Institute For Peace And Unification Studies

New institutionalism, constituting a middle-range theory in the social sciences over the past decade, has failed to explain the ways whereby an institutional change takes place. Viewing the world through a lens that targets the institution alone, adherents of the approach focus chiefly on the logic of institutional persistence, that is, embeddedness. A critical analysis of the notion of new institutionalism, from a systems perspective, shows that the embeddedness becomes the very source of institutional change. The established institution, the members of which adhere to the continuity that the institution embodies, cannot escape exposure to complex systemic and environmental changes. That is, the institution, which is nested in a system, cannot but experience a retardation of the adaptive process. The retardation results in institutional change and, furthermore, often precedes a systemic transformation, depending upon the significance of the institution within a given system. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Throughout the twentieth century, states across East Asia committed many relatively undocumented atrocities, with victims numbering in the millions. The contributors to this insightful volume analyze many of the most notorious cases, including the Japanese army’s Okinawan killings in 1945, Indonesia’s anticommunist purge in 1965–1968, Thailand’s Red Drum incinerations in 1972–1975, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge massacre in 1975–1978, Korea’s Kwangju crackdown in 1980, the Philippines’ Mendiola incident in 1987, Myanmar’s suppression of the democratic movement in 1988, and China’s Tiananmen incident. With in-depth investigation of events that have long been misunderstood or kept hidden from public scrutiny, State Violence in East Asia provides critical insights into the political and cultural dynamics of state-sanctioned violence and discusses ways to prevent it in the future.

The institution of nuclear power in Japan appears to be drifting; nevertheless it persists. For the past 60 years, conservative politicians, technologists, and electric companies have acted in concert, for different reasons, to achieve a full nuclear fuel cycle: specifically technology for reprocessing and uranium enrichment. Their pursuit has eroded the bottom-line spirit of peaceful use; to be sure, it has been excessively ambitious for Japan's status as a non-nuclear-weapon state. The mastering of the full nuclear fuel cycle has resulted in a competency trap, excluding or delaying development of alternatives to nuclear power. Furthermore, this situation has heightened nuclear power's sunk costs. The critical conjuncture of the March 11, 2011 incident has had a limited impact only. Anti-nuclear activists, the weakest concerned actor, try to dramatize their movement for "exit from nuclear," but they have failed to bring about electoral changes.

This paper seeks to understand why the United States treated Japan and Korea differently in the revisions of bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements. On the sensitive issue of grating its allies the rights of developing enrichment and reprocessing (ENR), the United States did so for Japan in the 1977 and 1987 revisions, but did not for Korea during the 2015 revision. For the great power as a supplier state, there are two factors affecting the decision: policy-makers’ concern about alliance management prior to the calculation of security outcome, and firms’ commercial interests. In order to avoid damage to the US–Japan alliance and to maintain Japan's complementation for the US nuclear industry, Washington granted the rights of ENR to Tokyo. In contrast, because of its confidence of managing the US–Korea alliance and partly because of incompatibility of commercial interests between the two, Washington did not grant the rights to Seoul at the 2015 revision. Based on the comparison of the two cases, this paper underscores a need to alter the power projection theory regarding nuclear proliferation by explicating the alliance management as the ex ante element of power projection and by accounting for commercial interests such as fuel sale and technological partnership.

North Korea is perilously close to developing strategic nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States and its East Asian allies. Since their first nuclear test in 2006, North Korea has struggled to perfect the required delivery systems. Kim Jong-un's regime now appears to be close, however. Sung Chull Kim, Michael D. Cohen, and the volume contributors contend that the time to prevent North Korea from achieving this capability is virtually over; scholars and policymakers must turn their attention to how to deter a nuclear North Korea. The United States, South Korea, and Japan must also come to terms with the fact that North Korea will be able to deter them with its nuclear arsenal. How will the erratic Kim Jong-un behave when North Korea develops the capability to hit medium- and long-range targets with nuclear weapons? How will and should the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China respond, and what will this mean for regional stability in the short term and long term? The international group of authors in this volume address these questions and offer a timely analysis of the consequences of an operational North Korean nuclear capability for international security.

