Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
The Digital Reproduction of the State: Public Diplomacy, Digital Entitativity, and Strategic Ontology, Forthcoming in Media, War & Conflict.
How do states engage in strategic ontology via digital diplomacy? Existing arguments about digital diplomacy focus on everyday practices, overlooking its ontological implications by reproducing states for lay people whose use of social media forms part of the knowledge discourse about world politics. I argue that states employ digital diplomacy to engage in strategic ontology to manage narratives about themselves. Such strategy induces what I call “digital entitativity” or constructing people’s perceptions that a state is a whole with intentions via digital means. Using a hermeneutic approach to discourse analysis, it analyzes the People’s Republic of China’s public diplomacy efforts on Twitter/X to present itself digitally to international audiences, identifying themes that disrupt and conform to normalized practices of digital diplomacy and the existing international order. This has implications for understanding how China perceives the need to counter narratives and rectify its negative global image.
[Forum Essay] Rethinking Leader Visits as Performances, with Eric Van Rythoven, Forthcoming in International Studies Perspectives.
Routines Die Hard: Ontological Security and Audience Agency in Securitisation, with Brian Finch. Review of International Studies. 2024. FirstView. 1-26.
How can we understand the audience agency during securitisation processes that can induce anxiety? The Copenhagen School of security studies conceptualises an audience as possessing political agency which is contingent on their capabilities to respond to securitising moves. Drawing on Anthony Giddens' approach to ontological security, we argue that there is another type of agency supplementing political agency. Ontological agency refers to exercising control over the stability and continuity of one’s everyday routines and practices to minimise disruption to these routines caused by securitisation. Because routines of day-to-day life are central to bracketing sources of anxiety, people may choose to overlook and not react to securitising moves designating threats and implementing emergency measures that can undermine ontological security. We illustrate the analytical purchase of ontological agency by using unstructured observations of South Korean people's responses to military practices that securitise North Korea. Our observations reveal that there is latent anxiety regarding North Korea that manifests in varying degrees ranging from inaction when routines are not disrupted by securitisation to outward burst of emotional reactions and breakdown when securitisation practices disrupt people’s basic routines. This raises implications about the importance of ontological security driving the success or failure of securitisation and the politics of existentialism.
The Dark Matter of World Politics: System Trust, Summits, and State Personhood, with Jennifer Mitzen. International Organization. 2022. (Winner of Best Article Award, Diplomatic Studies Section, ISA 2023)
International Relations (IR) theory has had a trust revival, with scholars focusing on how trust can enhance inter-personal cooperation attempts between leaders. We propose there is another type of trust in play in world politics. International system trust refers to a feeling of confidence in the international social order, which is indexed especially by trust in its central unit, state persons. System trust anchors ontological security, and its presence is an unstated assumption of the IR trust scholarship. In this paper we conceptualize system trust. We illuminate its presence by flagging the production of state personhood in a familiar case in IR trust scholarship, the 1985 Geneva Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. Inter-personal and system trust perspectives highlight different aspects of the same summit. The juxtaposition suggests new lines of research into: the production of state persons in diplomacy, the relationship between inter-personal and system trust, and the impact of the rise of personalistic/patrimonial leadership on diplomacy and international order.
Summit Diplomacy as Theatre of Sovereignty Contestation. The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. 2022.
The recent revival in the interest in summitry in International Relations scholarship conceptualises it as an elite-centred or foreign policy-focused process targeting foreign governments and publics. This article makes a theoretical intervention on the effects of summitry by foregrounding publics as audiences of international politics who can exercise agency. Because summits are primarily elite-staged performances of Westphalian principles of state sovereignty, they generate a political space for audiences to publicly embrace or contest summitry performances and their meanings of sovereignty. They can do so by co-performing with or by counter-performing elitist summitry performances, which can generate narratives with potential to shape and alter domestic societies in the long run.
Policy Analysis Papers and Chapters
Who Should Speak for South Korea? Invigorating South Korea's Unification Public Diplomacy Efforts in the US. Shaping the Future of Security on the Korean Peninsula: Next-Generation Policy Perspectives. National Committee on American Foreign Policy. 2025.
