ABSTRACT Why did nuclear cooperation between the United States and North Korea collapse after nearly a decade under the Agreed Framework? Using spoiler theory, this article explains how domestic political opposition can undermine the implementation of nuclear agreements between adversarial states. It argues that when domestic spoilers gain influence over implementation decisions, they are able to disrupt efforts to sustain cooperation. Analyzing the 1994–2002 Agreed Framework, the article focuses on United States‐side spoilers and shows that during the Clinton administration, deal custodians contained domestic opposition and maintained cooperation despite persistent resistance. After 2001, however, opponents of engagement captured key implementation levers, and cooperation unraveled. The collapse of the Agreed Framework was thus largely the result of spoiler intervention rather than an unavoidable response to North Korean noncompliance.
ABSTRACT South Korea presents a puzzle for threat‐centered accounts of allied nuclear politics. Why did South Korea advance into covert state‐directed exploration of a nuclear weapons option before North Korea possessed nuclear weapons, yet refrain from renewed state‐directed pursuit after North Korea built a substantial nuclear arsenal and posed a grave nuclear threat? This article develops a credibility–constraint framework to explain recurrent nuclear‐option salience and variation in whether such salience converts into state‐directed pursuit. Extended deterrence simultaneously reassures allies against external threats and constrains nuclear autonomy through alliance governance and associated legal, technological, and nonproliferation restraints. Credibility–constraint decoupling arises when confidence in US reassurance weakens while these restraints remain binding, generating autonomy pressures and heightening nuclear‐option salience. Whether salience remains bounded or advances into covert state‐directed exploration depends on the density and enforceability of the restraint architecture, access to weapons‐usable fissile‐material pathways, and domestic political institutions. The framework explains why covert option‐building emerged in the 1970s, whereas recurrent nuclear‐option salience has remained politically bounded in the contemporary period. This divergence reflects the relatively permissive institutional and technological environment of the 1970s, in contrast to denser restraints, restricted material access, and greater institutional scrutiny in the contemporary period. Threat severity and reassurance credibility alone are therefore insufficient to explain variation in allied nuclear politics. By incorporating the restraint architecture, the framework moves beyond binary accounts that oppose alliance reliance to nuclear proliferation and shows how extended deterrence structures the salience, political expression, and conditional conversion of nuclear options.
ABSTRACT Since its revival in 2017, the U.S.–Japan–India–Australia Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) has continued to operate across multiple changes of government in its member states despite the absence of legally binding security commitments, and has extended its cooperation into a range of functional domains. Yet it has never developed into a defense pact carrying mutual‐defense obligations, nor into a more tightly binding security‐cooperation mechanism. This article understands the Quad as a low‐commitment minilateral security arrangement and proposes “platformization without high commitment” as a middle‐range analytical framework. The framework explains why a single institutional design can both sustain cooperation under conditions of pronounced divergence in members' preferences and, at the same time, make it difficult for the mechanism to move beyond its existing boundaries into domains that would require members to make explicit security commitments. The article argues that the institutional resilience of platformization derives from the combined operation of three mechanisms—political anchoring, network support, and functional endorsement—rather than from shared threat perception or U.S. leadership alone. At the same time, differences among members in their security concerns and risk assessments, the functional division of labor among Indo‐Pacific security mechanisms, and the Quad's deliberate restraint in avoiding the appearance of an exclusive military bloc together limit its functional expansion. Through process tracing of the Quad's evolution from 2017 to 2026, the article shows that the low‐commitment design has allowed the Quad to convert member differences into manageable institutional conditions and thereby sustain cooperation; but the same institutional features also delimit its role in collective defense, collective enforcement, and high‐risk crisis response.
This article examines the adequacy and state practice of employing trade-related measures to mitigate the global plastic pollution. Trade spans the entire lifecycle of plastics, bringing plastic with high economic value and deep integration within global value chains. As a global environmental crisis, plastic pollution necessitates a synergistic approach to international governance. Discipline in plastic trade under the international legal framework not only helps reconcile the friction between trade and the environment, but also addresses the systemic inefficiencies stemming from regulatory fragmentation. With a focus on three key processes: the Plastic Waste Amendments to the Basel Convention, the WTO Dialogue on Plastic Pollution and Environmentally Sustainable Plastics Trade, and the negotiations toward an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, this paper examines the basic paradigms of plastic trade governance and analyzes the deficiencies and geo-economic obstacles it faces. Given the consideration of global plastic governance's high reliance on state participation, the paper further takes China as a primary case study, analyzing approaches for China to participate in plastic trade governance with the model of foreign-related rule of law.
