This book departs from existing studies by focusing on the impact of international influences on the society, culture, and language of both North and South Korea. Since President Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa drive of the mid-1990s, South Korea has become a model for successful globalization. In contrast, North Korea is commonly considered one of the least internationally integrated countries. This characterization fails to account for the reality of the two Koreas and their global engagements. The opening essay situates the chapters by highlighting some significant contrasts and commonalities between the experiences of North and South Korea’s history of engagement with the world beyond the Peninsula. The chapters explore both the longer-term historical influence of Korea’s international contacts as well as specific Korean cultural, linguistic, and social developments that have occurred since the 1990s demise of the global Cold War and greater international integration.

Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang’s Nuclear North Korea was first published in 2003 amid the outbreak of a lasting crisis over the North Korean nuclear program. It promptly became a landmark of an ongoing debate in academic and policy circles about whether to engage or contain North Korea. Fifteen years later, as North Korea tests intercontinental ballistic missiles and the U.S. president angrily refers to Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man,” Nuclear North Korea remains an essential guide to the difficult choices we face. Coming from different perspectives—Kang believes the threat posed by Pyongyang has been inflated and endorses a more open approach, while Cha is more skeptical and advocates harsher measures, though both believe that some form of engagement is necessary—the authors together present authoritative analysis of one of the world’s thorniest challenges. They refute a number of misconceptions and challenge the faulty thinking that surrounds the discussion of North Korea, particularly the idea that North Korea is an irrational actor. Cha and Kang look at the implications of a nuclear North Korea, assess recent and current approaches to sanctions and engagement, and provide a functional framework for constructive policy. With a new chapter on the way forward for the international community in light of continued nuclear tensions, this book is of lasting relevance to understanding the state of affairs on the Korean peninsula.

This book represents the first scholarly attempt to summarize and analyze how Korea’s relationship with Africa has been shaped in policy and non-policy aspects. It shows how far it has come and where it goes. The book recognizes that Korea-Africa relations, though relatively new, break ground by acknowledging the importance of a diligent endeavor to carry out post-colonial development, and have continued to grow as we find promising progress and opportunities in the mutual cooperation between the two. This book is all-inclusive, covering Korea’s academic, economic, diplomatic, and civil engagements with Africa. It investigates untold aspects of Korea-Africa relations.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has a reputation as one of the worst human rights situations in the world. This book utilizes a unique international law perspective to examine the actions and inactions of North Korea with regard to international security and human rights. Adopting political, military, historical and legal perspectives, the book explores how the two issues of nuclear weapons and the human rights abuses in North Korea are interconnected, and why the international community should apply the same international law framework to find a solution for both. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, such as refugee and defector testimony, Morse Tan offers a real-life story of North Korea that covers the pertinent law, and constructive approaches of its regime. Tan examines the specific objectives and actions of the North Korean government, and measures these according to international legal obligations such as applicable treaty law, jus cogens norms, and customary international law. The book concludes by offering solutions for dealing with international security surrounding the Korean Peninsula, and forwards a proposal for the creation of a tribunal to prosecute those at the top of the regime for international crimes and human rights abuses. As a project exploring the extremes of international law violation, this book will be of great interest and use to readers interested in the history, and political and legal implications of the strategies employed by the North Korea government.

Worldwide political changes have presented a unique opportunity for forging a new basis of international security relations. The end of the cold war, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the ascending role of the United Nations in regional security affairs have transformed the driving issues of international security. These changes both heighten the demand and offer the potential for global cooperation on an unprecedented scale. Traditional security preoccupations and the foundations of past strategy—based on preparation for massive military confrontation—are no longer appropriate. Now world leaders must find alternative strategies to ensure international safety. This book brings together a prominent group of experts, including several recently appointed government officials, to examine an alternative form of security, one that emphasizes collaborative rather than confrontational relationships among national military establishment. Global Engagement offers a complete analysis of the concept of cooperative security, which seeks to establish international agreements to regulate the size, technical composition, investment patterns, and operational practices of all military forces for mutual benefit. It explains how cooperative security also aims to create mechanisms to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and regional conflict. The contributors identify the trends motivating the movement toward cooperative security and analyze the implications for practical policy action. They examine the problem of controlling advanced conventional munitions, analyze an integrated control arraignment, discuss international principles of equity and their relationship to problems of security, and offer regional political perspectives while considering social regional security problems. With the altered security environment, cooperation has clearly become the new strategic imperative. Policymakers are challenged to dispose of large arsenals of conventional and nuclear weapons and redirect their efforts to support preventative management of security conditions. Leading the discussion of the security challenges ahead, the authors of this volume debate the utility of cooperative engagement for future strategy.

This edited volume brings together a set of essays exploring the global dimensions of Korea’s recent history and politics by a group of the most talented young scholars. Essays in the volume seek to answer two interrelated questions: How have international developments impacted Korea? And how has Korea in turn influenced world events and trends? The volume demonstrates that the most important issues in Korea’s post World War II history—division, war, economic development, and inter-Korean rivalry—cannot be understood without reference to the country’s global interactions. Essays in the volume cover a range of topics including: U.S.-South Korean relations, North Korean foreign policy, immigration, and democratization. The essays included in the volume push the boundaries of several different subfields. Historical essays break new ground by introducing new archival materials and revealing important details about the past diplomacy of the two Korea’s. Others consider aspects of American influence on Korea that have previously been ignored such as the U.S. impact on urban development and food consumption. Essays on contemporary Korean politics and society make sense of most recent developments in North and South Korea while presenting intriguing new interpretive frameworks. By bringing new voices in Korean Studies to the forefront, this volume changes how we understand and reconceptualize Korea’s role in the world.

Central to a transformational approach to conflict is the idea that conflicts must be viewed as embedded within broader relational patterns, and social and discursive structures—and must be addressed as such. This implies the need for systemic change at generative levels, in order to create genuine transformation at the level of particular conflicts. Central, also, to this book is the idea that the origins of transformation can be momentary, or situational, small-scale or micro-level, as well as bigger and more systemic or macro-level. Micro-level changes involve shifts and meaningful changes in communication and related patterns that are created in communication between people. Such transformative changes can radiate out into more systemic levels, and systemic transformative changes can radiate inwards to more micro- levels. This book engages this transformative framework. Within this framework, this book pulls together current work that epitomizes, and highlights, the contribution of communication scholarship, and communication centered approaches to conflict transformation, in local/community, regional, environmental and global conflicts in various parts of the world. The resulting volume presents an engaging mix of scholarly chapters, think pieces, and experiences from the field of practice. The book embraces a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as transformative techniques and processes, including: narrative, dialogic, critical, cultural, linguistic, conversation analytic, discourse analytic, and rhetorical. This book makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing dialogue across and between disciplines and people on how to transform conflicts creatively, sustainably, and ethically.