Research
RESEARCH INTERESTS
International Institutions, International Human Rights Law and Humanitarian Law, Non-state Armed Groups, Gender, Comparative Politics in Asia, Korea, Philippines, Mixed-methods
BOOK PROJECT
Blacklisted Rebels: Commitment to Child Rights in Armed Conflict
My dissertation examines the conditions under which rebel groups commit to international humanitarian law with a particular focus on United Nations (UN) action plans for ending and preventing their child rights violations. Analyzing my original dataset of all rebel groups blacklisted for violating child rights by the UN from 2002 to 2018, I argue that a rebel group's commitment to child rights is determined by the group's level of concern with its domestic and international legitimacy. I also argue that a host state's motivation to blacklist a rebel group is the main factor in influencing the UN's decision to blacklist particular rebel groups. The sequence of rebel groups’ commitment to UN action plans is divided into four phases: violating child rights, listing violators, signing UN action plans, and complying with UN action plans. To examine this sequence, I use a mixed-method approach that consists of statistical analysis with large-N cases, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) with medium-N cases, and congruence tests with small-N cases including Nepal and the Philippines.
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
Iara Gonzalez-Ascencio and Minju Kwon. Forthcoming. Cohabitation with Criminals: Civilian Women’s Everyday Cooperation with Mexican Drug Cartels. International Feminist Journal of Politics. [Equal contribution]
Armed conflicts between drug cartels and the Mexican government have caused collateral damage to local communities while prompting various responses from civilian women. Existing studies on women’s reactions to narco-violence have focused on either their active resistance against violence or their direct participation in cartels. In reality, however, most civilian women’s actions exist on a spectrum between these two extreme poles, which has received relatively little attention from the literature. This article examines how civilian women cooperate with cartels by analyzing qualitative data, including 37 semi-structured interviews with participants from Jalisco, Mexico. Using the concept of “everyday cooperation,” we divide women’s actions in the narco-environment and coexisting with cartels into three categories: keeping silent, pursuing benefits and idealizing narco-cultures. Although civilian women’s actions are shaped by the normalization of violence embedded in their local communities, they strategize their behavior through social learning processes. This study conceptually and empirically contributes to the literature on civilian agency under narco-violence by scrutinizing the array of responses from local civilian women to massive criminal violence, focusing on their daily cooperation with cartels in Mexico.
Inho Choi and Minju Kwon. Online First. Ontological Complexity of Interpolity Orders: The Encounter of Choson and Tibet in Qing. European Journal of International Relations. [Equal contribution]
This article examines the ontological complexity of interpolity orders with a focus on peripheral polities in the Qing order. Existing multiculturalist studies of the Qing order emphasized diverse cultural representations of a single imperial reality, lacking an understanding of multiple realities experienced by peripheral participants. Our analysis reveals the ontological complexity—rather than cultural diversity—of the Qing order, in which multiple ontological agents experienced different lived worlds, from the encounter between Chosŏn Korean envoys and the Tibetan Panchen Lama at Emperor Qianlong’s birthday ceremony. By analyzing the Chosŏn envoy member Pak Chiwŏn’s travelog and Tibetan records, we argue that the Chosŏn envoys with Confucian ontology experienced the Panchen Lama as a subhuman, while the Lama experienced the envoys as ignorant lay beings. Observing this ontological dissonance, Pak Chiwŏn criticized the Qing court’s appropriation of peripheral ontologies and proposed experiencing other ontologies to foreground the presence of the pluriverse in the interpolity order. Beyond the Qing, an ontological approach will help reveal heterogeneous lived worlds of interpolity orders and reconceptualize interpolity order under the condition of ontological complexity.
