Environmental goals are linked to regionalism, but they are often a low priority for advocates of nationalism. Early in the 1990s idealists assumed that reallocations of money, newly active social movements, and a lively process of regionalism would boost environmentalism to one of the top priorities across Northeast Asia. Soon they found, as regionalism floundered, that countries did not have a strong commitment to the environment and some showed little concern. In a region where state-centered development and national dignity remain powerful concerns, environmental hopes rest on gradual acceptance as a secondary theme as part of balanced regionalism. After fading before great power competition in 1996–99, regionalism made a partial comeback in 2000. Hopes for environmental cooperation rest on new gains for regionalism, but strains in the summer of 2001 suggest that progress will be slow.

Are authoritarian successor party (ASP) supporters more likely to protest? I propose that ASP supporters are less likely to protest in general. The post-democratization mobilization environment is shaped upon the pre-democratization mobilization basis. During the pre-democratization period, protest was organized around the democracy movement. Thus, protest tactics and networks were accumulated through it. As former authoritarian ruling party supporters, ASP supporters are less likely to have legacies of participating in the democracy movement, which prevents them from accessing the accumulated protest resources from the democracy movement. However, I argue that this negative association varies based on the ASP qualities and supporters’ age. Supporters of ASPs that maintain strong pre-democratization legacies are more likely to participate in protests than supporters of ASPs that do not strongly highlight their authoritarian legacies. Also, when the ASPs’ characteristics are considered, older ASP supporters are more likely to participate in protests than younger supporters. Using both single-level and multilevel statistical analyses, I examine four Asian countries with politically powerful ASPs and find evidence supporting my hypotheses. Lastly, I compare two South Korean mass movements, the Candlelight movement and the Taegeukgi rallies to unpack the relationships between ASP supporters, protest resources, and mobilization. This study reveals authoritarian legacies among post-democratization citizens through ASP supporters’ protesting behavior.

Ample empirical evidence suggests that Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs), which are the core credit institutions in rural China, are not accountable to their member households. This article argues that this conundrum can be explained by an institutional analysis of the credit cooperatives using the multiple principals-agent framework: the credit cooperatives as agents are accountable to multiple heterogeneous principals—with multiple conflicting objectives. The multiple principals are (1) the County RCC Unions, which exercise control using the evaluation criteria on which the remuneration of grassroots RCC officers is assessed; (2) local party secretaries, who exert influence through top personnel appointment and dismissal in the credit cooperatives; and (3) member households, which are a “collective” principal. In a multiple-principals scenario, the “collective” principal has weaker control over the agents due to the “collective action” problem.

Despite its embedded ambiguity, conventional wisdom tends to prevail over time. This may be because old adages recurrently embrace some ingredients of truth. As James A. Mathisen highlights, conventional wisdom plays a significant role in constituting knowledge as a starting point. For many people, numerous adages (the rich get richer while the poor get poorer; birds of a feather flock together) are most commonly perceived as true. More interestingly, the accuracy of the two folk wisdoms appears to be more salient in culture-producing industries, including the motion picture industry. Concomitantly, the two adages have long been connected to diverse societal phenomena and sociological knowledge.

Almost two decades after the initial victory of Thai Rak Thai, scholars still debate the forces behind Thaksin's rise to power. I revisit these debates and argue for a more explicit analysis of dynamics over time. I distinguish analytically between the founding moment of TRT's first victory and the subsequent reproduction of its dominance. I argue that TRT's financial muscle was a sufficient condition for its 2001 victory, that institutions merely contributed to the scale of its victory, and that its platform was not decisive. Once in power, however, institutions were instrumental in allowing TRT to complete its term, but more important for its long-term dominance was the rapid implementation of its campaign promises, which created a mass constituency that in turn made Thaksin-linked parties resilient at the polls despite institutional reforms designed to weaken their electoral performance.

