North Koreans in South Korea and Beyond: Transnational Migration and Contested Nationhood

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-338
Author(s):  
Jin Woong Kang

This article examines the differentiated identities of North Koreans in South Korea and beyond in terms of transnational migration and contested nationhood. In the post-Cold War era, North Koreans in South Korea have been marginalised as a social minority, and comprise a subaltern group within South Korea, despite having South Korean citizenship. As a result, many North Korean refugees, including those who have already gained South Korean citizenship, have migrated to Western countries for a better life in terms of wealth and welfare. As active agents, they have pursued strategic lives in the host countries’ multicultural societies and Korean communities. Through complex transnational migration to South Korea and elsewhere, North Koreans have reformulated nationhood by contesting the idea of a “homogeneous nation” of Korea. This article focuses on how North Koreans have shaped their own Koreanness in the multicultural societies of the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in the hierarchical nationhood of South Korea. By doing so, it offers an alternative framework for looking at the multifarious identities of North Korean refugees globally.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
HYUN KYONG HANNAH CHANG

Abstract Protestant music in South Korea has received little attention in ethnomusicology despite the fact that Protestant Christianity was one of the most popular religions in twentieth-century Korea. This has meant a missed opportunity to consider the musical impact of a religious institution that mediated translocal experiences between South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period (1950s–1980s). This article explores the politics of music style in South Korean diasporic churches through an ethnography of a church choir in California. I document these singers’ preference for European-style choral music over neotraditional pieces that incorporate the aesthetics of suffering from certain Korean traditional genres. I argue that their musical judgement must be understood in the context of their lived and remembered experience of power inequalities between the United States and South Korea. Based on my interviews with the singers, I show that they understand hymns and related Euro-American genres as healing practices that helped them overcome a difficult past and hear traditional vocal music as sonic icons of Korea's sad past. The article outlines a pervasive South Korean/Korean diasporic historical consciousness that challenges easy conceptions of identity and agency in music studies.


Africa ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 456-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald L. Donham

As I write, the United States and the United Kingdom have begun their invasion of Iraq. Thus, the most developed forms of violence are being brought into relationship with some of the world's most complexly layered local identitites—all on global television. The unpredictability of this situation points, I believe, to one of the more profound aspects of the post-Cold War order.


2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shida Rastegari Henneberry ◽  
Seong-huyk Hwang

The first difference version of the restricted source-differentiated almost ideal demand system is used to estimate South Korean meat demand. The results of this study indicate that the United States has the most to gain from an increase in the size of the South Korean imported meat market in terms of its beef exports, while South Korea has the most to gain from this expansion in the pork market. Moreover, the results indicate that the United States has a competitive advantage to Australia in the South Korean beef market. Results of this study have implications for U.S. meat exports in this ever-changing policy environment.


Author(s):  
Kevin Zhou

Canada is known for its close relations with the United States in the domains of economic affairs, defence and international diplomacy. This arrangement, however, was a product of the great changes brought about by the Second World War. The combination of British decline, Ottawa’s desire to achieve full independence from London, and the looming Soviet threat during the Cold War created a political environment in which Canada had to become closely integrated with the United States both militarily and economically. Canada did so to ensure its survival in the international system. With the exception of a few controversial issues like US involvement in Vietnam (1955) and Iraq (2003) as well as Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD), Ottawa has been Washington’s closest ally since 1945. On numerous occasions like the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and as recently as the War in Afghanistan and the War Against IS (Islamic State), Canada had provided staunch military and diplomatic support to Washington in its engagements around the globe. In an era of relative peace, stability, and certainty, particularly during the Post-Cold War period and the height of American power from 1991 to 2008, this geopolitical arrangement of continental integration had greatly benefited Canada. This era of benefits, however, is arguably drawing to a close. The Great Recession of 2007-09, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the insistence on pursuing a foreign policy of global primacy despite its significant economic cost, are sending the US down an uncertain path. Due to its close relations and geographical proximity with the US, Canada now faces a hostile international environment that is filled with uncertainty as a result of superpower decline, great power rivalries, environmental degradation, and failed US interventions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

This chapter defines Graham’s crusades in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the 1950s as powerful cultural orchestrations of Cold War culture. It explores the reasons of leading political figures to support Graham, the media discourses that constructed Graham’s image as a cold warrior, and the religious and political worldviews of the religious organizers of the crusades in London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. In doing so, the chapter shows how hopes for genuine re-Christianization, in response to looming secularization, anticommunist fears, and post–World War II national anxieties, as well as spiritual legitimizations for the Cold War conflict, blended in Graham’s campaign work. These anxieties, hopes, and worldviews crisscrossed the Atlantic, allowing Graham and his campaign teams to make a significant contribution to creating an imagined transnational “spiritual Free World.”


2022 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lijin Xiang ◽  
Shiqun Ma ◽  
Lu Yu ◽  
Wenhao Wang ◽  
Zhichao Yin

The COVID-19 infections have profoundly and negatively impacted the whole world. Hence, we have modeled the dynamic spread of global COVID-19 infections with the connectedness approach based on the TVP-VAR model, using the data of confirmed COVID-19 cases during the period of March 23rd, 2020 to September 10th, 2021 in 18 countries. The results imply that, (i) the United States, the United Kingdom and Indonesia are global epidemic centers, among which the United States has the highest degree of the contagion of the COVID-19 infections, which is stable. South Korea, France and Italy are the main receiver of the contagion of the COVID-19 infections, and South Korea has been the most severely affected by the overseas epidemic; (ii) there is a negative correlation between the timeliness, effectiveness and mandatory nature of government policies and the risk of the associated countries COVID-19 epidemic affecting, as well as the magnitude of the net contagion of domestic COVID-19; (iii) the severity of domestic COVID-19 epidemics in the United States and Canada, Canada and Mexico, Indonesia and Canada is almost equivalent, especially for the United States, Canada and Mexico, whose domestic epidemics are with the same tendency; (iv) the COVID-19 epidemic has spread though not only the central divergence manner and chain mode of transmission, but also the way of feedback loop. Thus, more efforts should be made by the governments to enhance the pertinence and compulsion of their epidemic prevention policies and establish a systematic and efficient risk assessment mechanism for public health emergencies.


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