"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought" –Albert Szent-Gyorgyi.
Publications
Dongwook Kim, 2013, "International Nongovernmental Organizations and the Global Diffusion of National Human Rights Institutions,"
International Organization 67 (3), pp. 505-539.
ABSTRACT: During the past three decades national human rights institutions (NHRIs) have spread to more than one hundred United Nations (UN) member states and become key to human rights enforcement and democratic accountability. Given that NHRIs can take on a life of their own even under adverse conditions, why do governments in the developing world create permanent, independent national bodies with statutory powers to promote and protect human rights? Human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are crucial for global diffusion. They empower local actors and influence governments in favor of NHRI adoption by mediating the human rights and NHRI discourses and mobilizing shame internationally. An event history analysis offers robust evidence that controlling for the UN, regional organizations, and other rival factors, human rights INGOs have systematic positive effects on diffusion. The case studies of South Korea and Malaysia provide process-tracing evidence that the hypothesized causal mechanisms are operative.
Dongwook Kim, 2016, "International Non-Governmental Organizations and the Abolition of the Death Penalty,"
European Journal of International Relations 22 (3), pp. 596-621.
ABSTRACT: During the past 45 years, nearly 100 national states have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. This global diffusion poses a puzzle since capital punishment has long been accepted as the ultimate criminal sanction and its abolition has been often politically unpopular in many parts of the world. Although the literature has provided several possible explanations, the role of human rights international non-governmental organizations in worldwide death penalty abolition has not yet received sustained analytic attention. This article offers the first such analysis by arguing that human rights international non-governmental organizations empower pro-abolition constituencies and influence governments toward abolition by framing capital punishment as a human rights violation and lobbying parliamentarians to repeal death penalty laws. Event history analyses of 158 national states from 1967 to 2010 offer strong support for the theory. Controlling for regime type, regional demonstration effects, the Council of Europe, and other rival factors, this articles finds that human rights international non-governmental organizations' local engagement has strongly significant positive relationships with complete abolition. This finding is highly robust against control variable bias, endogeneity bias, omitted variable bias, model dependence, and the alternative operationalization of control variables and the dependent variable. Furthermore, the Philippines example demonstrates the theory's plausibility. It provides process-tracing evidence that through human rights framing and legislative lobbying, the national sections and member organizations of such human rights international non-governmental organizations as Amnesty International, the International Commission of Catholic Prison Pastoral Care, the International Federation of Human Rights, and Caritas Internationalis led Philippine legislators toward complete abolition in 2006.
Dongwook Kim, 2018, "The Determinants of Transnational Human Rights Reporting in Asia,"
Journal of East Asian Studies 18 (2), pp. 205-227.
ABSTRACT: Why do some national governments in East and Southeast Asia receive more transnational scrutiny and pressure on their domestic human rights practices than others? This article argues that transnational human rights reporting is more likely to target states where domestic activists and victims are densely connected with human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) through a local membership base. Human rights INGOs increase social demands and opportunities for transnational human rights reporting by strengthening local actors’ capabilities to leverage human rights and international solidarity as an advocacy strategy, and by mobilizing them for monitoring and information collection on the ground. Event count analyses of twenty-five Asian states from 1977 to 2008 find robust support for the theory, using new data on Amnesty International’s human rights reporting and human rights INGOs’ local membership base, and controlling for government respect for human rights, regime type, military power, and other factors.
Chonghyun Choi and Dongwook Kim, 2019, "The Determinants of Anti-Government Protests in Asia,"
Journal of East Asian Studies 19 (3), pp. 315-338.
ABSTRACT: What determines cross-national variations in the extent of anti-government protests in Asia? Anti-government protests have surged across Asia in recent years, with many contributing to consequential political change. However, systematic cross-national comparison of the determinants of protests in Asia is still largely missing. This article fills this important gap by quantitatively examining the explanatory power of the three main theories of contentious politics—namely, grievance, resource mobilization, and political process theories—in the Asian context with new data on anti-government protests in all 25 Asian states from 1990 to 2016. The analysis finds that urbanization, information and communication technology, and regional demonstration effects are the strong catalysts of anti-government protests in Asia while repressive state capacity particularly dampens protests. The finding offers important insights into the dynamics of anti-government protests that have become increasingly salient in Asian politics.
Dongwook Kim and Chonghyun Choi, 2020, "Civil Society and Labour Rights Protection in Asia and the Pacific,"
Pacific Affairs 93 (1), pp. 89-111.
ABSTRACT: Why do some national governments in Asia and the Pacific protect labour rights better in practice than others? This article argues that labour rights are better protected in Asia-Pacific countries where civil society organizations participate in the government’s policy-making process more intensively. It goes beyond treating regime type in the aggregate and demonstrates that the associational dimension of regime type plays a critical role in shaping government protection of labour rights in Asia and the Pacific. Multivariate longitudinal analyses of all 30 Asia-Pacific countries from 1981 to 2011 find robust support for the theory, using new data on civil society participation, and controlling for electoral democracy, trade openness, economic development, unobserved country-level heterogeneity, and other factors.
Dongwook Kim and Paul Nolette, 2024, "The Institutional Foundations of the Uneven Global Spread of Constitutional Courts,"
Perspectives on Politics 22 (1), pp. 294-311.
ABSTRACT: Since the third wave of democratization, specialized constitutional courts have spread widely across developed and developing countries and become key to government accountability, rights protection, and cross-institutional conflict resolution. Simultaneously, nearly half of all constitutional court adoptions have occurred in Europe. What explains the global, yet Eurocentric, spread of constitutional courts? Countries’ institutional endowments, particularly domestic and international legal institutions, are key to this crucial choice of constitutional design. Common law countries are less likely to establish specialized constitutional courts than their civil law counterparts due to their domestic legal system’s relatively weaker affinity with the constitutional court model. Furthermore, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission—the main international organization specifically promoting constitutional courts—has catalyzed their wide and rapid spread especially, but not exclusively, in Europe. Our theory gains robust support from event history analyses of 172 developed and developing countries from 1947 to 2019.
Dongwook Kim, 2015, "Mobilizing 'Third-Party Influence': The Impact of Amnesty International's Naming and Shaming,"
in H. Richard Friman, ed., The Politics of Leverage: Name, Shame, and Sanction in International Relations (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 61-85.
Dongwook Kim, Forthcoming, "Quantitative Approaches and Theory Evaluation in Norms Research,"
in Sassan Gholiagha, Phil Orchard, and Antje Wiener, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Norms Research in International Relations (London: Oxford University Press).
Manuscripts under Review
Three single-authored and three co-authored articles. Under review or in progress.