Hello there! My name is Seongkwon Park, and I am an undergraduate student majoring in International Relations. In general, I have great enthusiasm and interest in global affairs based on their geopolitical characteristics, and international politics. In addition to that, since I am an international student from South Korea, my academic interest mainly lies in foreign policy of the United States, regarding East Asian nations including my home country. It could be specified by sub-categories such as, US-China’s hegemony rivalry, ROK-Japan-US trilateral alliance, Inter-Korean relations, and nuclearization issue in North Korea. I enjoy reading articles and watching news about ongoing global issues, so I came up with the idea that it would be better to post some blogs consistently by summarizing the contents of articles and archiving my reflections. By doing so, I would like to clearly organize my thoughts on my field of interest and keep critical and analytic thoughts on global issues. Through this website, I will share my insights based on articles from relevant sources, such as Foreign Affairs, The Diplomat, or Council on Foreign Relations, and even some peer-reviewed public journals in this discipline.
One of the reasons for archiving my thoughts on international relations is that, since I would like to continue my academic journey in graduate school. My concentration will be International Security and Conflict Studies, and I plan to write a thesis on the process of nuclear negotiation between the United States and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). My tentative thesis statement would be basically about the evolution of nuclear negotiation between two nations since 1994 and argue that future denuclearization efforts should move beyond coercive strategies and adopt more credible, step-by-step diplomatic approaches. In order to write this thesis, I have broadened my view about global politics and Korean peninsula issues through journals, opinion articles, and lectures of prominent scholars in the field, such as Professor Victor Cha at Georgetown University, Professor David Kang at University of Southern California, Professor John Mearsheimer at University of Chicago, and Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State. Specifically, Madeleine Albright led the U.S.-DPRK relationship during the Clinton Administration and held talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, has helped me to shape a better understanding of the nature of North Korea within an international political system, through her articles in “Foreign Policy” and her prolific work “Fascism: A Warning.” Also, the Offensive Realism theory by Professor Mearsheimer helped me comprehend why DPRK can never give up their nuclear program, considering the case of Ukraine and Libya, which had undergone denuclearization processes and how they ended up as they did. When it comes to methodology, I am planning to conduct qualitative document analysis by immersing myself in a number of primary written sources such as journal articles and columns. In doing so, I will put my endeavor to trace some patterns in the history of negotiation between the two nations.
