South Korea's (hereafter Korea) recent middle power diplomacy has attracted worldwide attention. Korean administrations have attempted to steer the country along a middle power path, where it can play a more active global role that is commensurate with the size of its economy. Most accounts take Korea's self-declared identity as a middle power for granted; that is, they do not evaluate the non-conforming data. On the other hand, this paper traces the process of why the country projects a middle power identity. This paper first addresses alternative explanations of the positional, behavioral and identity approaches to answer this question. Following the failure of these explanations, this paper proposes that Korea's more assertive projection of its proclaimed middle power identity was a nation branding project that aimed to tackle the so-called Korea discount and to achieve its aspired place in the global prestige and status hierarchy. In turn, Korea envisioned its improved standing in the world helping it achieve its preferred global outcomes, particularly in shaping a favorable international environment surrounding the country.

In 2018, the situation on the Korean peninsula eased after 17 years of tension. Chinese political circles and academic circles began to discuss how to deal with the change in the situation on the Peninsula. Many notable experts on North Korea in China have expressed their views, but there are great differences among them. The government's decision-making is opaque. How do Chinese scholars interact with the government and how does the detente on the Korean Peninsula influence the opinion market of the academic community of China? How should South Korea handle the relationship with Chinese scholars in order to meet its own interests? In this article, I analyze the interaction between Chinese academics and politics on the basis of information available to the public and the changes in China's policy toward the Peninsula during and after the Sino-US trade conflict.

South Korea, China, and Japan have history and territorial disputes in each of their bilateral relationship. These issues have existed for several decades, but they have not surfaced all the time. In the recent past, however, both China and Japan adopted policies that caused friction. Why did they do that? That is because of China's aggressive foreign policy based on the strong economy and Japan's rightwing shift for domestic political reason to appeal to nationalism. In addition, these countries adopted aggressive foreign policies to pursue national interests at the price of their neighboring states.

The assassination attempt on South Korean (ROK) President Chun Doo Hwan during a state visit to Rangoon, Burma (now known as Yangon, Myanmar) in 1983 illustrates the willingness of the North Korean state to engage in state terror not only against its own citizens, but also against the ROK. The authors examine the North Korean state's adoption of covert operations tactics and terrorist activity in an attempt to undermine the ROK, even when its actions have costs in terms of the North's relationship with individual Southeast Asian states. In addition, using newly-released archival material from the British National Archives, the authors examine the 1983 Rangoon Bombing as a case study in North Korean covert operations abroad.

This paper attempts to explore practical and theoretical implications of the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye in conjunction with Korean democracy from a perspective of political philosophy by employing the ideas of Rawls' public reason and Habermas' public sphere. It examines how public reason or public use of reason works to form an overlapping consensus in the process of the citizens' competing rallies of Candlelight vs. Taegeukgi leading to the Constitutional Court's decision, from October 2016 to March 2017. The paper, with the analyses of the Candlelight vs. Taegeukgi rallies, the decision on the motion to impeach the president in National Assembly, and the Constitutional Court's final jurisdiction on the impeachment, attempts to argue that public reason or public use of reason tacitly or explicitly was, albeit sporadically, expressed in the public sphere so that it drove public institutions to make a decision from a perspective of public reasonableness. However, advancing differently in parallel public reasons or public uses of reason in the Korean public sphere exposes some practical limitations of communicative action or deliberative politics in its capacity to form a social consensus or solidarity particularly when citizens are divided in political ideologies. It may also arguably reflect a distinctive aspect of Korean political culture. For this reason, it further argues that the Korean constitutional court's decision for the impeachment, though equipped with the procedural legitimacy and contributed to maintaining stability of Korean democracy, reflects an overlapping consensus as a modus vivendi in the sense that it is open to further public reflection in the future.

This study investigated the logic behind the formation process of political orientation in Korea by revisiting Thorstein Veblen's social Darwinism perspective, according to which the highest and lowest income groups keep their conservativeness longer than other groups either willingly or passively. In order to prove his theory, this study borrowed a dataset from the World Values Survey (WVS) and applied several regression models. As a result, conservativeness decreased as level of income increased; however, the extent to which conservative orientation decreases became smaller. It meant that Veblen's theory has well fitted into Korean society. Based on the results, this study diagnosed current circumstance of Korean society having suffered from serious social and political polarization. It concluded that the polarization happened due mainly to the time gap among individuals to capitulate to the pressure of change which the present age requires accepting, and finally provided appropriate stance to address the problem.

This study analyzes the effects of the global-level governance mechanism on regional financial cooperation in East Asia since the G20 Summit was launched in 2008. First, the G20 has not had much impact on East Asian financial cooperation There has been slow but continuous progress in existing regional financial cooperation based on the IMF-linked Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization. Second, Chinese-led regional financial initiatives have burgeoned as a result of China's dual-track policies on global financial governance. This study contributes to understanding the global governance-regional cooperation relationship. First, the relationship varies by the legitimacy and effectiveness of global governance. Second, the leading country's role is crucial in shaping the direction of regional financial cooperation, and hence, the global governance-regional cooperation relationship. Finally, the relationship is complementary in the case of East Asia. However, with China's new regional initiatives, the global financial architecture will be more fragmented.