ABSTRACT This study analyzes portal‐mediated framing of China‐related coverage in South Korea by examining 37,164 news articles collected from two major portal platforms (Naver and Daum) from 2014 to 2024. Using TF–IDF vectorization and K‐means clustering, the analysis identifies three recurring thematic frames: (1) economic sanctions and export controls (38.5%), (2) US–China technology competition (35.4%), and (3) the Korea–US alliance and military cooperation (26.1%). Time‐series patterns in these clusters align with major geopolitical junctures (e.g., THAAD, the US–China trade war, and the COVID‐19 period). Correlation analyses with survey indicators show strong temporal associations between framing frequencies and public attitudes (e.g., pandemic‐related keywords and distrust toward China, r = 0.91), consistent with a mutually reinforcing dynamic rather than a definitive one‐way causal effect. The study theorizes these coexisting patterns as “compound framing” and interprets them as a discursive manifestation of South Korea's structural duality as an East Asian middle power.
Like many other states of the "Global South," India and China have consistently professed their neutrality in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. This article compares and contrasts the "neutral" positions adopted by New Delhi and Beijing regarding the conflict. It does so by positing a definition of neutrality that is broader and less ambiguous than the conventional definition, employing five distinct criteria for assessing a country's neutrality: (i) nonparticipation in military action; (ii) a refusal to officially take sides in the conflict; (iii) a refusal to officially apportion blame for its outbreak or consequences; (iv) a refusal to use state-controlled media resources to amplify either side's official narrative; (v) nonparticipation in economic sanctions. Applying this definition, the article concludes that India's stance on the Russia-Ukraine war appears to come relatively close to the "ideal type" of neutrality, whereas China cannot be considered a neutral power in this conflict.
This study examines China's approach to the Wakhan Corridor and argues that Beijing's policy toward Afghanistan is shaped primarily by a Hierarchical Security-Development Nexus reinforced through China's National Security Concept. While recent Afghanistan-Pakistan trade disruptions have increased Kabul's interest in Wakhan as an alternative route, China remains unwilling to advance connectivity without credible security guarantees. Drawing on policy analysis, field interviews, and official documents, the study shows that the corridor's strategic importance is asymmetric: vital for Afghanistan but secondary for China. The article contributes to debate on China's regional strategy by demonstrating how security concerns precede economic opportunities in fragile borderlands.
This paper examines the 2025 US decision to deport members of the Venezuelan-origin gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador under a $6 million incarceration agreement, arguing that the episode represents a critical evolution in outsourced security governance. By comparing this case with the 1980s deportation of Salvadoran gang affiliates, the paper traces the shift from unilateral repatriation to contractual enforcement, illustrating how core coercive functions are increasingly delegated to structurally dependent states. Building on theories of governmentality, delegated sovereignty, and transnational security governance, the article conceptualizes this configuration as "the El Salvador exception." To situate the case within broader global dynamics, the paper contextualizes this arrangement alongside other extraterritorial models, such as the Australia-Nauru offshore processing regime, to highlight a growing transregional trend in outsourced security governance. The analysis demonstrates three implications of this model: the erosion of due process and accountability; the reproduction of asymmetric enforcement hierarchies; and the spatial relocation of security risks to peripheral states. By connecting developments in the Americas with longstanding practices in the Asia-Pacific, the paper illuminates outsourced security governance as a transregional political technology reshaping contemporary approaches to migration, crime, and sovereignty.
The intensifying competition between the United States and China has been significantly reshaping the global order, presenting considerable challenges for states in the Asia-Pacific region. As an emerging geopolitical construct, the region has posed formidable challenges and strategic constraints for Pakistan, compelling it to manage its historical alliances, redefine priorities, and formulate viable policy responses in the evolving global landscape. To unfold Pakistan's positioning, this paper asks how Pakistan navigates its foreign policy priorities and strategic calculations while dealing with the US-China competition? Based on the hedging framework, the paper argues that Pakistan's foreign policy positioning revolves around pragmatic hedging with either power in the US-China rivalry. Pakistan's geostrategic engagement with the United States and its geo-economic and geo-security partnership with China aim to cultivate a zero-enemy stance/narrative, balancing competitive coexistence and maximizing returns from both powers. The evaluation demonstrates that Pakistan's national security strategic doctrine/policy prioritizes geo-economics considerations over geopolitics to navigate its economic challenges, address its status dilemma in South Asian geopolitics, and manage complex geo-security issues.
