priming experiment, we investigate South Korean citizens’ preferences regarding the Quad. We find that, without additional information, nearly half of the respondents supported joining the Quad. Yet neither mentioning the security benefits of joining the Quad nor mentioning the potential economic costs associated with Chinese retaliation for joining the Quad changed their level of support. Nor did we detect any treatment heterogeneity. Beyond the experiment, we find that threat perceptions and party affiliation are strongly correlated with respondents’ preferences.

In this study, we examine South Korea's foreign policy strategy in the context of the increasing strategic rivalry between the United States and China. We ask why South Korea is relatively hesitant to actively balance against China, especially compared to other US allies like Japan. We present a theory that examines how the lack of territorial and maritime disputes between a US ally and China affects an ally's foreign policy strategy in the US–China rivalry, to explain the case of South Korea. In general, when a US ally is engaged in an ongoing, active territorial and/or maritime dispute with China, we expect the US ally to more actively help the US balance against China. Because bilateral relations between the US ally and China are already tense, the US ally can afford to side with the US without being as vulnerable to Chinese retaliation. On the other hand, when a US ally has no ongoing, active territorial and/or maritime dispute with China, the US ally is expected to be more cautious in siding with the US against China because doing so can provoke China to retaliate in ways more costly than if they already had ongoing disputes. We find that without ongoing, active disputes with China, South Korea is more vulnerable to retaliation by China through critical issues like North Korea and trade. As a result, it is difficult for South Korea to side with the US in actively balancing against China.

South Korea and Japan have maintained tense bilateral relations over their unresolved historical and territorial disputes for decades. The US has repeatedly called for improved relations between South Korea and Japan and underlined the importance of US–South Korea–Japan trilateral relations to address North Korean threats and regional security challenges. Would we, then, expect the US to play a role in helping to mediate South Korea–Japan problems? If so, under what conditions and to what extent would the US get involved in South Korea–Japan disputes? If not, what makes the US hesitate to do so? We argue that US involvement in South Korea–Japan bilateral relations depends on the degree to which the US perceives the tensions as costly and risky for US national security interests. With an issues-based analysis, a granular examination of South Korea–Japan trade disputes and the spat over the GSOMIA in 2019, and qualitative interviews with former US government and military officials, we find that the US is more likely to involve itself in South Korea–Japan relations and more likely to use its leverage as a major power with its allies when it perceives significant risks to its capabilities to address security challenges, primarily those posed by North Korea.

This essay suggests that the renewed politicization and militarization of the maritime sphere is a product of the increasing need to re-legitimise the current state-based political order. Order can be understood as particular configurations of boundaries as they define political communities through various practices of inclusion and exclusion: East Asian seas have become one of the final frontiers for sustaining national developmental projects, they mark the boundaries between the Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean nation-states, and are also borderlands in the global order as they separate ‘East’ from ‘West’ and thereby differentiate the ‘civilized’ self from the ‘barbarian’ other.

This article examines the new sphere of transnational activism in the Japanese environmental movement of the 1970s. What was previously a domestic phenomenon of local mobilizations against pollution and development expanded into a new array of transnational initiatives, many with a specific focus on pollution in the countries of East Asia. The article focuses on a transnational movement involving South Korean and Japanese activists to stop the relocation of a polluting mercurochrome plant from Japan to South Korea. I argue that such transnational involvement had a significant impact on activist identity. Within the framework of the Japanese nation, activists could seamlessly position themselves as victims of the state and industry. But transnational involvement upset this schematic by exposing their complicity in the transgressions of Japanese industry abroad. The result, I argue, was a more self-reflexive activist identity and the development of a kind of grassroots regional consciousness within some Japanese civic movements throughout the 1970s.

For many people outside the South Korean popular music (K-pop) world, the December 2017 death of pop star Kim Jonghyun was a sad, but abstract event. Jonghyun, and dozens more like him, is a type of Korean celebrity known as an “idol.” In addition to being popular within Korea, idols are the public face of K-pop, which has become a worldwide phenomenon. This has made idols into incarnations of Korea and Korean culture, and brought the public's powerful disciplining gaze to bear on these young performers. In this paper, we explore how characteristics of life in contemporary Korea—including a high suicide rate, and intense pressures in education and employment—compound with idols' years of intense training in singing and dancing without adequate attention to physical, much less mental, health. Although this is the first incident of an A-list K-pop idol committing suicide, we propose that the nature of contemporary Korean celebrity, together with specific factors defining the lives of Korean youth, create an environment where suicide may become even more prevalent, escalating Korea's suicide rate, which is already among the world's highest. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of Jonghyun's suicide on K-pop fans.

On 3 December 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, the first time such an order had been given since the country democratized in 1987. Koreans and international observers alike are puzzled as to why Yoon would take such a drastic measure. This article argues that competing visions of the history of South Korea 's military dictatorship era, in which the Korean right views the left as pro-North Korea and the left views the right as Japanese collaborators and an obstacle to democratization, contributed to an atmosphere in which cooperation among the two major political parties is near impossible. Within this setting, Yoon in particular worked closely with New Right academics who seek to justify previous military dictators and seemingly became taken with contemporary far-right election fraud conspiracies. As a result, Yoon came to see martial law as a legitimate means to advance his agenda.