"Kim and Cohen's volume on North Korea offers a 360 degree view of one of the most vexing problems for US foreign policy and national security. The authors each bring a unique analytic angle to the problem ranging from deterrence theory to the foreign policies of key protagonists like the United States, South Korea, and China. There is something here for both the expert and the general reader who want to make sense of this enigmatic regime and its increasingly risk-acceptant behavior." ― Victor Cha, D.S. Song-Korea Foundation Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of Asian Studies, Georgetown University. Former White House NSC director for Asia and US deputy head of delegation for the Six Party Talks, and author of The Impossible State: North Korea Past and Future

"A set of first rate papers address the enduring North Korean nuclear saga and its strategic and political implications. The contributors capture the complexity of deterrence and compellence in Korea and the emerging strategic scenarios while providing fresh light on the choices the regional and international players are making. A must read for all interested in nuclear proliferation and East Asian security." ― T.V. Paul, James McGill Professor of International Relations, McGill University

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6342-partnership-within-hierarchy.aspx

https://www.amazon.com/Partnership-Within-Hierarchy-Evolving-Security/dp/1438463936

Examines intra-alliance politics between the United States, Japan, and South Korea.

In an age of increasingly complex security situations around the world, it is essential that students and practitioners understand alliances and minilateral security mechanisms. Partnership within Hierarchy examines, in depth, the troubled evolution of the US–Japan–South Korea security triangle from the Cold War period to the present time. Referencing a voluminous amount of declassified documents in three different languages, Sung Chull Kim, through six case studies, delves into the common questions arising in different historical periods, such as who should pay costs, what to commit, and why. Burden sharing and commitment, Kim shows, emerged as the main subject of competing expectations and disagreements arising between the capable middle power Japan and the weak power South Korea. Kim details how the dominant power, the United States, has controlled the red lines and intervened in the disputes, the result of which is in most instances a balancing effect for the triangle. In this vein, he persuasively accounts for why historical disputes between Japan and South Korea, which submerged during the Cold War, reverberate today when asymmetry between the two is substantially balanced.

“This book adds a thoughtful framework to our understanding of the United States–Japan–South Korea triangle over six decades. It also serves the field well by linking six critical decisions in Japan–Korea relations over this time period and the US impact to the overall framework.” — Gilbert Rozman, author of The Sino-Russian Challenge to the World Order: National Identities, Bilateral Relations, and East versus West in the 2010s

“Sung Chull Kim provides a fascinating narrative for the evolution of the triangular relationship.” — Terence Roehrig, coauthor of South Korea’s Rise: Economic Development, Power, and Foreign Relations

This article compares the different trajectories of nuclear power policy in Japan, Taiwan and Korea in the post-Fukushima era. The Fukushima nuclear accident ratcheted up the level of contention between civil activism and supporters of nuclear power in all three states. The result of this contention has been decided by the combined effects of two factors – interest structure (complexity vs simplicity) and politicisation (national level vs local level). In terms of scope, policy change has taken place in Taiwan, Japan and Korea in that order. This analysis contributes to a balanced understanding of both structural constraints and the political process in which each actor, and in particular civil activism, is able to manoeuvre.

