Minseon Ku, Ph.D.

mku@wm.edu


Postdoctoral Fellow

College of William & Mary

Year of PhD: 2023

Country: United States (Virginia)

About Me:

Minseon Ku (Ph.D) is a postdoctoral fellow with the Diplomacy Project at the Global Research Institute at William & Mary. Her research interests include diplomacy (broadly defined), identity-security nexus, US diplomacy, and South Korea's foreign policy and diplomacy. 

Research Interests

Foreign Policy

Political Psychology

Asian Politics

National Identity

Ontological Security

Critical IR Theory

International Security

Diplomacy

Public Diplomacy

International Diplomacy

Countries of Interest

South Korea

North Korea

Japan

China

United States

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2025) Routines Die Hard: Ontological Security and Audience Agency in Securitisation, Review of International Studies

How can we understand the audience agency and securitisation processes that can induce anxiety? The Copenhagen School of security studies conceptualises an audience as possessing political agency which is contingent on their capabilities to respond to securitising moves. Drawing on Anthony Giddens' approach to ontological security, we argue that there is another type of agency supplementing political agency. Ontological agency refers to exercising control over the stability and continuity of one’s everyday routines and practices to minimise disruption to these routines caused by securitisation. Because routines of day-to-day life are central to bracketing sources of anxiety, people may choose to overlook and not react to securitising moves designating threats and implementing emergency measures that can undermine ontological security. We illustrate the analytical purchase of ontological agency by using unstructured observations of South Korean people's responses to military practices that securitise North Korea to capture their public discourse as audience to securitisation. Our observations reveal that there is latent anxiety regarding North Korea that manifests in varying degrees ranging from inaction when routines are not disrupted by securitisation to outward burst of emotional reactions and breakdown when securitisation practices disrupt people’s basic routines. This raises implications about the importance of ontological security driving the success or failure of securitisation and the politics of existentialism.

(2022) The Dark Matter of World Politics: System Trust, Summits, and State Personhood, International Organization

International Relations (IR) theory has had a trust revival, with scholars focusing on how trust can enhance inter-personal cooperation attempts between leaders. We propose there is another type of trust in play in world politics. International system trust refers to a feeling of confidence in the international social order, which is indexed especially by trust in its central unit, state persons. System trust anchors ontological security, and its presence is an unstated assumption of the IR trust scholarship. In this paper we conceptualize system trust. We illuminate its presence by flagging the production of state personhood in a familiar case in IR trust scholarship, the 1985 Geneva Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. Inter-personal and system trust perspectives highlight different aspects of the same summit. The juxtaposition suggests new lines of research into: the production of state persons in diplomacy, the relationship between inter-personal and system trust, and the impact of the rise of personalistic/patrimonial leadership on diplomacy and international order.

(2022) Summit Diplomacy as Theatre of Sovereignty Contestation., The Hague Journal of Diplomacy

The recent revival in the interest in summitry in International Relations scholarship conceptualises it as an elite-centred or foreign policy-focused process targeting foreign governments and publics. This article makes a theoretical intervention on the effects of summitry by foregrounding publics as audiences of international politics who can exercise agency. Because summits are primarily elite-staged performances of Westphalian principles of state sovereignty, they generate a political space for audiences to publicly embrace or contest summitry performances and their meanings of sovereignty. They can do so by co-performing with or by counter-performing elitist summitry performances, which can generate narratives with potential to shape and alter domestic societies in the long run.

(2016) The role of identity in South Korea's policies towards Japan, Korean Social Science Journal

This paper asks why South Korea’s relations with Japan is so vulnerable todisputes over history in the post-Cold War period. It argues that South Korea’s identitiesvis-a`-vis Japan and North Korea respectively conflict with each other and leads toinconsistent policy towards Japan that hovers between cooperation and discord. By ana-lyzing South Korea’s relations with Japan as well as its policies and behavior in the post-Cold War period, this paper aims to show how identity factor affects a state’s foreignpolicy and behavior towards other states. In doing so, it questions the rationalityassumption of state behavior in IR and offers alternative explanations on how to betterunderstand ‘‘emotional’’ foreign policies.

(2015) Rational Emotions: The Role of Identity and Emotions in Dokdo/Takeshima Dispute between South Korea and Japan, EPIK Journals Online, East Asia Institute

:This paper looks at the role of emotions in international relations by linking it to identity. It blurs the distinction between rationality and emotions and explains emotional action by altering the equation of desire (interests) + belief (identity) = action. There are two parts to the argument. First, it argues that identities trigger specific emotions, making the attribution of emotional action as “irrational” obsolete. Second, an emotion lingers because it gets institutionalized. By combining the sociological approach to emotions and constructivist theory of international relations, it explains the source of the Korean public’s anger toward Japan’s actions and its persistence in the case of Dokdo/Takeshima territorial-historical dispute. It concludes by providing important implications for the study of conflicts and tensions in international relations by showing how identity clash and the anger generated adversely affect inter-state relations.

Media Appearances:

Radio Appearances:

(2021) NPR

On US-South Korea summit

Newspaper Quotes:

(2023) AFP

"Boy Who Cried Wolf: Seoul Residents Panic After False Rocket Alarm"

(2022) AFP

"Who is South Korea's new president Yoon Suk-yeol?"

(2020) AFP

"South Korea ruling party wins parliamentary majority"