South Korea's State-led Soft Power Strategies: Limits on Inter-Korean Relations

Abstract

The South Korean government has taken on many of Joseph Nye's ideas as it is promoting a state-led soft power in the form of the cultural hallyu, foreign aid, and domestically, a future-orientated rebranding of South Korea as a multicultural state. Soft power is understood in instrumental terms as well as in more substantive terms. This state-led multiculturalism has challenged widely held beliefs in ethnic homogeneity which have been the mainspring of national identity and national security in South Korea. These beliefs have underscored inter-Korean relations as the two states officially share beliefs despite political and ideological differences. The growing significance of such state-led multiculturalism in Global Korea to attract foreign workers can be linked to a myriad of intentional and unintentional strategic issues arising from this form of state-led soft power promotion. This is particularly significant given the sensitive culture and identity across the East Asian region.     

The Limits of Cloning

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

An Inquiry into the Development Process of Village Industries: The Case of a Knitwear Cluster in Northern Vietnam

While village industries are known to have high potential to grow, their growth process has seldom been analysed. This study explores the development process of a rapidly growing village-based garment cluster in northern Vietnam. We found that both the human capital and social capital (measured by the kinship ties with overseas Vietnamese traders) of the proprietors facilitated their innovative entry into new export markets. Furthermore, general human capital acquired by schooling and specific human capital acquired by management experience are found to have contributed to the adoption of a vertically integrated production system, which, in turn, contributed to enhanced enterprise performance.     

Testing The Limits of Incrementalism: An Empirical Analysis of Expenditure Decisions by English Local Authorities, 1981–1996

Studies of budgetary outputs in public organizations are dominated by the theory of incrementalism. This perspective suggests that expenditure decisions are based on simple rules of thumb. We evaluate the validity of incrementalism by examining the annual spending decisions of 403 English local authorities over 15 budgetary cycles. Two budgetary norms are tested empirically: protect the real level of service provision, and follow central expenditure guidelines. Each of these norms is translated into two decision rules: marginality, or the size of deviations from the norm, and regularity, which refers to the consistency of such deviations over time. Few of the statistical results support the hypothesis that local expenditure decisions are dominated by general budgetary norms or specific decision rules. Our evidence therefore casts doubt on the validity of incrementalism as a theory of local budgetary outputs, and as an explanation of spending decisions in the public sector as a whole.     

The Politics of Institutional Choice Across Sub-Saharan Africa: Presidential Term Limits

During the transitions to multipartyism that began in the late 1980s, presidential term limits were adopted into the constitutions of a majority of sub-Saharan African states. Yet, a sizable minority of African governments resisted implementing such restrictions on executive power. How can this variation be explained? This article proposes an expanded strategic choice approach that posits that the degree of electoral uncertainty affects institutional choice in cases of controlled, unilateral constitutional revisions (which were common across Africa) just as much as it shapes institutional choice in situations of cooperative constitution-making through bargaining and pact-making. Based on this logic, I argue that term limits were adopted as an electoral insurance mechanism in all cases where constitutional drafters perceive the degree of future electoral uncertainty to be high, regardless of whether the constitutional review process is cooperative or controlled. Alternatively, term limits are eschewed in cases where one unified party fully controls the constitutional review process and also perceives that they will win elections into the foreseeable future. The argument is tested through a statistical analysis of the determinants of term limit choice across all relevant sub-Saharan cases.     

An Inquiry into the Heterogeneous Outcomes of International Migration: Evidence from Rural Households in Bangladesh

There are considerable differences in the duration, intensity, and history of migration experiences among migrant households. The variation can have a significant effect on their investment behaviour. We classify our sample households in Bangladesh into four groups depending on the history and stage of migration and estimate its differential effect on physical and human capital investment. The results show that the patterns of investment are distinct between the groups and even of opposite directions in some cases. These heterogeneous effects often cancel each other out, leading to insignificant effects of migration when the average effect on all migrant households is estimated.     