본 논문은 북핵을 핵이라는 보편적 연구 대상으로 삼아야 한다는 문제의식에서 출발 한다. 본 논문은 핵연구의 세 부문, 즉 핵비확산, 핵통제·폐기, 핵억제의 맥락에서 북핵 및 비핵화를 분석하고, 각 부문에서의 문제점과 가능성을 분석한다. 첫째, 비핵화는 북한의 NPT체제로의 복귀이다. 북한 핵무장 동기(수요측면)는 대외적 생존뿐만 아니라 정권 정당성과도 밀접하게 관련되어 있으며, 북한에의 기술이전(공급측면)은 강대국간 견제, 밸런싱의 국제정치 속에서 발생하였다. 핵확산과정에서의 복합성은 북핵 해결의 장애로 작용하는 것이 사실이다. 둘째, 우리가 가장 흔히 말하는 비핵화는 핵능력의 폐기를 의미하는바, 현재는 포괄적 비핵화의 틀 안에서 신뢰할만한 폐기 및 검증에 이르는 것이 유일한 방도인 것으로 보인다. 즉, 미북 사이 타협점이 가능한 부분이 있다면, 미국이 신고의 완전성 부분에서 일부 양보하는 대신 폐기에 참여하고 검증을 확보하는 것이다. 셋째, 비핵화는 결단과 의지와 관련되는 것으로 핵억제의 종식이다. 북핵의 궁극적 해결은 물리적 핵능력의 폐기만이 아니라 김정은 스스로 핵억제를 포기해야 하지만 이런 의지를 표명한 적이 없다. 그러나 북한은 미국 및 국제사회에 대하여 위험감수의 강제핵위협을 행하기는 힘들 것이며 이를 인지하고 있는 것으로 보인다. 이상의 분석은 두 가지 정도의 새로운 연구 주제를 제기한다. 하나는 북핵 확산과정의 공급측면과 관련한 국제정치적 역학에 관한 문제이고, 다른 하나는 남북관계에서 북한의 강제핵위협의 사용 여부에 관한 문제이다.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the North Korean nuclear issue, and denuclearization as the solution to it, from the perspective of the nuclear weapons study in general. The existing literature in Korea has not made sustained efforts to comprehend theoretical implications of the three fields of the nuclear weapons study: nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear arms control and dismantlement, and nuclear deterrence. Based on the three, this paper conceives the North Korean nuclear issue and defines denuclearization, thus explicating opportunities and challenges. First, denuclearization means North Korea’s return to the NPT regime. In the demand side, North Korea’s motivation of nuclear armament was to ensure state security and security of the regime centered around Kim Jong-un, whereas in the supply side, Pyongyang’s nuclear path was facilitated by the introduction of the sensitive technology, particularly uranium enrichment, through A. Q. Khan’s nuclear black market networks. Such complexity of proliferation in North Korea is an obstacle to denuclearization. Second, the most commonly mentioned aspect of denuclearization is nuclear dismantlement. After the breakdown of the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi in 2019, a likely solution is a combination of U.S. comprehensive packaged agreement and North Korea’s step-by-step approach. Third, denuclearization is closely related to the will to give up nuclear deterrence, an intention-related process that differs from the dismantlement involving elimination of material capability. Kim Jong-un has never expressed or hinted such intention. As the coercive diplomacy studies show, however, North Korea is not likely to elevate nuclear threat through brinkmanship because this will simply toughen international sanctions. All in all, North Korea is far from the above-mentioned definition of denuclearization. The analysis in this paper raises two related questions for the future research: one is about the power politics surrounding the supply-side of nuclear proliferation in North Korea, and the other is about likelihood and patterns of North Korea’s use of coercive nuclear threat to South Korea, if not to the United States.

This article addresses the underexplored question of why some state violence cases in Asia are not followed by transitional justice even during a democratic transition. It explicates the two factors that obstruct or delay seeking truth and accountability and thus bring impunity for perpetrators. One is the context in which the violence took place, and the other is longevity of the violent regime. If the violence occurs during a period of conflation of state construction and regime building, and if the perpetrators' power persists long enough to be institutionalized, transitional justice is least likely to take place. Five cases of violence violence which were committed by anticommunist regimes during the Cold War in four Asian countries are explored.

With respect to China and its neighbors, what are the political implications when a great power advances economically into small states? This paper presents an asymmetry-coercion linkage to explain the relationship between a great power and small states by reconceptualizing Albert Hirschman's theory of trade dependency. This reconceptualization involves two tasks. First, the paper explicates vulnerability to coercion as a consequence of economic asymmetry, whereby a small state becomes susceptible to a great power's compellence or co-optation to take a certain path preferred by the latter. Second, in demonstrating and measuring vulnerability to coercion, the paper accounts for the three factors: trade concentration, non-transparency, and reliance on bilateral aid. The combined effect of these three factors is that among the six countries under investigation, Cambodia and North Korea are extremely vulnerable to China's coercion, while Vietnam is the least vulnerable state.