This study investigates the influence of perceptions of the United States and China on individual support for democratic and non-democratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), set against the backdrop of heightened global power rivalry in public discourse. This study shifts the emphasis from macro-level patterns of authoritarian dissemination to micro-level perspectives, evaluating how citizens perceive the governing regimes linked to these principal powers. The analysis, employing data from Arab Barometer Wave 8, explores the relationship between negative perceptions toward America and favorable sentiments toward China about preferences for democratic versus non-democratic governance. The findings reveal clear correlations: intensified negative attitudes against the United States are associated with reduced support for democracy, whereas elevated positive sentiments toward China are linked to greater receptiveness to non-democratic alternatives. These developments indicate a wider decline in the normative status of liberal democracy in certain regions of the Global South, where global competition increasingly influences the criteria by which individuals assess political systems. This study advances the existing discussion on authoritarian diffusion and democratic resilience by emphasizing individual-level attitudes. It demonstrates that international power dynamics intersect with domestic political decisions, affecting voters' evaluations of various regime types.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye's 2016 decision to authorize the deployment of the U.S. Forces Korea THAAD system-and Beijing's subsequent economic and diplomatic coercion-marked a decisive inflection point in Seoul's China policy. This article analyzes how both South Korea's progressive and conservative coalitions revised their expectations regarding China and domestic public opinion through the protracted episode. The result has been a bipartisan resignation that South Korea is now structurally positioned to disappoint China. Yet, an enduring hope persists in Seoul that a new equilibrium has been reached. This conflicts with Beijing's likely belief that, through the calibrated use of carrots and sticks, its neighbor will progressively accommodate Chinese interests-a contradiction set to deepen as Beijing's expectations rise in step with its growing power.
How does the North Korean regime secure elite loyalty without institutional transparency or material redistribution? While existing studies have examined the use of Partizan narratives under Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, this paper argues that Kim Jong Un introduces a significant discursive shift: the invention of "Kim Jong Un Partizans." This symbolic construction enables the regime to naturalize legitimacy without a direct historical or revolutionary foundation, reframing memory politics as an elite-binding technology under third-generation rule. This study synthesizes discourse theory and authoritarian elite politics by showing how performative memory, staged through rituals and elite signals, helps produce common knowledge within a politically engineered epistemic enclosure. Using a qualitative case study and historical tracing, it analyzes 1496 articles from Rodong Sinmun (1960s-2021). The findings show how revolutionary narratives sustain dynastic rule across generations. This research contributes to understanding how authoritarian regimes perform legitimacy through symbolic power, elite interpellation, and discursive continuity.
This article examines strategic force formation through cross-national statistical analysis and a case study of North Korea's Strategic Rocket Force. Using mixed methods, we investigate how civilian control influences the establishment of specialized organizations for managing strategic weapons. Our analysis reveals that lower civilian control significantly increases the likelihood of separate strategic force formation. The North Korean case demonstrates that even in highly personalistic authoritarian regimes, periods of weakened civilian control-such as during leadership transitions-enable military organizational interests to shape strategic force development. Established in 2012 during Kim Jong-un's succession, the Strategic Rocket Force illustrates how the military institutionalized its organizational interests, gaining enhanced resources, autonomy, and prestige. These findings complement explanations focusing on external threats or technological capabilities by demonstrating that military organizational interests and civil-military dynamics also fundamentally shape strategic force development, with important implications for understanding nuclear proliferation and Korean Peninsula security.
This study examines why legislators change their positions on Free Trade Agreement (FTA) ratification votes in the South Korean National Assembly, analyzing 17 FTA ratifications from the 16th to 20th Assembly. Using logistic regression with change-based variables, I find that transitions in ruling party status, changes in party loyalty, and shifts in constituency economic composition significantly influence position changes. Directional analysis reveals asymmetric patterns: legislators who gain ruling party status are more likely to switch from opposition to support, while switches from support to opposition are primarily driven by increases in district manufacturing employment. Increases in agricultural employment are associated with switches toward support rather than opposition, possibly reflecting government compensation mechanisms. Interaction analysis shows that declining electoral security amplifies responsiveness to constituency economic changes, and that former ruling party members with high party loyalty are particularly prone to switching toward support. These findings demonstrate that legislative position changes in trade policy are shaped more by transitions in political context than by static characteristics, and that different types of position switches operate through fundamentally different mechanisms.
This article investigates the manifestation and drivers of the fragmentation of inter-state cooperation in submarine cable governance, and analyzes China's strategic positioning within this landscape. It argues that the fragmentation is manifested in both forms and agendas. On one hand, the fragmentation stems from the interplay of a state's calculus of willingness and capacity to cooperate, which gives rise to a spectrum of cooperative outcomes ranging from binding hard law to noncooperation. These outcomes are empirically validated by Singapore's practices. On the other hand, the fragmentation is also influenced by the unique geographic, commercial, public, and strategic attributes of the cables themselves. China's engagement in submarine cable governance presents a paradox. Despite its stature as a digital power, its achievements are limited. This is constrained internally by conflicting willingness and insufficient capacity, and externally by geopolitical exclusion and partner scarcity. Consequently, the article proposes that China's viable path forward is a pragmatic strategy of "managed participation," which entails domestic regulatory reform, tiered international engagement, and the leveraging of its commercial and technical prowess to navigate the entrenched geopolitical competition. The resolution of the complex governance fragmentation will contribute to the safety and resilience of submarine cables and international connectivity.
