Category: 2019-2020

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Professor Andrew Krieger, senior adjunct professor at Montgomery College in Rockville, MD; teaches courses in international relations, sociology, and American government.

Speakers

Heung-Kyu Kim is the founder and Director of China Policy Institute and professor in the department of political science at Ajou University, South Korea. He also served as a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His current assignments include Director of Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Presidential Commission on Policy-Planning, Team Leader of Security and Defense in the Presidential Task Force of Future Vision 2045, a board member of the National Security Council and a board member of National Defense Reform Commission, Ministry of National Defense. Kim has written more than 300 articles, books, and policy papers regarding Chinese politics and foreign policy, and security issues in Northeast Asia. They include China and the U.S.-ROK Alliance: Promoting a Trilateral Dialogue (CFR, 2017), Enemy, Homager or Equal Partner?: Evolving Korea-China Relations (2012), From a Buffer Zone to a Strategic Burden: Evolving Sino-North Korea Relations during Hu Jintao Era (2010). His book China’s Central-Local Relations and Decision-Making received an award for Excellency of the Year by the Ministry of Culture in 2008. He also received the NEAR Foundation Academic prize of the year in the area of foreign policy and security in 2014. Kim received his BA and MA in international relations from Seoul National University, South Korea, and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan.

Scott A. Snyder is a senior fellow for Korea studies and director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). His program examines South Korea’s efforts to contribute on the international stage; its potential influence and contributions as a middle power in East Asia; and the peninsular, regional, and global implications of North Korean instability. Mr. Snyder is the author of South Korea at the Crossroads: Autonomy and Alliance in an Era of Rival Powers (January 2018) and coauthor of The Japan-South Korea Identity Clash: East Asian Security and the United States (May 2015) with Brad Glosserman. He is also the coeditor of North Korea in Transition: Politics, Economy, and Society (October 2012), and the editor of Global Korea: South Korea’s Contributions to International Security (October 2012) and The U.S.-South Korea Alliance: Meeting New Security Challenges (March 2012). Mr. Snyder served as the project director for CFR’s Independent Task Force on policy toward the Korean Peninsula. He currently writes for the blog Asia Unbound.

Jiyong Zheng currently serves as Professor and Director at the Center for Korean Studies, Fudan University, and Secretary-General of Shanghai Institute of Korean Studies. Zheng Jiyong joined the army and studied at the School of Foreign Languages, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. In 1991, he was assigned to research the military and diplomacy of the Korean Peninsula. In 2009, he retired from the army and joined Fudan University. He received his Doctoral Degree at Fudan University and has had post-doctoral experiences at IFES, Kyungnam University, ROK(2009/09-2010/12) and in Kim Il Sung University, DPRK(2014/07-11), and was a visiting scholar in Seoul National University, ROK(2016/09-2017/09), and is currently a Visiting Scholar in The Henry L. Stimson Center. His research focuses on domestic politics in the two Koreas, and on bilateral and multilateral relations related to the Korean peninsula, and policy-making process in DPRK, China, and ROK. He is the author and co-author of more than 100 scholarly articles and author or editor of more than 10 books, including ROK’s Political Party Systems (2008), ROK’s Parliamentary Politics (2017), North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War? (2019), The “Conflict-Reconciliation” Cycle on the Korean Peninsula: A Chinese Perspective (2012), and Road Map to a Korean Peninsula Peace Regime: A Chinese Perspective (2015).

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures and Director of the Institute for Korean Studies at GW. She received her Ph.D. in Korean History from Columbia University. She is a specialist in gender and legal history of early modern Korea. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on two book projects titled Suspicious Deaths: Forensic Medicine, Dead Bodies, and Criminal Justice in Chosŏn Korea and Sexual Desire and Gendered Subjects: Decriminalization of Adultery Law in Korean History.

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Abstract

Is the process of state building a unilateral, national venture, or is it something more collaborative, taking place in the interstices between adjoining countries? To answer this question, this book takes a comparative look at the state building process along China, Myanmar, and Thailand’s common borderland area. It shows that the variations in state building among these neighboring countries are the result of an interactive process that occurs across national boundaries. 

Departing from existing approaches that look at such processes from the angle of singular, bounded territorial states, the book argues that a more fruitful method is to examine how state and nation building in one country can influence, and be influenced by, the same processes across borders. It argues that the success or failure of one country’s state building is a process that extends beyond domestic factors such as war preparation, political institutions, and geographic and demographic variables. Rather, it shows that we should conceptualize state building as an interactive process heavily influenced by a “neighborhood effect.” Furthermore, the book moves beyond the academic boundaries that divide arbitrarily China studies and Southeast Asian studies by providing an analysis that ties the state and nation building processes in China with those of Southeast Asia.

Note: This event is free and open to the public. This event is to support the launch of Enze Han’s book entitled Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State Building between China and Southeast Asia.

Enze Han is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include ethnic politics in China, China’s relations with Southeast Asia, and the politics of state formation in the borderland area between China, Myanmar and Thailand. Previously he was Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. His research has been supported by the Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and British Council/Newton Fund. During 2015-2016, he was a Friends Founders’ Circle Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. He is the author of Asymmetrical Neighbours: Borderland State Building between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National Identity in China (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

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Michael Yahuda is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, where he served from 1973 to 2003. Since then he has been a visiting scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, the Elliott School, George Washington University, except for 2005-2006 when he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National University 1976 and a Visiting Professor at the University of Adelaide, (South Australia) 1981-83 and the University of Michigan, 1985-1986. He has also been a Guest Scholar, 1988 and Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center Washington, DC, 2011-2012 and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies, Harvard, 2005. He was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Singaporean Institute for South East Asian Studies (2005) and at the Chinese Foreign Affairs University, Beijing (Autumn 2007). He has acted as an adviser to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and as a consultant to organizations in London and Singapore. His main fields of interest are China’s politics, foreign policy and the international relations of the Asia Pacific. He enjoys an international reputation as a specialist on the politics of East Asia. He has published ten books and more than 200 articles and chapters in books. His latest book is The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific (4th and completely revised edition, 2019).

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