This paper provides a contextualized reading of the South Korean 2016 hit drama ‘Descendants of the Sun’, the most prominent pop cultural manifestation of the Republic of Korea’s rising status as a global middle power. Through linking the fictional peacekeeping mission to a confidently nationalist conception of South Korean identity, the drama normalizes troop deployments by circumventing traditional narratives for legitimation. This argument rests on observations concerning the omission of any historical and UN context for the deployment, the Othering of the United States as main antagonist, and the unchallenged sense of righteousness and morality displayed by the main protagonists in an otherwise passive local setting.

Chang Kang-myoung’s provocatively titled novel Because I Hate Korea (Han’gugi sireoseo) became a best-seller in 2015 and is among the most notable literary works to address rampant dissatisfaction among South Korean millennials. In recent years, Chang, a former journalist (b. 1975), has developed a reputation for adroit and prolific fictionalized expressions of local discontent. Because I Hate Korea reflects a pervasive desire on the part of the nation’s younger people to escape from “Hell Joseon,” a coinage that has attained widespread circulation. This piece briefly introduces the novel, setting it within its wider contemporary context, and then provides a translation of the first chapter.

This article, intended as a companion to the recent documentary Us and Them: Korean Indie Rock in a K-Pop World co-produced by Stephen Epstein and Timothy Tangheriini, situates Korean indie and punk rock within a broader context in order to demonstrate how what may seem a byway within Korean culture serves as a useful index of important recent societal transformations. As the nature of not only global media flows and musical circulation but Korean national identity and economic structures all undergo significant change, how should observers understand “Korean” “indie” music and its meanings as of 2015? How have the local punk and indie scenes developed in concert with, and in contrast to, K-pop?

Yun Isang (1917-95) was one of Korea's most prominent composers in the twentieth century. From 1957, the year he moved to West Germany, to his death in 1995, he had an internationally illustrious career, garnering critical acclaim in Europe, Japan, the United States, and North Korea. In South Korea, however, he became a controversial figure after he was embroiled in a national security scandal in 1967. As part of this incident, dubbed the East Berlin Affair at the time, Yun Isang was abducted in West Germany by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and charged with espionage for North Korea. This experience of victimization, which also included torture, imprisonment, and an initial death sentence, turned him into a vocal critic of Park Chung Hee and an overseas unification activist in contact with North Korea. This article remembers the moral and political framings of Yun Isang in South Korea against a recurring politics of forgetting that masks the magnitude of violence that was wielded in the name of national security. It traces coverage of Yun in several mainstream newspapers from the first mention of his name in 1952 to 1995. It argues that representations of Yun were mediated by a tension between national artistic progress and national security, one of the central tensions that defined South Korea's Cold-War cultural politics.

This paper uses observations collected “on the ground” inside North Korea to argue that everyday life matters when researching North Korea and that one method of carrying out such research is to travel there as a tourist.

This column was born out of curiosity and community. Inspired by the many conversations and shared experiences of colleagues and friends at gatherings of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) and other law library organizations around the world, it seeks to explore the ever-evolving roles we play in the legal community.

The East Asian democracies (EAD) of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have received little attention from the international political science community working on populism. By analyzing the last two to three decades of research on EAD we look for clues to help us explain why there is so little interest. In our review we encounter cases of eclectic conceptualization, suboptimal data, innovative categorization, binary analytics, and even political bias, all of which may weaken the persuasiveness of the respective research in the eyes of critical colleagues. Our key finding, however, is that all studies on EAD implicitly refer to local political standards as the baseline from which alleged populist behavior is identified and labeled. In direct comparison, the populist characteristics of East Asian politicians appear to be less pronounced than those of sledgehammer populists like Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, or Boris Johnson. Consequently, scholars working on the latter may be less curious about the former. Our findings, therefore, confront us with the question of what to use as a baseline for the measurement of potentially populist phenomena. We argue for the application of what is locally considered standard political behavior and conclude that such a practice has the potential to draw more attention to cases from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

This study employed a person-centred approach to investigate the digital divide in South Korea and its impact on life satisfaction among individuals. Six latent profiles were identified based on the following factors: digital device literacy, social capital, and digital self-efficacy. These factors denote different levels of the digital divide, highlighting the multifaceted nature of this issue and the importance of considering multiple factors that contribute to inequality. Additionally, sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, and educational level were found to play a role in determining group membership, emphasising the need to understand the underlying causes of the divide. Variations in life satisfaction among the groups emphasise their different effects on well-being. The findings can be used to inform targeted policies and interventions to bridge the digital divide in South Korea. To that end, this study provides data for designing tailored education, social networking, and support policies for vulnerable groups.

How can we understand the audience agency and securitisation processes that can induce anxiety? The Copenhagen School of security studies conceptualises an audience as possessing political agency which is contingent on their capabilities to respond to securitising moves. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s approach to ontological security, we argue that there is another type of agency supplementing political agency. Ontological agency refers to exercising control over the stability and continuity of one’s everyday routines and practices to minimise disruption to these routines caused by securitisation. Because routines of day-to-day life are central to bracketing sources of anxiety, people may choose to overlook and not react to securitising moves designating threats and implementing emergency measures that can undermine ontological security. We illustrate the analytical purchase of ontological agency by using unstructured observations of South Korean people’s responses to military practices that securitise North Korea. Our observations reveal that there is latent anxiety regarding North Korea that manifests in varying degrees ranging from inaction when routines are not disrupted by securitisation to outward bursts of emotional reactions and breakdown when securitisation practices disrupt people’s basic routines. This raises implications about the importance of ontological security driving the success or failure of securitisation and the politics of existentialism.