This article contributes to the understanding of China and Pakistan's relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It examines why do the Taliban prioritize regime security in relations with China and Pakistan. The analysis argues that while China and Pakistan approach Afghanistan based on strategic, security, and economic interests, the Taliban remain primarily focused on regime survival and internal stability. Despite historical tensions, the Taliban sustain unofficial relations with both states to secure political legitimacy and security guarantees. China's non-interference policy enables the Taliban to consolidate power without external governance pressure, while Beijing seeks stable conditions to access Afghanistan's resources and expand regional connectivity. Pakistan aims to prevent Tehreek-e-Taliban militancy while maintaining leverage in Kabul. Using a regime security framework and qualitative analysis, the article finds that the Taliban's internal priorities often diverge from the expectations of China and Pakistan, limiting the depth of trilateral cooperation in security and regional integration.
Conflicts in the contemporary international system have increasingly shifted from state-centric power struggles to deeply rooted human needs crises. This study applies John Burton's Human Needs Theory to explain the persistence of the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan, focusing on the deprivation of identity, recognition, and security among Kashmiri people. A quantitative research design was used to collect perceptions from 250 respondents, including policy experts and conflict-affected civilians. Descriptive and inferential analyses reveal that unmet human needs strongly shape attitudes toward resistance and militancy, while traditional military-driven approaches have failed to deliver sustainable peace. The findings highlight a significant gender-based and generational difference in insecurity perceptions. The study argues that sustainable conflict resolution requires diplomatic engagement, confidence-building measures, constitutional reforms, and human-needs-oriented peace processes. It concludes that addressing the lived insecurities and political invisibility of Kashmiris is essential for transforming the decades-old conflict into durable peace.
In South Korea, ruling parties have historically been strongly subordinated to the presidency. What were the origins of this president-ruling party relationship? This paper aims to answer this question by examining the political dynamics that led to the marginalization of the Democratic Republican Party (DRP) and the establishment of Park Chung-hee's personalist dictatorship, from the beginning of the military regime in 1961 to the early Yushin era in 1973. Few previous studies, grounded in theoretical frameworks, have provided in-depth case studies on how an authoritarian leader establishes a personalist dictatorship by overcoming other regime elites seeking to build and maintain a collective leadership system, such as a hegemonic party regime, particularly in the South Korean context. In contrast, this paper argues that factionalized regime elites, combined with a ruler's enhanced ability to punish other elite factions and control financial resources, increase the likelihood that an (electoral) authoritarian regime will shift toward a personalist dictatorship. The Park era clearly illustrates these political dynamics. During this period, the ruling DRP was internally factionalized, while Park's power was increasingly enhanced due to the strong presidency, executive dominance over parliament under the “developmental state,” and his growing popularity fueled by rapid economic growth. Accordingly, he could minimize the size of the winning coalition by effectively employing a “divide and rule” strategy, thereby concentrating all power in his hands. The complete subordination of the ruling party to the president was a key byproduct of the consolidation of Park's personalist dictatorship. This paper uses a within-case analysis based on qualitative methods.
This study explores the role of cultural values in shaping attitudes toward compliance with emergency measures during health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. While culture is a multi-dimensional concept, scholars often rely on the individualism-collectivism dichotomy to explain the higher compliance observed in East Asian countries compared to the West. Beyond the simple dichotomies of previous studies, this study categorizes cultural characteristics of East Asian societies into four key aspects-anti-pluralism, social hierarchy, social harmony, and group primacy. Based on the latest data from the 6th Asian Barometer Survey, the results of the analysis significantly support the idea that different aspects of cultural values have varying impacts on citizens' compliance with emergency measures within East Asian societies. Specifically, attitudes toward anti-pluralism and social hierarchy are more strongly associated with higher compliance than those toward social harmony and group primacy. The results examining the interaction with trust in government also show that the influence of cultural values persists, even when such trust is low.
The nuclear armament debate has become prominent in contemporary South Korean politics, driven by security concerns toward North Korea's nuclear development and the credibility of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence. The Trump 2.0 Presidency has further heightened the debate, with advocates claiming strategic opportunities and necessities for South Korea's nuclear independence. This article examines the debate, evaluating the feasibility and desirability of nuclear armament. The article argues that technological, diplomatic, and domestic political factors pose obstacles to current feasibility. Even if such obstacles are mitigated, nuclear armament has limited security benefits and negative trade-offs, limiting its desirability as a long-term strategic solution. This article contributes to the literature by offering a critical yet holistic perspective on the implications of South Korea's nuclearization, urging policymakers, and the public not to view nuclear weapons as a panacea, but rather to weigh their risks and benefits alongside alternative security approaches.
