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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Subempire's Embrace: Sovereignty and the Geopolitics of Asylum in South Korea

Subempire's Embrace: Sovereignty and the Geopolitics of Asylum in South Korea

Kim, Nora Hui-Jung

Hardcover

Immigration & RefugeesKorean History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798880704385
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Pages: 248
Language: English

Subempire's Embrace is the first monograph to examine South Korea's refugee policy and discourse from the 1950s to the present. Nora Kim, a sociologist, traces how US-led wars have shaped the country's refugee landscape from Korean War refugees and Vietnamese refugees to Yemeni asylum seekers, Karen resettlement refugees, Afghan evacuees, and North Korean defectors.

Building on and advancing critical refugee studies, the book introduces the concept of the subempire to argue that US imperialism relies on subordinate empires to sustain its hegemony in Asia. It shows how war functions dually: producing refugees and enabling (sub)imperial expansion. South Korea's path exemplifies this logic--emerging from an aid recipient during the Korean War to a subimperial nation during the Vietnam War, and later extending military, political, and economic influence into the Middle East and Central Asia during the war in Afghanistan. Each war has generated new categories of refugees and new rationales for their reception.

At its conceptual core, Subempire's Embrace theorizes refugee hosting as an embrace, an exercise of sovereign power that operates through both law and violence. This framework illuminates how South Korea's legal apparatus and war-driven interventions jointly shape its authority to determine who counts as a refugee and how they are embraced. The book identifies five modalities of embrace, Militarized, Surrogate, Disenchanted, Calculated, and Ambivalent; each reflects a historical moment in South Korea's evolving relationship with empire and humanitarianism.

Ultimately, Subempire's Embrace reveals how the formation of the US hegemony and the rise of the neoliberal global order have together produced a disenchanted refugee landscape, where refugees have shifted from Cold War symbols of anticommunism to depoliticized objects of humanitarian management. By situating South Korea within the networks of empire and war, the book redefines the geopolitics of refugee reception in contemporary Asia.

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