The methodologies and assumptions that guide our acquisition of knowledge and interpretation of data are context and time bound. Academic disciplines, sub-disciplines, methodological approaches and research agendas are to a large degree conditioned by the ‘real world,’ and none more so than International Relations. Accordingly, it is important to consider the possible sociological foundations of different epistemologies and paradigms of International Relations. Surely there is more than one way of looking at the world, unless one is steadfastly married to a positivist universal truth. Yet it is interesting that East Asian scholarship and teaching in IR has seemingly not developed strong ‘indigenous’ regional characteristics, perhaps with the exception of Japan with its large market, long tradition, political freedom and economic affluence. In fact IR has absorbed and closely followed Western and particularly North American social science. This introduction and the articles that follow will explore the fortunes of IR scholarship and regional studies in East Asia in the context of national and regional environments. It will consider how IR is taught and researched in various national settings, and examine the interaction between IR as a social science and national/regional historical experiences, cultural and pedagogical traditions, and politico-ideological values. The underlining problematique concerns the idea of an East Asian ‘IR community’: why has this tended to be comparatively weak? How can we envision the development of a more rigorous East Asian IR community, one that is not exclusively judged according to external — and particularly North American — terms of reference and standards? It goes without saying that we are not attempting to antagonize our American friends and colleagues, but simply to stimulate a ‘sociology of science’ reflection of the discipline in the East Asian regional setting. Two questions serve as the organizing themes of this special issue. The first concerns the primary characteristics of the regional IR community. Many of the papers in this collection point to the dominance of US-originated ideas and theories. The second question arises from the first question: whether these predominant approaches help us to understand the region in a time of change.

This article traces the evolution of international relations studies as an academic discipline in China in the last two decades or so. Almost non-existent before the 1980s, IR studies has become an increasingly dynamic, sophisticated, and popular field of social science in both teaching and research. This is reflected in the growth of institutions, degree programs, scholarship and paradigmatic debate as well as interaction with the Western intellectual community in both theory and personnel. Nevertheless, the development of IR studies in China is still in its primitive stage and it must contend with various problems such as political control, a lack of well-trained scholars, inadequate funding, and ideational uncertainty.

We argue that the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea, in which 304 passengers perished, was a result of the mode and process of privatization of South Korea's maritime police and rescue services. Through the development of a nuanced theory of privatization and use of a novel conceptualization of corruption, coupled with empirical analysis, our study shows that the outcome was symptomatic of a wider trend of systematic bureaucratic rent-seeking. A pro-active private sector ready to capitalize on the opportunity, in conjunction with a permissive political environment, resulted in a reduction of state capacity, with devastating consequences.

When do militaries in the newly industrialized countries of East and Southeast Asia support their governments, when do they support citizens' challenge of government, and when do they launch coups? We propose and test a theory of military behavior using data from across East and Southeast Asia between the 1970s and 2008. The results corroborate the model's predictions to make four contributions: First, the model provides a framework of military behavior for countries to expand study beyond coups or the absence thereof. Second, the findings bring to focus the influence of citizens on the military's behavior, an aspect largely overlooked in scholarship of the region. Third, the necessary conditions—weak economy and galvanized citizens' challenge—that affect the military's behavior vis-à -vis citizens and the government highlight the strategic interaction treatment. Fourth, this study broadens systematic treatment to enrich empirics and theory-building for the political economies of these countries.

In this paper, we study how political parties react to democratic transitions. We find that the structure of legislators’ social networks plays a critical role in shaping their political interactions during the transition period, and consequently, the post-transition party systems that emerge. We focus on the Korean case, where the incumbent authoritarian party merged with one of its pro-democracy opponents to create a powerful and enduring conservative party under democratic rule. Using a novel individual-level dataset on all legislative members during the transition, we find that the merger was facilitated by dense social networks linking members of the merged parties, which increased trust across the parties and reduced the difficulty of a merger. Conversely, we find that the paucity of ties linking pro-democracy parties hindered their long-term cooperation, despite their shared ideologies and policy goals. The study complements existing theories by providing a network-based explanation for the weakly institutionalized political party system that has characterized Korean politics since democratization.

