Dr. Minseon Ku 구민선 具旼宣

Hello! I'm the Diana Davis Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, for the 2023-4 academic year. My book project, The Power of Performance: Summit Diplomacy in World Politics, develops a theoretical approach to understanding the function of summitry in world politics by foregrounding the audience dimension. Using process tracing, focus group study, and survey experiments, I argue that in addition to the strategic need for leaders' face-to-face meetings, summitry is a performance influencing the domestic audience's ontological security or the security of being. Political elites generate visuals of inter-state relations, during which states and the international system are reproduced. Driven by the need for certainty and stability in their everyday lives, the domestic public's tendency to look for states in the visuals of leaders' face-to-face meetings produces unintended effects generating foreign policy implications. 

 

My research related to summitry has been published in International Organization and the Hague Journal of Diplomacy. My research interests include IR theory, ontological (in)security, public opinion, diplomacy, US and South Korean foreign policy, and East Asia International Relations. I have contributed policy commentaries on South Korea's foreign policy and diplomacy related to inter-Korea affairs, nuclear diplomacy, and historical disputes with Japan. 

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Previously, I was a research assistant at the National Assembly Budget Office in Seoul, South Korea and a Korea Foundation junior residential fellow at the CSIS Office of the Korea Chair in Washington, D.C.