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Abstract
This article is a response to Timo Kivimaki's important article about peace in East Asia. The article focuses on Northeast Asia's structural configurations (i.e., economic interdependence and deterrence systems) contributing to peace in East Asia. This article essentially argues when it comes down to peace in East Asia, two subregions of East Asia, namely Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, must be analyzed to recognize different subregions' structural orders affecting East Asia as a whole.

This article is a response to Timo Kivimaki's important article about peace in East Asia. The article focuses on Northeast Asia's structural configurations (i.e., economic interdependence and deterrence systems) contributing to peace in East Asia. This article essentially argues when it comes down to peace in East Asia, two subregions of East Asia, namely Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, must be analyzed to recognize different subregions' structural orders affecting East Asia as a whole.

AbstractIs the relatively long peace of Northeast Asia a result of crisis stability or general stability? The article introduces two stability concepts – crisis and general stability. Crisis stability occurs when both sides in military crisis are so secure due to its military capability and are able to wait out a surprise attack fully confident that it would be able to respond with a punishing counter attack. On the other hand, general stability prevails when two powers greatly prefer peace even to a victorious war whether crisis stability exists or not, simply because war has become inconceivable as a means of solving any political disagreements and conflicts. While crisis stability entails delicate balance of military power from the deterrence literature of security studies, general stability bases its logic of inquiry on constructivism where the idea of war aversion – categorically rejecting war as a means to end conflicts – becomes the prevailing norm. Therefore, this article empirically examines how Northeast Asia has sustained its peace through crisis stability and presents a new trend toward general stability.

South Korea's "Sunshine" engagement policy during the Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun administrations (1998-2007) invited heated debates over the policy's ability to induce formidable changes within Pyongyang in terms of nuclear-weapons development and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula. Critics argued that Seoul's engagement policy would incubate Pyongyang's nuclear program, not hamper it. The policy also created coordination problems in the ROK-U.S. alliance and domestic political cleavages in South Korea. This article assesses the rationale behind South Korea's engagement policy, and argues that it initiated a politics of identity reformulation between Sunshine proponents and opponents. The two liberal administrations' Sunshine policy also contributed to changes in the South's role identity vis-à-vis North Korea by resetting the concept of national interest, the identity of North Korea, and alternative means to move away from a containment strategy. The article thus contends that the unit-level change in the state's role identity must go through a political struggle against the established security identity of a state. Reconciliation through engagement in a protracted conflictual relationship has to successfully win out over the old idea of containment. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)

This article discusses the analytically unbalanced theorizing in International Relations (IR) when it comes to a region, or subsystem. The tension is between theoretical universalism and contextual exceptionalism, and it is present in the IR community in Korea. If the former group is loyal to the general principles of scientific inquiry of social research, the latter group emphasizes the unique historical experience of Korea and its theorizing efforts to reflect such uniqueness. The author argues that for the IR community in Korea to develop its own name brand, the "Korean School," as an independent and influential force like the English School, it should collectively seek to bridge its perceptual representation concerning historical uniqueness with scientifically theorizing efforts while simultaneously incorporating the general theories of IR with unique regional independent variables. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)