Kevin Gray
Biographic Data
| ID | 3591008 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin Gray |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin |
| FAMILY NAME | Gray |
| SIGNATURE | GRAY K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8456-8562 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 164 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Inter-Korean relations and the end of peaceful reunification
Old Wine in New Bottles
Beyond Post-Democracy
Revolution and restoration in post-war East Asia
While tensions over historical issues between Japan and South Korea have long served to impede US strategic goals in East Asia, mainstream International Relations theory has largely been unable to explain the stubborn persistence of such issues. Instead, I interpret East Asia's post-war history through the lens of Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, thereby situating the 'history problem' in the context of the dialectical relations between s…
North Korean Corporate Governance Reform and the State‐Market Nexus
The question of economic reform has been one of the most debated issues in the study of North Korean political economy. Through examining the case of corporate governance reform under the Kim Jong Un government, we argue that existing discusions of North Korea reform rest on a problematic ontological separation of state and market that fails to capture the extent to which the state uses economic reform to embed itself in and in certain respects d…
Introduction
This article provides an introduction to the special issue on post-COVID transformations. We raise three sets of questions relating to the implications of the pandemic for the sustainability of the present global political and economic system and the extent to which that system may as a result be undergoing transformation. First, what is likely to be the impact of the pandemic on the current global order based on neoliberal hyperglobalization? Se…
Debating Uneven and Combined Development/Debating International Relations
This forum arises from an online event on the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD). Following an introduction which proposes a ‘special affinity’ between UCD and International Relations (IR), four presenters at that event discuss their ‘view from outside’ UCD, including perspectives from Global Historical Sociology, Realism, Decolonial theory and Gramscian Marxism. Meanwhile four members of the audience add their views on UCD and disci…
Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands
North Korea and the Geopolitics of Development
Kevin Gray and Jong-Woon Lee focus on three geopolitical 'moments' that have been crucial to the shaping of the North Korean system: colonialism, the Cold War, and the rise of China, to demonstrate how broader processes of geopolitical contestation have fundamentally shaped the emergence and subsequent development of the North Korean political economy. They argue that placing the nexus between geopolitics and development at the centre of the anal…
China and the philosophy of internal relations
The Rescaling of the Chinese State and Sino-North Korean Relations
While Beijing has repeatedly signed up to multilateral sanctions against North Korea, it is widely regarded as having failed to strictly enforce those sanctions. Indeed, China's deepening economic engagement with the country has led observers to debate the causes of this seemingly duplicitous approach. Constructivist and realist approaches have relied on state-centric frameworks that serve to reduce Sino-North Korean relations to the high politic…
Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy
Whether we talk about human learning and unlearning, securitization, or political economy, the forces and mechanisms generating both globalization and disintegration are causally efficacious across the world. Thus, the processes that led to the victory of the ‘Leave’ campaign in the June 2016 referendum on UK European Union membership are not simply confined to the United Kingdom, or even Europe. Similarly, conflict in Ukraine and the presidency …
Cause for optimism? Financial sanctions and the rise of the Sino-North Korean border economy
This article critically engages with recent arguments that financial sanctions are capable of overcoming the shortcomings of traditional trade sanctions as well as more targeted ‘smart sanctions.’ Much of the existing analysis of financial sanctions cites as evidence of their success the case of the US Treasury's 2005 accusations against Macao's Banco Delta Asia of facilitating North Korean money laundering. We argue, however, that analysis of th…
South–South cooperation and the rise of the Global South
In this introductory article we examine the recent resurgence of South–South cooperation, which has moved once again onto the centre stage of world politics and economics, leading to a renewed interest in its historic promise to transform world order. We provide an overview of contemporary debates surrounding this resurgence, noting in particular the division between those who are optimistic with regard to the potential of Southern economic devel…
Overseas development aid as spatial fix? Examining South Korea’s Africa policy
This paper examines the extent to which South Korea’s developmental aid programme to Africa can be understood as a form of ‘aid as imperialism’. We argue against the depiction of a crude determinism between the ‘interests of capital’ and the international activism of the South Korean state through aid provision. Drawing on Harvey’s theory of the new imperialism, we argue that, while the structural transformations in the South Korean political eco…
North Korea
Hazel Smith has produced a remarkable piece of scholarship that convincingly challenges many of the prevalent cliched and outdated understandings of North Korea. The basic argument of the book is t
