November 25, 2017 at 10:36 PM
I organized a panel with my colleague, Yanming Li at the University of Tokyo, on the geopolitics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI garners attention in many scholastic and policy forums around the world as of late, but not necessarily so in Japan – excluding perhaps reports on some Japanese newspaper outlets. The […]
August 21, 2017 at 3:39 AM
I completed my two-year postdoctoral fellowship at NUS and left Singapore on August 15, 2017. The second half of my postdoctoral fellowship was an array of writings on Northeast Asia and the Middle East, presentations of my work at different conferences in several different countries – namely, Japan, China, South Korea, the US and the UK […]
I had not gone back to China since I left Beijing after dissertation fieldwork on July 31, 2012. So my visit to China marked a return in almost five years. The Zhou Enlai School of Government of Nankai University in Tianjin, where I gave my first presentation within mainland China in 2008, had built a […]
In mid-April, one of the personnel at a global immigration law firm came to me after seeing me in a series of TV interviews on current international affairs, and explained that his firm wants me to give a keynote at an upcoming immigration conference his firm will be hosting. He had looked up my research profile […]
I recently returned from a trip to five major US cities in the Northeast – New York, Middletown, New Haven, Boston, and Washington, DC – via the Incheon International Airport in Seoul from May 15 to May 29. The trip was planned around the East Asian Policymaking Workshop at Wesleyan University. Because the trip was […]
March 30, 2017 at 11:34 AM
An unprecedented research trip to the UK occurred from the 19th to the 25th of March – three days each in London and Manchester. My previous visits to the UK had been purely for visit purposes – this time it was purely research and conference oriented. I spent the first three days in London digging […]
March 12, 2017 at 9:20 AM
The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Korea’s decision to impeach (former) President Park Geun Hye and her departure from the Blue House comes at a difficult time when the country strives to find a way to make things anew. These are very challenging times both domestically and externally. Economic downturn, rapid aging of the […]
January 31, 2017 at 7:49 PM
For the past month and a half I did a tour around Asia – from Singapore to Tokyo, to Seoul, to Bangkok, to Tokyo again, then back to Singapore. I was dispatched to Tokyo as part of the NUS-Keio Workshop, and spent two weeks of December and another two weeks in January in Tokyo Midtown. […]
November 9, 2016 at 8:46 PM
American prestige has come to an end. Watching as the final vote count was webcast throughout the world, what struck me more than ever was the hidden preferences of the American voter. ‘Trumpism’ in the most negative sense has been manifested throughout the campaign, but opinion polls prior to election day failed to capture what the […]
October 3, 2016 at 6:31 AM
A decade has passed since my time at the UNSC Sanctions Committees (2005-06). After the PhD training, I have come to realize that after obtaining the PhD, you are free to decide what you research. At each stage of my life, I took up a new language – Korean was my native, English in elementary […]
