Esther Kim ’23, Government/ EAS, KI Undergraduate Thesis Research Grant (Remote), Summer 2022

Thanks to funding from centers such as Harvard’s Korea Institute, I was able to conduct fieldwork for my senior thesis this summer. The Korea Institute supplemented the costs of spending time in research, creating contacts, transcribing Korean interviews into English notes, and making site visits once in the country.

Before embarking on this research, I had formalized the question, “How does liberal religious advocacy influence South Korea’s human rights foreign policy on North Korea towards civil and political rights (CPR) v. economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR) approaches?” I identified a variation in human rights theory between CPR and ESCR, which have their roots in competing Cold War definitions of the rights a state should guarantee for its people—the West proposed that political rights, such as freedom of expression and partaking in government, were fundamental to human rights; the East counter-proposed that guaranteeing welfare of life through food, health, and education were more important.

The idea for this thesis was that I would examine one source of political opinion-making in a highly active civil society, or the church in South Korea, to see how it affected the country’s human rights policy towards either CPR or ESCR directions. I wanted to see whether espousing more liberal theologies resulted in a more ESCR, humanitarian welfare-oriented political ideology, especially on the topic of how South Korea should deal with its dictatorial regime upstairs. Due to previous coursework I was familiar with how conservative versus liberal theologies have played out in domestic politics in the U.S., and also with the more hawkish versus engaging swings in South Korea’s foreign policy towards North Korea; I thought this project would address new depths by merging these topics.

I decided to interview different South Korean actors involved in both religious life and action on North Korea at the lay church, nonprofit, academic, and policymaking levels. I first contacted three pastors who served in different churches around the Seoul area. After a lunch of trout hui-dupbap (sushi over rice), I asked them questions centered around a) their own political beliefs and opinions on North Korea, b) how much those beliefs were expressed in their churches, and c) general relationships between their congregations and government, or political actions. The pastors noted that while the topic of North Korea is still heavily emotional—collections for aid to missionaries in the country, for example, generate the largest donations by far—the administration in office could heighten or depress the political attitude around organized North Korean events (i.e., defector testimonies, fundraising).

I also attended several different church services—one tiny local service composed of mostly elderly patrons, one for a more middle-class district, a church with a thriving youth education program and audience, and Onnuri Church, one of the most well-known names in the Korean megachurch world. After these congregations, I spoke to Christian ecumenical groups such as the National Christian Council of Korea (한국기독교교회협의회), a more liberal organization that runs the Korea Peace Campaign to end the Korean and demilitarize tensions. I was able to meet representatives from Prebyterian Church USA (PCUSA) and other Americans interested in aid to North Korea as well. These members were involved in lobbying changes for U.S. attitudes towards North Korea and completely un-involved in South Korean foreign policymaking. I discovered U.S. attitudes to be a potentially significant factor either influencing or butting against South Korean foreign policy decisions towards North Korea, enough so that it may be included more structurally into the thesis.

Next, I met with two different non-government organizations with roots in a faith-based founding that work on aiding the North Korean people. One, Justice For North Korea or JFNK (북한정의연대), was founded by Pastor Peter Chung in 2007 and focuses on the political and civil human rights abuses occurring in the country. Their vision for progress in the short term includes getting more defectors out of the country and protecting existing defectors from repatriation. In the long term, their eventual goal is to undermine the regime and free all North Koreans. The organization seemed to support previous South Korean foreign policies, often issued by more conservative administrations, that articulated human rights as an issue and were more hawkish or punitive in their approach to North Korea. An organization with a slightly different approach was called Korea Food for the Hungry International (기아대책), fka Korea Faith Hope International or Korea Friends of Hope International (KFHI). KFHI is a relief and development NGO with projects all across the world, and its North Korea project is focused on education, land development, and humanitarian response as approaches for the welfare of North Korean people. Many of the organization’s goals for North Korea coincide with a more liberal foreign policy approach, one that prizes engagement and maintaining good relations with the regime in order to have access into the country. They dealt much less with defectors and other touchy issues for North Korea, such as UN condemnation of the regime’s human rights record.

Finally, I also had the chance to speak with academics from Soongsil University and Seoul National University who have studied the issue of human rights in North Korea. Soongsil University has a strong Christian leadership bent in their programs, with a Christian Unification Leader Training Center (기독교통일지도자훈련센터) that aspires for a reunification of the peninsula. I had previously gotten the chance to meet another academic, Professor Yoon from Seoul National University, as my visiting professor for a seminar on North Korea back on campus. He had served as South Korea’s Foreign Minister under the Roh Moo Hyun administration. As one of my later interviews, he also confirmed a suspicion that had been arising in me throughout my research—that there was no real pipeline from Christian religious advocacy to foreign policy on North Korea. While certain groups might rally around certain higher profile events, such as the rallies that JFNK held to protest the repatriation of a North Korean defector, there was no sustained foreign policy attitude towards North Korea being expressed in the church, and furthermore no clear avenue of impact for any proclamations in the church to result in pressing civic action.

The fieldwork in Korea was highly valuable to me as a theory-formulating process, as well as a theory-rejecting process. While I may have to remove the project’s grounding in Christian advocacy, as well as the emphasis on liberal versus conservative ideology in the church, I was able to discern the very promising dilemma of how organizations working on CPR and ESCR approaches to help North Korea hinder or at times directly contradict each other. My focus will likely pivot to examine this conflict among parties taking very different paths to pursue the same conceivable interest—a better future for the people of North Korea.