Neo-Colonialism in South-South Relations? The Case of China and North Korea
The past decade has seen the rapid expansion of economic ties between China and North Korea, leading to questions of whether this emerging relationship resembles neo-colonialism or a more positive form of South-South cooperation. This article argues that China's engagement is driven in the first instance by strategic considerations, namely the maintenance of the geopolitical status quo on the Korean peninsula. However, North Korea has also become…
Following in China's footsteps? The political economy of North Korean reform
Since the coming to power of Kim Jong Un in 2012, the North Korea government has recently announced, and to some degree has implemented, a new set of economic management policies known as the June 28th measures in 2012 and the May 30th measures in 2014. Both of these sets of measures seek to build upon the abandoned reforms of the early 2000s through restructuring North Korea's highly inefficient collective farm and state-owned enterprise managem…
Labour Unrest in the Global Political Economy
This paper argues that whilst the relationship between US consumerism and China's low-wage production has underpinned China's economic growth in recent years, policy-makers are increasingly cognisant of heightened internal and external vulnerabilities, namely increased domestic social unrest and downturns in US demand. Despite calls for increased domestic consumption, opinion remains divided as to the extent to which policy-makers will make a gen…
Introduction to Baxter’s Habermas
U.S. Aid and Uneven Development in East Asia
This article discusses the divergent developmental outcomes among postwar South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam. While U.S. aid has correctly been identified as a key factor in the rapid postwar development of South Korea and Taiwan, the failure of aid to establish strong institutions in South Vietnam calls for a closer analysis of how different historical and geopolitical factors explain the greater political stability and institutional capacit…
Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalization
One of the most remarkable aspects of South Korea’s transition from impoverished post-colonial nation to fully-fledged industrialized democracy has been the growth of its independent and dynamic labour movement. Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation examines current trends and transformations within the Korean labour movement since the 1990s. It has been a common assumption that the ‘third wave’ of democratisation, the end of the Cold War, …
Introduction
There has been much debate over the extent to which the rising powers of the global South are challenging contemporary global political and economic governance. While some observers see an emancipatory potential in the redistribution of power among states, others see the rising powers as firmly located within the Western-centred neoliberal world order. This collection of papers seeks to go beyond the state-centrism of existing approaches by exami…
Political Cultures of South Korea
The presidential victory of Park Geun-Hye, the dictator’s daughter, as bid for a refurbished conservative hegemony in the ROK. Origins of the elite in colonial collaboration and anti-Communist modernization, and its attempts to re-hegemonize the country’s historical trajectory
People Power in the Era of Global Crisis
This article examines the relationship between oppression, injustice, and liberation both theoretically and practically and in relation to contemporary global events and political history. The struggle for human freedom and liberation from structures of oppression and exploitation, and the relation to democracy and to the agents of social change, is the central subject of the analysis. The article summarises the critical analyses of the contribut…
South–South cooperation and the rise of the Global South
In this introductory article we examine the recent resurgence of South–South cooperation, which has moved once again onto the centre stage of world politics and economics, leading to a renewed interest in its historic promise to transform world order. We provide an overview of contemporary debates surrounding this resurgence, noting in particular the division between those who are optimistic with regard to the potential of Southern economic devel…
Introduction
There has been much debate over the extent to which the rising powers of the global South are challenging contemporary global political and economic governance. While some observers see an emancipatory potential in the redistribution of power among states, others see the rising powers as firmly located within the Western-centred neoliberal world order. This collection of papers seeks to go beyond the state-centrism of existing approaches by exami…
Labour and the state in China's passive revolution
This article begins by engaging with some recent attempts to bring the study of the agency of labour into analyses of global capitalism, and argues that these approaches fail to capture the ways in which labour movements impact upon state strategies and, in turn, how this affects the spatial and temporal nature of global capitalist restructuring. Through adopting Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, the article shows that whilst China…
Overseas development aid as spatial fix? Examining South Korea’s Africa policy
This paper examines the extent to which South Korea’s developmental aid programme to Africa can be understood as a form of ‘aid as imperialism’. We argue against the depiction of a crude determinism between the ‘interests of capital’ and the international activism of the South Korean state through aid provision. Drawing on Harvey’s theory of the new imperialism, we argue that, while the structural transformations in the South Korean political eco…
