Jeong-Woo Koo

Global citizenship and human rights: A longitudinal analysis of social studies and ethics textbooks in the Republic of Korea

What happens to traditional civic notions of nation, national identity, and constitutional rights when national curricula incorporate ideas of global citizenship, other national identities, diversity, and human rights? Using a longitudinal, mixed-methods approach, we address this issue by analyzing the nature of changes in South Korean civic education textbooks. Findings indicate that national citizenship themes remain core elements but that their emphases have weakened, while global citizenship themes have dramatically increased, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. In addition, the content and presentation of textbooks have become increasingly learner-centered, encouraging students to become self-directed, empowered individuals in a global society. Interviews with academics, practitioners, and policy makers indicate that both global and local factors contributed to these developments.

UNESCO and the Associated Schools Project: Symbolic Affirmation of World Community, International Understanding, and Human Rights

The UNESCO Associated Schools Project emphasizes world community, human rights, and international understanding. This article investigates the emergence and global diffusion of the project from 1953 to 2001, estimating the influence of national, regional, and world characteristics on the likelihood of a country adopting a UNESCO school. It also addresses the effects of national linkages to the international human rights regime. The results reveal that adoption rates are positively influenced by stronger national links to the human rights regime throughout the period and that various measures of the density of global society influence adoption, particularly after the institutionalization of human rights. Finally, the results demonstrate that democratic countries and nations with more expanded educational systems tend to adopt a UNESCO school before the period of human rights institutionalization. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on the global environment and the diffusion of innovations in education.

Love thy neighbor: Explaining asylum seeking and hosting, 1982–2008

Using a Tobit analysis, this article examines factors influencing asylum seekers’ filing of asylum applications and host countries’ recognition of convention refugees. From the views that stress socio-politico-economic conditions, we find that welfare-provisional and geographically close countries often become targets of asylum seekers, whereas politically secured and geographically remote countries have higher propensity to recognize legal status of asylum seekers. From a world polity perspective, we note that asylum seekers prefer the countries that have national refugee legislation, ratify more human rights treaties, and have greater international nongovernmental organizations membership, yet host countries – despite their linkage to the world polity – abstain from granting legal protection to asylum seekers, suggesting the possibility of a decoupling. This study contributes to both a more systematic understanding of global refugee movements and the ongoing debate on whether individuals and countries act strategically or are influenced by world cultural principles.

Measuring National Human Rights: A Reflection on Korean Experiences

This article proposes a research strategy to construct national human rights indicators and indices and uses this strategy for the assessment of human rights observance in the Republic of Korea during the period 1990 to 2007. To ensure reliability, the proposed indicators are derived from the Concluding Observations issued by the committees of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The analysis of the constructed composite indices reveals a dramatic trend of a countrys human rights improvements and setbacks over time. The article maintains that the proposed strategy is easily replicable by countries seeking to systematically assess and subsequently improve their human rights.