“History Problem” and Regional Orders in Northeast Asia

• Date & Time : Tuesday, 30 October, 2018, 12:00-13:00
• Speaker :  Professor  Jae-Jung Suh (Int’l Christian Univ.)
• Chair/Discussant : Dr. Jong-Cheol Kim (SNUAC)
• Place : International Conference Room #303, SNUAC(Bldg#101)
• Organizer : SNUAC
• Inquiry : Heejin Choi / +82-2-880-2693 / heejinchoi@snu.ac.kr

Jae-Jung Suh is currently Professor at International Christian University (Tokyo, Japan). He is visiting Seoul National University Asia Center (SNUAC) as a visiting scholar from September 2018. He has served as Associate Professor and Director of Korea Studies at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University and Assistant Professor in Department of Government at Cornell University as well as on the Presidential Commission on Policy Planning (Republic of Korea). An expert on the U.S.-Korea relations, U.S. policy toward Asia, international relations of East Asia, international security, and IR theory, he is currently working on regional orders in East Asia, human security, and North Korea. He has authored and edited numerous journal articles and books, including Power, Interest and Identity in Military Alliances; Rethinking Security in East Asia; Truth and Reconciliation in the Republic of Korea; Challenges of Modernization and Governance in South Korea: The Sinking of the Sewol and Its Causes; Origins of North Korea’s Juche: Colonialism, War, and Development. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from University of Pennsylvania and B.Sc. in physics from the University of Chicago.

Do contentions over history in Northeast Asia reflect a difficult past that casts a long shadow over the future? Or do they serve as a medium of dialogue across national boundaries when serious shifts in power or politics increase the level of uncertainty as well as actors’ anxieties about the future direction of the region? Contrary to most studies on the “history problem” in Northeast Asia that see the problem as a constant affecting the international relations of the region throughout the postwar period, this research starts with an observation of a variation in the region’s history problem. While the past may be a constant, what actors make of it varies. Professor Jae-Jung Suh proposes to re-analyze the history of the historical contentions in Northeast Asia as that of the regional actors’ attempts to manage their differences over national identities and regional orders in the context of the region’s shifting power balance. Professor Jae-Jung Suh then tries to identify actor’s legitimacy and framework as the two factors that transform the history disputes into one of four different regional orders: nationalist spheres, parallel national spheres, contentious regional sphere, and regional public sphere.