Following in China's footsteps? The political economy of North Korean reform
Since the coming to power of Kim Jong Un in 2012, the North Korea government has recently announced, and to some degree has implemented, a new set of economic management policies known as the June 28th measures in 2012 and the May 30th measures in 2014. Both of these sets of measures seek to build upon the abandoned reforms of the early 2000s through restructuring North Korea's highly inefficient collective farm and state-owned enterprise managem…
Labour Unrest in the Global Political Economy
This paper argues that whilst the relationship between US consumerism and China's low-wage production has underpinned China's economic growth in recent years, policy-makers are increasingly cognisant of heightened internal and external vulnerabilities, namely increased domestic social unrest and downturns in US demand. Despite calls for increased domestic consumption, opinion remains divided as to the extent to which policy-makers will make a gen…
The Social and Geopolitical Origins of State Transformation
Recent debates surrounding state transformation in East Asia have tended to examine either how transformations in domestic social relations undermined the efficacy of the developmental state, or how mobilisation of coercion and consent at the international level led to the adoption of neoliberal policies. Through an examination of the case of Korea, however, this article seeks to move beyond this division between ‘domestic’ - and ‘international’ …
Debating Uneven and Combined Development/Debating International Relations
This forum arises from an online event on the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD). Following an introduction which proposes a ‘special affinity’ between UCD and International Relations (IR), four presenters at that event discuss their ‘view from outside’ UCD, including perspectives from Global Historical Sociology, Realism, Decolonial theory and Gramscian Marxism. Meanwhile four members of the audience add their views on UCD and disci…
People Power in the Era of Global Crisis
This article examines the relationship between oppression, injustice, and liberation both theoretically and practically and in relation to contemporary global events and political history. The struggle for human freedom and liberation from structures of oppression and exploitation, and the relation to democracy and to the agents of social change, is the central subject of the analysis. The article summarises the critical analyses of the contribut…
Taiwan and the geopolitics of late development
Through a case study of Taiwan, this paper seeks to address recent debates surrounding the transformation of developmental states in East Asia. Whilst a number of authors have cited the Taiwanese state as being both cautious and resilient in the midst of global restructuring, this paper seeks to critically engage with such arguments by highlighting the dynamic and mutually constitutive relations between the forms of social relations that underpin…
The Global Uprising of Labour? The Korean Labour Movement and Neoliberal Social Corporatism
The role of organized labour as expression of dissent or social resistance to neoliberal economic globalization has attracted increasing scholarly interest. Several writers have argued that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘global uprising of labour’. In particular, reference is made to the labour movements of the industrializing semiperiphery, such as South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil, which are argued to show a way forward for the labou…
Cause for optimism? Financial sanctions and the rise of the Sino-North Korean border economy
This article critically engages with recent arguments that financial sanctions are capable of overcoming the shortcomings of traditional trade sanctions as well as more targeted ‘smart sanctions.’ Much of the existing analysis of financial sanctions cites as evidence of their success the case of the US Treasury's 2005 accusations against Macao's Banco Delta Asia of facilitating North Korean money laundering. We argue, however, that analysis of th…
Neo-Colonialism in South-South Relations? The Case of China and North Korea
The past decade has seen the rapid expansion of economic ties between China and North Korea, leading to questions of whether this emerging relationship resembles neo-colonialism or a more positive form of South-South cooperation. This article argues that China's engagement is driven in the first instance by strategic considerations, namely the maintenance of the geopolitical status quo on the Korean peninsula. However, North Korea has also become…
North Korea
Hazel Smith has produced a remarkable piece of scholarship that convincingly challenges many of the prevalent cliched and outdated understandings of North Korea. The basic argument of the book is t
Beyond Post-Democracy
U.S. Aid and Uneven Development in East Asia
This article discusses the divergent developmental outcomes among postwar South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam. While U.S. aid has correctly been identified as a key factor in the rapid postwar development of South Korea and Taiwan, the failure of aid to establish strong institutions in South Vietnam calls for a closer analysis of how different historical and geopolitical factors explain the greater political stability and institutional capacit…
Pedestrian democracy and the geography of hope
A notable feature of the contemporary evolution of property law has been an increasing recognition of public entitlements of access to wild or scenic natural landscape. The right to traverse someone else's land for recreational purposes is one component of what some have called ‘pedestrian democracy’. The following pages trace the origin of liberalizing developments in this area, relating these innovations to the paucity and fragility of pre-exis…
