Event

29th June 2024, Saturday
Seongsu, Seoul Korea

The lecturer, professor Sung Ryeol Kim is a Diplomacy professor at Busan University of Foreign Studies who is the first ever defector to obtain the professor profession in South Korea.  The lecture consisted of 3 different sections.

Human Rights Issues in Imperfect Sovereign States

According to Professor Kim, there are several characters that defines East Asian Imperfect Sovereign States. 

1. Sovereignty Continuation (System competition)

2. A Zero-Sum Game that deals security problems (Presupposing that one side will extinct)

3. The early stage of the division structure and the emergence of those who want to take advantage of the division

4. Those who exploit division and human rights issues

5. The structure of internal and external balance.

These contrasts to Kenneth Waltz’s Sovereignty Theory which states that it does not act the way as it pleases but it decides how to regulate the internal and external challenges. In Theory of International Politics, Waltz has stated that sovereign state decides for itself how to cope with internal and external problems and whether to or not to seek assistance. Waltz mentions the concept of sovereignty is the key to understand the equal treatment of all states. Regardless of their economic power, population, territorial size and that all state is equal in their desire to maintain or strive for the freedom of social self-development. 

Access to the Universality and Relativity of Human Rights

On this section, professor contrasts two ideas of Lee Kun Yew (Culture is Destiny: A conversation with Lee Kuan Yew) verses Kim Dae Jung’s Western values (Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia’s Anti-Democratic Values) The cultural differences in Western and East societies exist and so does their political implications. Professor brought is up to explain that the concept of human rights may be universal but it maybe different and be relative according to countries. For instance, the concept of human rights does exist in both Asia (let’s take China for example) and Europe, but the Europe’s opinion on some specialties may not correspondent with Asia (China). 

The problem that Korea facing when advancing human rights can be also applied to the universality and relativity. For the former, they emphasize that the rights in North Korea and the issues should be dealt with in terms of universal values for humanity, face up to the fact that we should not turn a blind eye to human rights as the same people, and even think about what we can do when we think about unification in the future. For the latter, in the case of the relativity approach, these scholars emphasizes that North Korea is under a socialist system and that it can have a negative impact by emphasizing the specificity of confronting various things in a divided state. The conservative party and the liberal party has their own view points, mainly stemming from the conservatie party focuses on ddenuclearization while the liberal party tries to admit the North Korean regime. With this bipolar view, the Korean peninsula has a long way to go when finding a midway to discuss reunification and furthermore, human rights in general.

The whole session lasted around 2 hours. For the students who study international relations, political science, North Korea is not a new topic. The regime has existed, and it is continuously there to suppress its own people day by day. The regime emphasizes on the stability of the regime rather than the happiness of its own people. This frustration will continue unless the global society cooperates to eradicate the roots of the problem. South Korean government should be on the same page when they are talking about North Korea. Rather than fighting over rather it is peace first or reunification first (vice versa) they should agree on the same idea to face North Korea realistically and investigate with cosnsistent arguments. The current generation got many information about the outside world, especially on South Korea. With this urge to learn more about the countries than theirselves, the professor predicts the regim won’t be able to hold its power much longer as the foundation crumbles down. The Korean peninsula not only needs to cooperate but also needs to think about the relationships with other neighboring countries such as Russia, China and mostly, USA.