Accumulation by Dispossession and Its Limits: The Southern Africa Paradigm Revisited

The dispossession of agricultural producers from the land has long been considered a condition of successful capitalist development. The main contention of this paper is that such dispossession has in fact become the source of major developmental handicaps for at least some and possibly many countries of the global South. We develop our argument by focusing on the South(ern) African experience as a paradigmatic outlier case of accumulation by dispossession—that is, as one of its extreme instances capable of highlighting in almost ideo-typical fashion its nature and limits. After reconstructing interpretations of capitalist development in Southern Africa that in the early 1970s established the region as a paradigm of accumulation by dispossession, we discuss how useful these interpretations are for understanding the more recent developmental trajectory of South Africa. We then suggest ways in which these interpretations from the 1970s should be reformulated in light of subsequent developments. We conclude by briefly examining the theoretical and policy implications of the analysis.     

无锡新区：创新型国际化科技新城

位于无锡市区东南部太湖之滨的无锡国家高新技术产业开发区，是1992年经国务院批准设立的。经过十多年的创业和奋斗，如今的新区已成为长三角地区具有显著影响力的国家高新技术开发区，综合实力跻身全国54个国家级高新区的前列。近来，无锡新区又喜事连台：国内首个软件服务外包专业园区开园；国内首屈一指的IC设计主题科技园区集成电路设计园大厦落成。太湖之滨，一个产业转型新地标已然树起。     

The Limits of Instrumentalism: Informal Work and Gendered Cycles of Food Insecurity in Mozambique

The instrumentalist literature suggests that women can help achieve household food security if they have access to productive resources but do not become overburdened as a result. This paper seeks to assess the relevance of this literature by exploring the gendered cycles of food insecurity in the context of women’s informal labour in northern Mozambique. It considers the relation between women and food security as embedded in the broader socio-economic setting, and finds that the interaction of different forms of deprivation, such as lack of secure employment and conflicting labour demands, generates food insecurity.     

The Public Sector In An In-Between Time: Searching For New Public Values

A number of new governance structures has been introduced in the Danish public sector. These include contract agencies, user boards, boards of directors, marketization, corporatization, involving voluntary organizations in public services, EU-funded state border crossing co-operation, and Europeanization in many forms. Despite their obvious dissimilarities, these governance structures have one thing in common: they challenge the foundations of the public sector and territorial representative democracy by blurring the distinctions between politics and administration; between public and private; and between national and international. If politicians and voters are deprived of the capacity to make these distinctions, political responsibility is bound to fade away. Also, each new governance structure down-loads degrees of indeterminateness in the public sector since they may interact in unforeseen ways and introduce new actors, roles and practices in the public sector. This may cause the development of a more flexible public sector marked by 'local' appropriateness and adaptability but also by a multitude of inconsistent models and principles. To avoid the latter, a general discourse on values and their institutional requirements and the invention of public 'domains' is needed.     

The Infiltration of Terrorist Organizations Into the Pharmaceutical Industry: Hezbollah as a Case Study

Criminal syndicates and terrorist organizations are inherently different, one motivated by profit and the other by political goals. Yet their difference enables them to cooperate for their mutual benefit. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the drug trade; from harvesting and trafficking in illegal substances, it has been an easy transition to counterfeiting and disseminating medications. Hezbollah, in particular, has become involved in the production, smuggling and distribution of counterfeit medications in North America, Africa and the Middle East as a means of raising immense sums of money to finance its terrorist activities. Hezbollah's infiltration into the pharmaceuticals industry illustrates the danger posed by the marriage of terrorism and crime, which arises both from enhanced resources for terrorism, and from the corruption of a legitimate and necessary industry. Understanding the nature and extent of this danger is the first step in preparing to meet it.     

Scrutiny and the Political Party Group in UK Local Government: New Models of Behaviour

The introduction, via the Local Government Act 2000, of political executives held to account by influential overview and scrutiny committees challenges fundamentally the traditional operations of the party group system. This paper uses evidence from a variety of sources (including the experience of Parliamentary select committees) to explore how councillors are managing the tensions between party group loyalty and the expectation surrounding the operation of scrutiny. Four models of party group behaviour are identified with the group acting as partner, arbitrator, filter and Leviathan respectively. These typologies are then used (together with research evidence) to interpret the circumstances in which effective scrutiny may be aided or hindered by party group dynamics. Three alternative scenarios, which illustrate the impact of different political dynamics on the effectiveness of scrutiny, are identified and explored. It is concluded that the success of the overview and scrutiny experiment is by no means assured and faced with the intransigent nature of most party group behaviour, the future of effective scrutiny hangs in the balance.