Old Wine in New Bottles
Revolution and restoration in post-war East Asia
While tensions over historical issues between Japan and South Korea have long served to impede US strategic goals in East Asia, mainstream International Relations theory has largely been unable to explain the stubborn persistence of such issues. Instead, I interpret East Asia's post-war history through the lens of Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, thereby situating the 'history problem' in the context of the dialectical relations between s…
Introduction
This article provides an introduction to the special issue on post-COVID transformations. We raise three sets of questions relating to the implications of the pandemic for the sustainability of the present global political and economic system and the extent to which that system may as a result be undergoing transformation. First, what is likely to be the impact of the pandemic on the current global order based on neoliberal hyperglobalization? Se…
The Rescaling of the Chinese State and Sino-North Korean Relations
While Beijing has repeatedly signed up to multilateral sanctions against North Korea, it is widely regarded as having failed to strictly enforce those sanctions. Indeed, China's deepening economic engagement with the country has led observers to debate the causes of this seemingly duplicitous approach. Constructivist and realist approaches have relied on state-centric frameworks that serve to reduce Sino-North Korean relations to the high politic…
From Human to Workers' Rights
Migrant workers in Korea occupy a low social position because of their objective economic position within the division of labour, hegemonic norms of racial homogeneity, and government policy that seeks to extract the labour power from migrant workers without recognising their substantive human and workers' rights. Despite the existence of an official system for the rotational employment of so-called “industrial trainees”, the dominant system in K…
Peace Profile
It's almost so trite that it's not worth putting to paper. Left‐wing tracts are brilliantly but erratically written; they drag the reader forward with their erudition only to cast him or her aside
Sartre After Marx
Migrant Labor and Civil Society Relations in South Korea
Nearly two decades have passed since migrant workers first entered Korea to fill labor shortages in the small and medium business sector. In response to the many difficulties faced by migrant workers in this highly exploitative sector of the economy, a dynamic civil society movement has emerged to provide day-to-day support for the migrant workers as well as propose alternative policy frameworks for their employment. Whilst the important role pla…
From Human to Workers' Rights
Migrant workers in Korea occupy a low social position because of their objective economic position within the division of labour, hegemonic norms of racial homogeneity, and government policy that seeks to extract the labour power from migrant workers without recognising their substantive human and workers' rights. Despite the existence of an official system for the rotational employment of so-called “industrial trainees”, the dominant system in K…
Challenges to the Theory and Practice of Polyarchy
This paper provides an analysis of the development of democracy in Korea since the transition from authoritarianism in 1987, and its implications for critical analyses of Third World democratisation. Accounts of ‘low intensity democracy’ or ‘polyarchy’ have noted Third World democratisation for its constrained and elite-centred nature, and as an outcome of US foreign policy, which has sought to demobilise restive popular movements and extend the …
The Global Uprising of Labour? The Korean Labour Movement and Neoliberal Social Corporatism
The role of organized labour as expression of dissent or social resistance to neoliberal economic globalization has attracted increasing scholarly interest. Several writers have argued that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘global uprising of labour’. In particular, reference is made to the labour movements of the industrializing semiperiphery, such as South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil, which are argued to show a way forward for the labou…
Habermas and Religion
Property in a queue
This chapter examines the interaction of property, space and time within the social phenomenon that we know as the queue: the physical line-up in expectation of service. Those who stand in line tend, whether consciously or not, to adopt many of the perceptions and strategies associated with proprietary entitlement. The chapter therefore explores the proprietary implications or connotations of the behavioral protocol of lining up. The normative re…
Pedestrian democracy and the geography of hope
A notable feature of the contemporary evolution of property law has been an increasing recognition of public entitlements of access to wild or scenic natural landscape. The right to traverse someone else's land for recreational purposes is one component of what some have called ‘pedestrian democracy’. The following pages trace the origin of liberalizing developments in this area, relating these innovations to the paucity and fragility of pre-exis…
Labour and the state in China's passive revolution
This article begins by engaging with some recent attempts to bring the study of the agency of labour into analyses of global capitalism, and argues that these approaches fail to capture the ways in which labour movements impact upon state strategies and, in turn, how this affects the spatial and temporal nature of global capitalist restructuring. Through adopting Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, the article shows that whilst China…
The Social and Geopolitical Origins of State Transformation