Despite growing public apathy and a dismissive attitude toward inter-Korea engagement in South Korea and the U.S., unification is enshrined in South Korea’s constitution and identity discourse produced by South Korean political elites. South Korea’s current security interests and its alliance with the U.S. present a dilemma not only for its identity but its unification policy. What can South Korea do to reconcile its competing needs and interests through diplomacy that can buffer against leadership changes in both Seoul and Washington? This paper presents four policy recommendations for Seoul. The first two are related to South Korea’s diplomatic representation and bureaucratic coordination, and thelast two are related to its public diplomacy efforts in the U.S.
Kim Jong Un's Reconsideration of Diplomacy. 2022 US-Korea Joint Academic Studies: South Korea's Response to New National Identity Pressures. Vol. 33. Korea Economic Institute of America. 2022.
This chapter argues that the inter-Korea summits of 2018-9 reflect the contesting views of South Korea's identities vis-a-vis North Korea: while the conservatives favor a more hawkish approach that perceives South Korea as a higher-status country than North Korea, which reflects the present-day South Korean identity, the progressives are more future-oriented, viewing inter-Korea relations as between equals, thus favoring engagement and dialogue. In contrast to elites, the public, especially younger South Koreans, is more ambivalent towards unification and North Korea, instead preferring peaceful co-existence and engagement that minimizes security threats from North Korea. South Korea’s aspirational identity of a unified Korea is thus weak in younger South Koreans’ perception of identity. These different views, however, seem to have been attenuated by North Korea and Kim Jong Un's sudden turn to public summitry, as exposure to media representations of the inter-Korea summits influenced the South Korean public opinion towards North Korea, Kim, and inter-Korea efforts in military de-escalation to shift, albeit briefly, in a positive direction.
Working Papers
Summitry as the Social International: Performance, Audience, and Vicarious Identification (Revise & Resubmit)
The Emotional Politics of Sovereignty, with Nina C. Krickel-Choi (Under Review)
Apology as Performance in World Politics
Leader Competence and Summitry
Works in Progress
What is Summit Diplomacy? Evidence from US-China Survey Experiments
The Practice Turn in Ontological Security Studies, with Emmanuelle Rousseau
Aestheticizing the Self: Post-Colonial Ontological (In)Security and Urban Politics and Policies, with Devon Cantwell-Chavez
Pre-PhD Program Publications
Peer-Reviewed Article
The role of identity in South Korea's policies towards Japan. Korean Social Science Journal. 2016.
This paper asks why South Korea’s relations with Japan is so vulnerable to disputes over history in the post-Cold War period. It argues that South Korea’s identities vis-à-vis Japan and North Korea respectively conflict with each other and leads to inconsistent policy towards Japan that hovers between cooperation and discord. By analyzing South Korea’s relations with Japan as well as its policies and behavior in the post-Cold War period, this paper aims to show how identity factor affects a state’s foreign policy and behavior towards other states. In doing so, it questions the rationality assumption of state behavior in IR and offers alternative explanations on how to better understand “emotional” foreign policies.
Book Chapters
The Meeting of East and West through Xi Yang Lou: A Visit to Yuan Ming Yuan in Sarangbang
Students in Beijing 3: Reconstructing Tianxia through Time Travel. (ed. Young-Sun Ha). Seoul: East Asia Institute, 2016. (E-book, in English)
The Final Days of the Chinese Tianxia Order: A Visit to the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty Memorial Hall II in Sarangbang in
Kyushu: 21st Century Joseon’s Embassy to Kyushu. (ed. Young-Sun Ha). Seoul: East Asia Institute, 2016. (E-book, in Korean)
Essays
Rational Emotions: The Role of Identity and Emotions in Dokdo/Takeshima Dispute between South Korea and Japan. EPIK Journals Online. 2015.
The Growing “Discomfort” with Comfort Women between South Korea and Japan. E-IR. November 2015.