Korea

The idea of a conference on East Asia at eCampus University in Novedrate (Como) Italy has been developed in order to meet the growing interest on the East Asian region, both in cultural and scientific terms, and in a socio-economic perspective.
The main focus of the conference is the cultural exchange and scientific cooperation of East Asian countries, according to sustainable development principles and policies within and outside East Asia.
The major fields of interest to the event are education and research, cultural exchanges, science and technological innovation, economy, law and politics.

I just published a spy novella with a plot right out of contemporary headlines: Weapon sales by North Korea to rogue nations in the Middle East threaten Israel’s security.

The thriller is set in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The CIA and the Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service) play cat and mouse in a sprint to stop World War III.

The text reads like a how-to manual for spy tradecraft. And the dialog is real and captivating, sprinkled with humor to help the reader catch his/her breath from the action.

At the same time South Korea seeks to stand out from Japan while trying to avoid being caught up by China. Being very open to the world, the Korean economy is particularly sensitive to the international situation. The 2008-2009 crisis was felt very strongly in the country. However the South Korea economy managed to bounce back but as a slower pace than expected. South Korean companies are in a similar position as the one they put their European and Japanese competitors nearly two decades ago. Authorities are aware that the growth strategy based on exports has reached its limits and it is time for the country to find new sources of economic growth, especially as the labor market remains tight and unemployment rate is increasing significantly, especially among youth. On political level although remain dependent on the United-States for its security, South Korea is trying to get closer to China since spring 2013. Alongside its relations with Japan continue to deteriorate. China is welcoming this move, especially as it sees it as a way to weaken the US position in the region.

On September 18, 1996, Lee Jin Gyu, a South Korean taxi cab driver, was taking a passenger on the Gangneung-Tonghae coastal highway.  A little before one in the morning, the driver noticed a group of men clustered on the side of the highway

Original article at NKNews: http://www.nknews.org/2012/09/this-day-in-the-history-of-the-dprk-2/

Despite continuing economic liberalization and social integration, relations between Northeast Asian governments are often tense and lead to enhanced military readiness. Alongside confrontation in all three dyads, however, trilateral cooperation between China, Japan and South Korea has been evolving. This study shows that history problems, territorial disputes and geopolitical concerns lock the Chinese, Japanese and South Korean governments into a constellation that creates political space for the emergence of cooperative frameworks. The very fixation on material power and bilateral relationships reveals that power is being exercised in non-material ways in effect foreclosing alternative futures and reproducing existing structures including the pertaining security dilemmas.

This is a popular appetizer in Primorskii Krai (Russia’s maritime
territory), reflecting the Korean influence on the cuisine of that region. Korean vendors in the markets of Vladivostok and Ussuriisk sell this spicy salad ready made, in clear plastic tubes, and Russians who live in proximity to Koreans have incorporated this recipe into their own culinary repertoire.

This is my version of a Korean rib dish. If these ribs were going to be smoked, I would not boil them first, but since they tend to be fatty, I do boil them before grilling. Serve the ribs with fried rice, stir-fried vegetables, and cucumber slices sprinkled with ground hot red chile.

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, monetary regionalism has been widely advocated as a means to shelter East Asia from not only the volatility of global financial markets but also from the US-dominated International Monetary Fund. While the primary obstacle to deepening regional monetary cooperation centered around the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) is cogently identified as being political, the existing literature focuses mostly on the rivalry between the likely lenders, China and Japan, and neglects the likely borrowers. Using the case of South Korea, this paper provides a cautionary tale of the CMI from a borrower’s perspective. Any workable liquidity support arrangement, regional or otherwise, requires a robust surveillance mechanism to address the problem of moral hazard inherent to such a lending facility. In turn, an effective surveillance mechanism inevitably implies a significant political leverage for the lenders and vulnerability for the borrowers, an outcome that cannot be assumed to be avoidable by the CMI just by the virtue of its regional scope. There is little basis to expect that being neighbors necessarily means neighborly behavior; mere geographic proximity does not make China and Japan any less self-interested than the United States, nor does it make Korea’s potential political costs more tolerable.

For two decades the Korean peninsula has been mired in a perilous nuclear brinkmanship with no end in sight. The paralysis is attributable in part to the widespread perception of North Korea as a ‘‘rogue’’ if not ‘‘mad’’ state, whose security concerns are seen as irrational, paranoiac, and illegitimate. Despite its eccentricities, however, Pyongyang is fundamentally a rational actor pursuing a rational strategy to deal with rational security concerns. Profound structural changes in the international system have rendered North Korea incapable of addressing its security anxiety through either internal balancing by conventional arms buildup or external balancing by alliance formation. In this context, nuclearization offers a logical and inexpensive route for Pyongyang to restore the military balance in the Korean peninsula and ensure its own survival.