Recent debates surrounding state transformation in East Asia have tended to examine either how transformations in domestic social relations undermined the efficacy of the developmental state, or how mobilisation of coercion and consent at the international level led to the adoption of neoliberal policies. Through an examination of the case of Korea, however, this article seeks to move beyond this division between ‘domestic’ - and ‘international’ …
Taiwan and the geopolitics of late development
Through a case study of Taiwan, this paper seeks to address recent debates surrounding the transformation of developmental states in East Asia. Whilst a number of authors have cited the Taiwanese state as being both cautious and resilient in the midst of global restructuring, this paper seeks to critically engage with such arguments by highlighting the dynamic and mutually constitutive relations between the forms of social relations that underpin…
Foreign Donors
People Power in the Era of Global Crisis
This article examines the relationship between oppression, injustice, and liberation both theoretically and practically and in relation to contemporary global events and political history. The struggle for human freedom and liberation from structures of oppression and exploitation, and the relation to democracy and to the agents of social change, is the central subject of the analysis. The article summarises the critical analyses of the contribut…
People Power in an Era of Global Crisis
Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalization
One of the most remarkable aspects of South Korea’s transition from impoverished post-colonial nation to fully-fledged industrialized democracy has been the growth of its independent and dynamic labour movement. Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation examines current trends and transformations within the Korean labour movement since the 1990s. It has been a common assumption that the ‘third wave’ of democratisation, the end of the Cold War, …
Introduction
There has been much debate over the extent to which the rising powers of the global South are challenging contemporary global political and economic governance. While some observers see an emancipatory potential in the redistribution of power among states, others see the rising powers as firmly located within the Western-centred neoliberal world order. This collection of papers seeks to go beyond the state-centrism of existing approaches by exami…
Political Cultures of South Korea
The presidential victory of Park Geun-Hye, the dictator’s daughter, as bid for a refurbished conservative hegemony in the ROK. Origins of the elite in colonial collaboration and anti-Communist modernization, and its attempts to re-hegemonize the country’s historical trajectory
Labour Unrest in the Global Political Economy
This paper argues that whilst the relationship between US consumerism and China's low-wage production has underpinned China's economic growth in recent years, policy-makers are increasingly cognisant of heightened internal and external vulnerabilities, namely increased domestic social unrest and downturns in US demand. Despite calls for increased domestic consumption, opinion remains divided as to the extent to which policy-makers will make a gen…
Introduction to Baxter’s Habermas
U.S. Aid and Uneven Development in East Asia
This article discusses the divergent developmental outcomes among postwar South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam. While U.S. aid has correctly been identified as a key factor in the rapid postwar development of South Korea and Taiwan, the failure of aid to establish strong institutions in South Vietnam calls for a closer analysis of how different historical and geopolitical factors explain the greater political stability and institutional capacit…
Following in China's footsteps? The political economy of North Korean reform
Since the coming to power of Kim Jong Un in 2012, the North Korea government has recently announced, and to some degree has implemented, a new set of economic management policies known as the June 28th measures in 2012 and the May 30th measures in 2014. Both of these sets of measures seek to build upon the abandoned reforms of the early 2000s through restructuring North Korea's highly inefficient collective farm and state-owned enterprise managem…
South–South cooperation and the rise of the Global South
In this introductory article we examine the recent resurgence of South–South cooperation, which has moved once again onto the centre stage of world politics and economics, leading to a renewed interest in its historic promise to transform world order. We provide an overview of contemporary debates surrounding this resurgence, noting in particular the division between those who are optimistic with regard to the potential of Southern economic devel…
Overseas development aid as spatial fix? Examining South Korea’s Africa policy
This paper examines the extent to which South Korea’s developmental aid programme to Africa can be understood as a form of ‘aid as imperialism’. We argue against the depiction of a crude determinism between the ‘interests of capital’ and the international activism of the South Korean state through aid provision. Drawing on Harvey’s theory of the new imperialism, we argue that, while the structural transformations in the South Korean political eco…
North Korea
Hazel Smith has produced a remarkable piece of scholarship that convincingly challenges many of the prevalent cliched and outdated understandings of North Korea. The basic argument of the book is t
Political science (33 works) · Law (27 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Politics (25 works) · Political economy (24 works) · Economics (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Asian Industrial and Economic Development (14 works) · Development economics (13 works) · China (10 works)