Eros Effect as Emergency Politics: Affective and Networked Politics of Agonistic Humanism in South Korea’s Sewol Ferry Disaster

This article examines how people, based on their personal reception of a crisis, come together and organize themselves to readdress the status quo in a state of emergency by exploring the sociopolitical power of affect, empathy, and spontaneity as a transformative movement mobilizer. Using Bonnie Honig’s notion of Emergency Politics, this article further conceptualizes George Katsiaficas’ notion of Eros Effect by reconsidering the transformative, constitutive power of people’s plural and contingent political agency in a crisis situation. Human affect, especially empathy to the devastated, coupled with communication networks, helps consolidate and spread what Herbert Marcuse called the New Sensibility of the human species as a transformative political power. This article further complicates Bonnie Honig’s claim on agonistic humanism by revisiting a dichotomy of mourning mothers and acting fathers. As an empirical case, this article investigates how the Korean people have organized themselves in a series of protests and rallies to take care of the victims of the Sewol Ferry after it sunk, killing more than 300 passengers, mainly high school juniors, on April 16, 2014.     

Refining the prize: Chinese oil refineries and its energy security

Since China became a net oil importer in 1993, oil refineries have played integral roles in China's quest for oil security. And yet, the capacity, security, and configurations of refineries were rarely featured in the discussions about China's oil policy. To fill this gap, this paper explains the basics of refinery economics and technology, and details the development in China's refining industry since the early 1990s. By taking refineries into consideration, it then revisits and reassesses the existing literature regarding the motives and drivers behind China's foreign oil policy, its effectiveness, and the political interactions between China and crude oil producers.     

Trading with the enemy? The futility of US commercial countermeasures against the Chinese challenge

This paper examines whether the US is in a position to adopt restrictive commercial measures against China in order to complement military balancing. It focuses on the necessary condition for serious economic measures against an adversary: the state needs to be sure that it can effectively diminish the adversary's economic performance more than its own. This essay suggests that Washington cannot ascertain that this necessary condition is met in its relations with China. Thus, it might be better for the US to avoid restricting trade with China in any meaningful way, even though bilateral security rivalry intensifies.     

Endangering alliance or risking proliferation?: US–Japan and US–Korea nuclear energy cooperation agreements

This paper seeks to understand why the United States treated Japan and Korea differently in the revisions of bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements. On the sensitive issue of grating its allies the rights of developing enrichment and reprocessing (ENR), the United States did so for Japan in the 1977 and 1987 revisions, but did not for Korea during the 2015 revision. For the great power as a supplier state, there are two factors affecting the decision: policy-makers’ concern about alliance management prior to the calculation of security outcome, and firms’ commercial interests. In order to avoid damage to the US–Japan alliance and to maintain Japan's complementation for the US nuclear industry, Washington granted the rights of ENR to Tokyo. In contrast, because of its confidence of managing the US–Korea alliance and partly because of incompatibility of commercial interests between the two, Washington did not grant the rights to Seoul at the 2015 revision. Based on the comparison of the two cases, this paper underscores a need to alter the power projection theory regarding nuclear proliferation by explicating the alliance management as the ex ante element of power projection and by accounting for commercial interests such as fuel sale and technological partnership.     

Understanding the effects of perceived ethics failure,compassionate leadership,and communication strategy on anti-government sentiment

This study conceptualizes anti-government sentiment and tests the relationships between anti-government sentiment and three antecedents (i.e., ethics failure, compassionate leadership, and communication strategy). An online survey (n = 1,112) was conducted in South Korea. Exploratory factor analysis with principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the measures proposed for anti-government sentiment. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling. Results show that publics' perceptions of the government's ethics failure, lack of compassionate leadership, and use of a buffering strategy for communication are positively related to their anti-government sentiment toward the incumbent government.