Minseon Ku 구민선 具旼宣

I'm a Rosenwald Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at the Dickey Center, Dartmouth College for 2023-4 academic year. I will be conferred a PhD in Political Science from the Ohio State University officially in December 2023. My book project, which is based on my dissertation on summitry and public opinion, develops a theoretical approach to understanding summitry by foregrounding the audience dimension, focusing on domestic audience reactions to the first summitry between former or current adversaries. Using process-tracing, focus group study and survey experiments, I argue that in addition to strategic considerations, summitry is a performance generating impressions to influence an audience into accepting foreign policy change. Political elites stage and perform summit performance in ways that will minimize disruption to people's sense of ontological security, or their expectations about the continuity about the international political reality they are familiar with. 

 

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, practice theory, diplomacy, US and South Korea 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 history 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.