This study examines whether a degree of autocracy and high quality of bureaucracy—two mechanisms often discussed in the context of Covid-19 responses—provide a meaningful explanation for East Asia's relative success compared to the rest of the world at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Our multiple regression analysis for 111 countries supports our expectation, as East Asia as a region is significantly and negatively associated with confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths compared to the rest of the world, and its interaction with the quality of bureaucracy further contributes to the negative association. In sum, this research highlights the important role of East Asia's regional characteristics in pandemic responses.

Research on attitudes toward immigrants and refugees largely focuses on intergroup conflict and related threats imposed by outgroup members. This study shifts the analytic focus to intragroup conflict: a domestic struggle among natives over how to handle recently arrived refugees and on their perception of foreign workers in general and Muslims in particular. By exploiting an exogenous variation in the interview timing of a nationally representative survey conducted in South Korea, a “new immigration destination,” this study offers a causal estimate (local average treatment effect) of domestic societal conflict on outgroup attitudes. Results from regression discontinuity (RD) analysis show that in its aftermath—immediately following the completion of a controversial e-petition sponsored by the anti-refugee group demanding that the government extradite asylum seekers—the public opinion of Korean adults toward foreign workers and Muslims became more, not less, favorable. Heterogeneous treatment effects are also found across two respondent-level characteristics: cosmopolitan identity and relative deprivation. Specifically, the focal relationship is more pronounced among individuals who identify less with cosmopolitan citizenship and among those who are more relatively deprived.

The historic June 2000 summit and subsequent exchanges between North and South Korea have added a new dimension to not only South-North Korean relations but also the situation in Northeast Asia as a whole. On one hand, the thawing South- North Korean relations has generated great optimism among those who see it as an irrefutable sign of North Korea's intention to join the rest of the world as a constructive player. At the other extreme, it is seen as a deceptive, if not desperate, act on the part of North Korea to reap economic gains and lower the guard of South Korea and its allies, principally the United States. Perhaps a more realistic assessment lies somewhere between these polar analyses.

Almost exactly a half-century following the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korea president Kim Dae-jung made a historic visit to Pyongyang for the first-ever summit meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas in June of 2000. A decade following the collapse of communism in the rest of the world, Kim's journey would inevitably be judged in history as a potential starting point for the end of inter-Korean confrontation. Three days following direct, broad-ranging discussions with his counterpart, Kim Jong Il, Kim Dae-jung confidently returned to Seoul with an inter-Korean summit declaration promising enhanced efforts at reconciliation and inter-Korean exchange. Upon his return to Seoul, Kim Dae-jung declared that there would be “no more war” on the Korean Peninsula. The next task was to institutionalize an array of exchanges and inter-Korean interactions designed eventually to lead to national reconciliation.

Northeast Asia constitutes a “regional environmental security complex” wherein the actors and societies are enmeshed together in a web of positive and negative externalities with respect both to environmental problems and efforts to solve them. The three sets of environmental issues relevant to the security architecture can be summarized as follows: damage to and destruction of peaceful relations, stability and order of the state-based system of international relations caused by environmental decay and resource scarcity; threats to human security rooted in environmental decay and resource scarcity; and damage to and destruction of environmental integrity caused by instability and conflict. Environmental degradation can degrade human security by damaging the health of human populations; economic security by impacting adversely on local, national, regional and international economies; and national security by undermining stable relations among countries. Equally, though, recurring patterns of human, economic and national behavior can deplete the earth's resources and degrade the physical environment.

What determines the public evaluation of South Korean president? Is it a temporal cycle of presidential tenure, the economy or political events? This paper explores these questions by examining the case of President Kim Dae Jung who enjoyed high popularity in the early phase of his tenure but experienced consistent decline of popularity after 18 months in office, much like his predecessors did. The paper argues that the high and low of public support for the president is not simply a function of the temporal cycle and that the fluctuation of public rating is strongly influenced by the public's consideration of economic matters and corruption scandals. In the case of the current South Korean president, one's performance in resuscitating the economy could not rescue a president besieged by one corruption scandal after another. Also, the improved economic conditions did not save Kim Dae Jung's public approval rate from tumbling, because reforms failed to alleviate the economic hardship felt by the lower class. All of this demonstrates that the public does separate economic and political issues and weigh them disproportionately in evaluating presidential performance.