Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Human rights, korea'

In an effort to maintain peace and stability in the East Asia region, and more specifically on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. faces an enormous challenge. The collapse of the Soviet Union, repeated natural disasters, and gross regime mismanagement of economic and social resources have left thousands of North Koreans starving, while at the same time the DPRK spends exorbitant amounts of money on its military. To maintain both its legitimacy and security, the Pyongyang regime purposely and willfully commits many human right violations against its own citizens. Current U.S. foreign policy toward North Korea is centered on the nuclear "Agreed Framework" and the perceived military threat that the DPRK poses to South Korea and the region. To date, human rights issues have not been a viable part of U.S. foreign policy toward North Korea. In response, this thesis proposes foreign and security policies that clearly address the connections between human rights issues and the North Korean military threat.

From its emergence to its expansion, intellectual property (IP) has not been isolated from trade. However, in the late 1970s, business interests in the United States (US) exerted powerful pressure, leading to IP norms becoming increasingly trade-centric. Hypothesis of this thesis is that such trade-centric IP norms, encouraged and formed by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), and subsequent TRIPS-plus rules pursued by the two most active actors, the US and the European Union (EU), fail to achieve the intended purposes of IP protection. This normalization of tradecentric regulation also creates conflict with a range of economic, social and cultural values that have significant human rights implications. The goal of this thesis is to: (a) critically examine this predominance of trade in contemporary IP norms; and (b) provide a counter framework for IP policy reform. It seeks to do this by juxtaposing the theoretical and empirical aspects of IP norms against human rights. This study will pursue to prove the hypothesis by conducting case studies on two free trade agreements (FTAs) enacted by South Korea with the US and the EU. The thesis concludes that, on the whole, the context of human rights provides a just counter framework that can unify the diverse range of issues. This is more so given that human rights are strengthened by international consensual norms institutionalised by intergovernmental organisations and supported by transnational advocacy networks. Nevertheless, this thesis advocates that an overemphasis on state and individuals in the human rights discourse needs to be challenged by taking into account the dominance of global economic regulations, the prevailing role of non-state actors, and the culturally relative nature of IP.

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Far East, Southeast Asia, and The Pacific))--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2009.
Thesis Advisor(s): Twomey, Christopher. "June 2009." Description based on title screen as viewed on July 10, 2009. Author(s) subject terms: North Korean refugees, Six Party, Republic of Korea, ROK, South Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, DPRK, North Korea, China, Japan, Russia, Northeast Asia regional stability, UNC, CFC, USFK, UNC Rear, UNC Sending States, Korean diaspora, assimilation, immigration, human rights, humanitarian assistance, stability and reconstruction operations. Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-70). Also available in print.

My main argument in this dissertation is that popular nationalism in post-war South Korea, unlike the conventional claim to it among many South Korean critical intellectuals and unification policy-makers, cannot serve as an antidote to anti-North Koreanism. On the contrary, it is problematic that the cultural politics of national identification, prescribed as an authentic critical tool of challenging anti-North Koreanism, helps program hierarchical inter-Korea relationships by exposing the South Korean public to anomalous cultural-political characteristics of North Koreans. It also does so by creating popular discourses that have reinforced unification policy agendas that frame the development of North Korea in terms that would make it amenable to the needs of transnational capitalism and the legitimacy of liberal human rights discourse. This critical endeavor claims that the critique of anti-North Koreanism cannot be successful without problematizing the idea of discontinuity that stresses there is a rupture between cold war and post-cold war forms of anti-North Koreanism. This is because any un-scrutinized presumption of the historical transition can only confuse critical interpretations of the role of national identification while thereby reinforcing policy-driven resolutions for inter-Korea sociability. Thus, I locate the significance of my work in a democratic call for South Korean critical communication and cultural studies as well as the public to effectively deconstruct the contingent discursive collaboration of national identification and anti-North Koreanism that complies with transnational globalization.

