Andrew Yeo

Business as usual: The role of norms in alliance management

How do allies successfully manage their alliance partnership in times of political crisis? We argue that the procedural norm of political contestation and the substantive norm of security consensus set the parameters for non-detrimental disagreement among democratic alliance partners. Rather than interpreting sharp disagreements with the US as signs of soft-balancing or alliance decline, we explain the seeming contradictions in alliance behavior — maintenance of the alliance versus sharp disagreements within the alliance — by drawing norms and institutions into the power equation. We use within- and cross-regional case comparisons of alliance disputes in East Asia and Europe to test our argument in both bilateral and multilateral contexts, respectively.

Alleviating Misery: The Politics of North Korean Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy

IntroductionNorth Koreans suffer from human rights abuses at the hands of the Kim regime. Despite consensus regarding the serious nature of abuses, addressing (much less resolving) these issues has proven to be difficult. Complicating matters further, the problem of North Korean human rights is embedded in the context of perpetual nuclear and humanitarian crises. This has stimulated ethical debates and much soul-searching among policymakers, aid workers, and activists torn between choices of principle and pragmatism. It has also inevitability led to the politicization of North Korean human rights.The politicization of North Korean human rights in U.S. foreign policy raises an interesting puzzle: why do human rights and humanitarian aid groups with noble intentions of alleviating human suffering at times distrust one another? In an ideal world, human rights, and its close cousin, humanitarian aid, knows no politics. But among narrow policy and activist circles within the human rights and humanitarian aid communities, politics has inevitably crept into the picture as different tactics, goals, and worldviews collide.This article explores different responses to human suffering in North Korea and the evolution of the contrasting yet symbiotic relationship between engagement and advocacy approaches to human rights since the mid-1990s in the United States. More concretely, I examine how short and long term strategic goals interacted with different moral and principled beliefs. This interaction produced two different networks working to alleviate the plight of North Koreans. One response to North Korean suffering stressed continued engagement with North Korea at the strategic, but more importantly humanitarian level. As evidence of gross human rights violations mounted in the late 1990s, a second network emerged shifting their focus toward advocacy and awareness, demanding greater political rights and freedoms for North Koreans.Understanding the Political ContextTo clarify the difference between these two ideal-type camps,1 an engagement-oriented approach seeks to meet the basic needs of North Koreans and improve living conditions through humanitarian initiatives, social entrepreneurship, educational training, and market-oriented business development.2 Engagement does not necessarily mean holding negotiations with the regime. Rather, it implies various levels of interaction with North Koreans at the state or local level with the goal of building working relationships.3 At the heart of an engagement approach is the idea of building relations and partnerships at the people-to-people level.On the other end of the spectrum are the human rights universalists who advocate greater freedom, liberty, and political rights for North Koreans.4 Naming and shaming the regime by documenting violations and reporting on topics such as the location of gulags, sex trafficking, the refugee crisis, or religious persecution remain their staple. Some have engaged in activities which at times encroach on North Korean sovereignty. This includes establishing an underground system helping North Koreans escape to the safety of other countries, often in Southeast Asia or Mongolia, in hopes of seeking asylum in South Korea, or sending information about the outside world into North Korea through radio broadcasts, USB drives, DVDs, and balloons.Drawing on evidence from primary and secondary accounts, interviews with human rights activists, and participant-observation at North Korean human rights events from 2009 to 2011 (see Appendix A), I build an analytical framework which helps shed light on the politicization of North Korean human rights. I argue that variations in the interaction between short- and long-term strategic and principled beliefs resulted in a division between a humanitarian engagement and a human rights advocacy/naming-and-shaming approach to North Korean suffering. Strategic beliefs here refer to ideas held by individuals which inform decision-making on national security issues. …

U.S. Military Base Realignment in South Korea

Although Donald Rumsfeld, the much maligned Secretary of Defense of the Bush years, has faded from public scrutiny, his two major legacies—the Iraq War and U.S. overseas military realignment—continue to impact global affairs and current military conflicts. Most are familiar with Iraq. Less well-known, however, was Rumsfeld’s ambitious attempt to transform the U.S. military. Hailed by then Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, as “the most profound re-ordering of U.S. military forces overseas since . . . World War II,” the Global Posture Review (GPR) entailed a major reshuffling and drawdown of Cold War–era bases.

Signaling Democracy: Patron-Client Relations and Democratization in South Korea and Poland

Facing massive protests, why did incumbent regimes in both South Korea and Poland repress movements for democratization in the early 1980s but make democratic concessions to the opposition in the late 1980s? I demonstrate how the United States and the Soviet Union as superpower patron states influenced democratic transitions in South Korea and Poland. The different outcomes across time are partially attributed to superpower policies toward their client states. Absent in 1980 were strong, credible signals from the United States and the Soviet Union to their respective client states to support political liberalization. But in the late 1980s superpowers affected the calculus of client state elites by either signaling or encouraging governments to make concessions to the opposition.