Taking Japan-North Korea Relations Seriously

centrality of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) to politics in Northeast Asia has been underscored above all by the country's suspected development of nuclear weapons since the early 1990s. North Korea provides a number of issues in regards to which the other regional actors try to coordinate their policies. Yet the literature analyzing the coordination of policy towards North Korea too often neglects aspects of the geostrategic context in which the nuclear drama is unfolding; diplomacy towards North Korea has been dissected predominantly from the viewpoint of US-North Korea relations. This binary focus is quite representative of international relations research in general, both in the postCold War era and earlier. Here, just as in many other contexts, the role, stature and leadership of the United States is often simply taken for granted. The assumption of US power functions as the unquestioned background against which research is done, and upon which analysis is built. In the sense that it possesses the greatest capability, the US may well be described as the most powerful state in the post-Cold War era. However, the limits of US power have recently been suggested by developments in Iraq, Iran and now North Korea, with the result that the extent of US power in concrete circumstances is a question that needs continuous elaboration. The tendency not to scrutinize sufficiently the issue of US power in the literature on multilateral coordination of policy on North Korea is probably further emphasized by the fact that most books and articles addressing the topic are written from a distinctively often rather myopic US perspective, engaging mostly USbased scholars.2

Geography · Political science · History · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies

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