This study is about Confucian humanism as the foundation of human rights and economic ethics. The study covers Korea, Japan and the Republic of China. The main research question lies in how Confucian humanism emerged as an enduring tradition, and how it impacts upon human rights and economic ethics of the three nations on their individual paths towards globalizing civil societies. Research elements are (i) literature review, (ii) focus group discussions and (iii) documentation corroborations. Literature reviews covered scholarly works of East Asia and international scholars. Narrative data were obtained from the focus group discussions. Documentation corroboration complemented the focus group discussions. The study explores the origin of Confucianism and proceeds to examine how the Confucian philosophical tradition gave naissance to Confucian humanism. From Confucian humanism, the thesis proceeds to Confucian governance (ching shih). Alternative political views of more egalitarian Confucian schools such as of Mencius also take up a good part of the governance theme. The role of life long self-cultivation is seen as the foundation of character-building for respective societal roles within Confucian ethics and social ethos. The modern democratic institution of human rights is argued as having emerged from the fertile demo-centric Confucian social psychology, but benefited directly from the Western institutional models. Discussions on the tradition of Confucianism and that of Confucian humanism progress through the important turning points throughout history, i.e., the Classic age of Confucius, the Neo-Confucian reformation, the Practical Learning sub-era of the Neo-Confucian era, and, finally, the contemporary Neo-Confucian. The discussions highlight that the Confucian tradition of 'humanity' that Confucius and his disciples formulated in the Classical age endured through the ages to modernity. They also point to the notion that Confucians pursued their intellectual, moral and aesthetic ideals to the highest possible level through the system of learning, philosophizing, and practicing in the tradition. The Confucian cosmology of the 'human to nature' nexus and the Confucian spirituality of cosmic immanence in the 'self' provide clues to the multi-layer structure of Confucian consciousness of self, selves and the greater self, namely society or the Heaven itself. The Neo-Confucian school of 'mind and heart' learning reinforced the inquiry into selves in nexus to nature and the universe. Religious tolerance and the adaptability of Confucianism have stood out as important qualities in the globalization of East-Asian values and ethos, i.e., Confucian 'souls and decorum.' Japan, as an island nation with a unique perception of its self-identity, employs Confucianism, still considered fundamentally as the philosophy of China, to reinforce the national identity without compromising the integrity of the Japanese tradition and sensitivity. Japanese aesthetic sensitivity would place aesthetic unity with nature on equal footing with that of moral unity with the world. Secularism and spirituality of Confucianism benefited from the peaceful co-existence amongst the three great philosophical traditions of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The thesis as an inquiry into Confucian humanism as a living tradition concludes by answering the main research question and its three associated postulates.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.
The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 30, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.

Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have escaped from their home country since the mid-1990s. Although it is a Party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, China, the main host country receiving escapees, has constantly denied their refugee status without any proper procedures and sent all of the North Korean Escapees (NKEs) back to the high probability of torture and even execution. The application of international refugee law to the NKE case has been tried, mainly focusing on the refugee status of NKEs together with the principle of non-refoulement. However, their status as Convention or political refugee is seriously challenged by the main host country, and this requires us to consider – while developing stronger arguments under refugee law, e.g. ‘Republikflucht’ – additional forms of protection that may be available under other areas of international law. Given that human rights law can apply to any persons irrespective of their legal status such as refugees or illegal immigrants, it seems to be a promising alternative to refugee law. In this context, the contents of human rights treaties to which China is a Party need to be carefully examined: among others the 1984 Convention against Torture. This thesis breaks new ground in offering a systematic examination of the rights of asylum-seekers not only under refugee law but also under human rights law and other areas of international law. Part one deals with refugee law issues such as political refugees and NKEs (Ch. II), humanitarian refugees and NKEs (Ch. III) and protection measures under refugee law (Ch. IV). Part Two discusses human rights applicable to NKEs based on international human rights law (Ch. V) and the protection mechanisms available to NKEs under this area of law (Ch. VI). Taking into account the positive ‘interaction’ between international refugee law and human rights law, the ‘co-action’ of both laws should be pursued and supported for the protection of the desperate NKEs.

Amidst the global wave of democratization, modernization, and economic engagement during the 1980s and 1990s, the traditional tenets of constitutionalism have proven to be unwieldy dogma for States undergoing periods of rapid transition. In order to retain the administrative capacity to steer – rather than merely adapt to – political and social change, numerous transitioning States have adopted a new paradigm of constitutionalism, namely transitional constitutionalism, characterized by a centralized and streamlined structure of governance. However, in many instances, including Korea’s post-division transitional history, this model has demonstrably undermined fundamental human rights protections. In this thesis, I propose a hybrid constitutional paradigm for unification in Korea (another form of State transition) which seeks to balance the dual objectives of effective governance and human rights protection. I do so by examining and critiquing the core principles of traditional and transitional constitutionalism, outlining the human rights issues that the unified Korea will likely confront in its constitutional trajectory based on an analysis of Korea’s political, social, cultural, and constitutional history, and finally proposing a hybrid model of constitutionalism that utilizes an institutional approach to prevent violations of human rights in the unified Korea while allowing the State to retain governmental efficiency during transition.
Thesis (Master, Law) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-30 11:35:33.362