Minju Kwon and Ya Su. 2024. Relatively Unworthy Victims? Middle-Aged Women as Rape Survivors. Violence Against Women 30(8): 1804–1824. [Equal contribution]
This study examines how the age of female survivors impacts public perceptions of rape in China. In our online survey experiment, participants consider rape as less serious when the survivor is a middle-aged woman compared to other groups of women (younger, older, or age unknown). Participants also request shorter sentencing when the survivor is a middle-aged woman than a younger woman. In China, moral codes surrounding chastity and respect for elders lead to greater emotional responses toward rape against younger and older survivors than middle-aged survivors. Our study expands studies of rape perception by theorizing public attitudes toward middle-aged survivors.
Minju Kwon. 2022. The United Nations in the Indo-Pacific Era and Competition for Legitimacy in East Asia, Journal of Peace and Unification Studies 14(1): 5–63 [In Korean, KCI]
This article analyzes official speeches on international peace and security carried out by Northeast Asian states, especially China, to secure their legitimacy at the United Nations (UN) in the Indo-Pacific era. Existing studies on Northeast Asian countries’ behavior relevant to UN peace and security agendas have focused mainly on individual states’ issues and policy recommendations. Thus, these studies have rarely explained the meanings of such speeches in a broader context of international relations theories, specifically from the perspective of social constructivism. By examining the records of the Security Council, keynote speeches at the UN General Assembly, and official remarks of state representatives and foreign ministers, this article demonstrates that Northeast Asian states, which all are “incomplete” sovereign states based on the Western conceptualization of modern sovereignty, have competed for legitimacy to attain recognition from the international society at the UN. China, Taiwan, South Korea, North Korea, and Japan have all strategically utilized the UN Charter—a core symbolic source of the UN—to legitimize themselves and delegitimize others with respect to UN memberships and permanent memberships of the UN Security Council. In particular, China has attempted to strengthen its legitimacy by emphasizing both the principle of non-interference based on the UN Charter and a Chinese-style approach. This article provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of Northeast Asian states’ interactions in international organizations amidst the current international order that is characterized by competition between the United States and China.
Research Review, Global NK Zoom & Connect, East Asia Institute, August 29, 2022 (Summary of the article with a focus on North Korea, Translated by the East Asia Institute)
Chapter 2 in Sang-Yoon Ma (ed.), Indotaepyeongyang Sidaeui Pyeonghwawa Hanbando (Peace and the Korean Peninsula in the Indo-Pacific Era), Seoul National University Press, Forthcoming.
Minju Kwon and Jeeye Song. 2020. The Korean War and Lottery: The Legislation of the Patriotic Lottery, Society and History, 128: 125–165. [In Korean, KCI, Equal contribution]
This article examines the establishment and abolition of South Korea’s Patriotic Lottery (Ae-guk Bok-gwon), which was designed to control inflation and increase government revenues during and after the Korean War. Referring to issue-framing strategies for morality policy, we argue that the government and the National Assembly presented the Patriotic Lottery with both rational-instrumental and moral frames. Despite opponents’ claims that the lottery would promote an insidious gambling culture, proponents justified the lottery as a rational and effective means of raising government revenue and financing social welfare under wartime conditions. The proponents also incorporated moral frames by describing the lottery as a non-compulsory, collective, and patriotic means of overcoming the nation’s economic challenges. However, the rational-instrumental justification of the Patriotic Lottery became weakened as the lottery lost its popularity and thereby lost its salience as a viable means for combating financial problems. Furthermore, coercive sales and lottery fraud fueled criticism of the government’s mismanagement and reignited debates on the morality of gambling, which eventually compelled the government to abolish the lottery. As the first in-depth study of the Patriotic Lottery, this article contributes to fiscal sociology by analyzing the government’s attempt to mitigate fiscal deficits and support national reconstruction in the context of the Korean War.
WORK IN PROGRESS
Naming and Shaming, and the Laws of War: When the ICRC Violates Discretion and Goes Public (with Brooke Greene and Tanisha M. Fazal)
Banning Child Pornography: Women's Political Participation and Legislation
Legitimate Hunters: Legitimacy-Making Process of the Civilian Joint Task Force in Nigeria (with Dinah Lawan)