Sovereignty and Status in East Asian International Relations

In Sovereignty and Status in East Asian International Relations, Seo-Hyun Park provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of how ‘hierarchy’ has been accepted and reproduced in East Asian international relations. The premise of this ambitious book, based on Park’s doctoral dissertation written at Cornell University, is that hierarchy is an enduring and powerful feature in East Asia. As nations continue to assert their own sovereign autonomy and seek to raise their status within existing hierarchical orders, hierarchy is perpetually reproduced. Park uses the cases of Japan and Korea to demonstrate this recurrent pattern. The book first considers hierarchical order in East Asia as the product of interactions between nations aware of their asymmetrical power relations and status differences and explains the East Asian hierarchies in their social contexts in the introductory chapter and the first chapter. Chapters 2 through 6 combine cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses and present six case studies, starting with the premodern period (chapter 2) and continuing through the transition to modernism (chapter 3), the Cold War era (chapters 4 and 5), and the post-Cold War (chapter 6). These case studies show that from the 19th century to the 21st, Japan and Korea asserted their sovereign autonomy vis-à-vis dominant countries in different historical contexts.

Autonomy · China · Development economics · East Asia · Economics · Economy · Geography · Hierarchy · International relations · Political science · Politics · Premise · Sociology · Sovereignty · Chinese history and philosophy · Japanese History and Culture · Law