This dissertation explains why Taiwan and South Korea experienced democratic breakthrough in the late 1980s, when Singapore failed to do so. It explains this variation in democratic outcomes by specifying the causal mechanisms underpinning the international-domestic political interface of democratic development in these cases. New empirical evidence discovered in the course of this research has confirmed that transnational networks of nonstate and substate actors were an indisputable source of external pressures on the authoritarian governments of Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore during the late 1970s and early 80s. Foreign human rights activists, Christian missionaries and ecumenical workers, members of overseas diaspora communities, journalists, academics and students, along with legislators in key democratic countries allied to the target governments, were found to have raised the international profile of political repression by flagging them as reprehensible human rights abuses. Within the context of an international normative environment where human rights was increasingly considered a legitimate international concern, these transnational actors generated a negative international opinion of the target governments. Such grassroots pressures had the potential to raise the cost of political repression for these target governments with the effect of curbing repressive state behavior, thereby protecting key domestic actors with the potential to effect democratic breakthrough. The extent to which these external pressures could effectively constrain repressive state behavior depended, however, on the immediate geopolitical circumstances of each case. Geopolitical circumstances were also important because they could affect the strength of the protection regime. Thus, the exposition of the transnational protection regime as the causal mechanism underpinning the international-domestic political interface of democratic development requires that we specify the exact role of agency within the international normative and geopolitical contexts in which they operate. This dissertation develops such an abstracted causal model for the purposes of application in other cases and for policy analysis.

This thesis examines how corporations use North Korea’s media portrayal to profit. By gaining government contracts to develop weapons and missile defense systems, companies such as Lockheed Martin make billions of dollars. The thesis will examine how this is accomplished in three stages: first, by examining how soft power is generated and used to build a consensus. Then, government usage of soft power to rationalize North Korea as a threat is discussed. Finally, how corporations profit from government-authorized weapons programs will be detailed. The thesis will incorporate theory based off of the ideas of Joseph Nye, as well as geopolitical concepts promulgated by Michael Hardt.
Graduate

Significant resources have been directed at stemming sex-trafficking. Despite this, it continues to flourish. The harm that results from an illicit global industry that nourishes crime, corrupt officials, and opportunistic consumers, is immense. This thesis presents a conceptual framework to consider the complexity, power relationships and reality of sex-trafficking. The thesis describes the extent of, and harms caused by, sex-trafficking internationally and into Australia. It examines international efforts to fight the problem, noting that these encounter two fundamental barriers. The first is that poverty and sex discrimination in source countries generates an ongoing supply of trafficked women. The second in the words of one senior United Nations official - is that ‘demand – at least for sexual exploitation – is largely the problem of the developed world ... Sexist attitudes, lifestyles that insult the dignity of women, and expensive media and advertising campaigns that exploit their bodies create a market for gender-based exploitation’ and trafficking (Luiz Carlos Da Costa ). Using an ethical-philosophical approach, the thesis explores fundamental concepts such as power, framing, choice, agency, exploitation, consent, adaptive preferences and the capabilities needed to lead a fully human life. Interviews on the ethical and policy issues with a number scholars, ethicists, criminologists, jurists, senior policy-makers and outstanding contributors to public-policy debates permits the thesis to test and extend its conceptual framework. This engagement, a virtual colloquium, reinforces that ethically robust policy development requires a demand focus that must take in the global political, economic, gender and cultural environment.

Since the 1970s we have witnessed a flourishing of transitional justice efforts around the globe. Yet, the actual impact of transitional justice is in question. This study assesses the impact of transitional justice with a single-case study of South Korea, the May 18 Democratic Movement (5.18) case in particular. In addition to the impact assessment, my dissertation provides an explanation on how transitional justice mechanisms exert their impact. To assess the impact of transitional justice, the study examines three dimensions - civil-military relations, historical narratives and institutional safeguards against human rights violations – which are essential in deterring further human rights violations by states. After process tracing the evolution of each dimension for the last 36 years, the study finds that transitional justice in South Korea has had a positive impact on deterring human rights violations since the democratic transition: the impact on civil-military relations and historical narratives is strong and positive, and the impact on institutional safeguards is positive, but somewhat limited due to South Korea’s unique security circumstances. Although the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms was imperfect and their impact is limited in some domains, on balance, the benefits of pursuing transitional justice in the South Korean case outweighed any possible costs – benefits in terms of (1) strengthening civilian control over the military, (2) creating a new historical narrative that delegitimated human rights abuses, and (3) creating institutional safeguards against human rights violations. Despite the possible negative consequences, the South Korean experience suggests that if transitional justice is pushed by strong public demand and properly implemented (sequence, timing, etc.), it can actually be more profitable and fruitful in establishing a society in which human rights are well respected and protected. The study also finds that transitional justice is a long and non-linear process, and not only the outcome but also the process itself produces a positive impact.
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