Dr Aliya Tskhay Research Fellow, University of St Andrews What happened? The beginning of 2022 in Kazakhstan will forever remain in its history and people’s memory, as a week of protests, violence and destruction erupted in the country. On January 2 a peaceful protest against the increase of prices for the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) […]

Professor Hyung-A Kim Outgoing President Moon Jae-in, in his recent “Talk with Citizens”, claimed that South Korea’s rise to the “top 10 nations” in the world while in office was his biggest achievement. Moon’s acclaim of South Korea’s achievements, especially in 2021, is warranted by the worldwide phenomena of Korean culture and art-based soft power, […]

Mikyoung Kim (Former Associate Professor, Hiroshima City University of Japan) Japan’s unusual ‘no-show’ in Washington DC The U.S., which has not directly intervened in so-called “history issues” between Korea and Japan, had to witness and deal with Korea-Japan diplomatic tensions in Washington last November. It happened during the Korea-U.S.-Japan Vice Foreign Ministers’ Meeting held on […]

Dr. Rita Udor One Saturday evening six months after I went to Willow village for my field studies, I was introduced to Ziggy by my informant. Sunday after church, in the hot summer afternoon, I met with him. He was wearing a winter jacket, and I wondered how anyone could wear such thick clothing on […]

Martin Weiser On February 16, South Korean lawmakers were briefed by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) that recently Kim Jong Un’s state title was changed from “Chairman of the State Affairs Commission” (SAC) in English translations to “President of the State Affairs of the DPRK.” Journalists then rushed to turn this into news. But instead […]

Professor Tom Sorell The first case of Covid in South Korea (see Footnote 1) was reported on 20 January 2020. The initial half-dozen cases all had a connection with Wuhan or Hubei province in China. In about a month, the number of cases had risen to around 30, with some infections also imported from Japan, […]

Dr Robert Winstanley-Chesters 2020 was a difficult year for global mobilities, however seemingly uncontrolled mobile energies were at play at sea. A particularly widely spread academic article from July 2020 focused on Chinese “Dark Fleets” of fishing boats, which had come to dominate many of the fishing grounds once important to North Korea, whose own […]

Hoon Jaung (Professor, Dept. Political Science and International Relations, Chung Ang University) This essay was drawn from the author’s publication in Korean, “COVID 19 Crisis and Korean Dataveillance State,” in Korean Journal of Legislative Studies vol. 26(3), 2020. When the world fell into the COVID 19 crisis in early 2020, South Korea seemed to be […]

Professor Moon-Sook Park, soprano and Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas, was invited to perform at St Cecilia’s Hall on the occasion of the 2020 SoKEN conference. The event was later postponed due to the pandemic. We are delighted to share her performance here.   This performance of 엄마야 누나야 (Dear Mother, Dear Sister) […]

Dr. Guy Puzey (University of Edinburgh) Twenty-two countries contributed military and humanitarian forces to the United Nations Command (UNC) during the Korean War. In practically all of those countries except South Korea itself, however, this is largely a forgotten conflict, to the extent that ‘the term “forgotten war” is synonymous with Korea in Anglophone culture’ […]