KSP's 2011–12 Koret Fellow, recently retired Korean senior career diplomat Ambassador Joon-woo Park, will discuss the U.S. role in current territorial disputes in East Asia. The disputes, which threaten peace and stability in the region and could result in conflict among major powers, have their origin in the incomplete settlement of the Pacific War overseen by the United States. Ambassador Park argues that the United States thus shares responsibility for the current situation. He will review the status of the major territorial disputes in East Asia and explain why the United States has a significant role to play in their peaceful resolution and in promoting cooperative and friendly relations among the countries of the region.

As a career diplomat, Ambassador Park served in numerous key posts, including those of ambassador to the EU and to Singapore and presidential advisor on foreign affairs. Park worked closely for over twenty years with Ban Ki-moon, the former Korean diplomat who is now the United Nations secretary-general.

Ambassador Park also served for seven years at the Korean embassies in Tokyo and Beijing. During his tenure as director general of the Korean foreign ministry’s Asian and Pacific Affairs Bureau, he handled sensitive, longstanding issues relating to regional history, such as the depiction of historical events in Japanese textbooks and the treatment of the history of the Goguryeo kingdom in China’s Northeast Project.

The Koret Fellowship has been made possible by the generous support of the Koret Foundation. The Fellowship’s purpose is to promote intellectual diversity and breadth in KSP by bringing leading professionals in Asia and the United States to Stanford to study U.S.-Korea relations. Fellows conduct their own research on the bilateral relationship, with an emphasis on contemporary relations, with the broad aim of fostering greater understanding and closer ties between the two countries.

Katharina Zellweger will share her insights into North Korea based on her experience as a development and humanitarian aid worker and a resident of Pyongyang. Closely interacting with North Koreans daily, Zellweger lived in Pyongyang for five years as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). She is a Swiss national with over 30 years of experience in humanitarian work from an Asian base. Her primary engagement has been with China and North Korea.

While heading the SDC program in Pyongyang, Zellweger focused on sustainable agricultural production to address food security issues, income generation to improve people's livelihoods, and capacity development to contribute to individual and institutional learning.

Before joining SDC, Zellweger worked nearly 30 years at the Caritas Internationalis office in Hong Kong, where she pioneered the organization's involvement in China and North Korea. Her humanitarian aid programs in North Korea were coordinated through Caritas-Hong Kong. In recognition of her work in North Korea, the Vatican made Zellweger a Dame of St. Gregory the Great in 2006. 

Zellweger holds a master's degree in international administration from the School of International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and a Swiss diploma in trade, commerce, and business administration. She also apprenticed with Switzerland’s national agricultural management program.

Zellweger joined the Korean Studies Program as the 2011-12 Pantech Fellow to conduct research on the transformation, especially social and economic change, of North Korea and its society.

Ha will examine how economic and political responses alter according to the types of financial crises -- currency crisis, banking crisis, and sovereign debt crisis -- encountered and how domestic political institutions influence government responses to these crises. She argues that fiscal and monetary policies tend to be more severely tightened under a currency crisis than under other crises, and the intensity of political atmosphere such as elections and electoral competitions pressures the governments to moderate the fiscal policies and even to adopt expansionary policies.

Ha is an assistant professor in the department of politics and policy in the School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Her research areas include comparative politics, political economy, and political institutions. Her work has dealt primarily with the impact of globalization and domestic political institutions on domestic political economy, particularly as manifested in inequality, poverty, growth, unemployment, inflation, welfare spending, and taxation.

Ha received a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. In her dissertation, Distributive Politics in the Era of Globalization, she explains how globalization and government ideology have shaped income distribution in terms of welfare, inequality, and poverty. She currently works on government policy responses to financial crises and their political and economic effects.

Space is limited and RSVPs will be accepted on a first come, first served basis.

Today nuclear negotiations with North Korea, begun twenty years ago, have returned to their starting point. The Geneva Agreement of 1994 collapsed as a result of North Korea’s clandestine uranium enrichment program, and the PRC-hosted Six Party talks have failed to halt nuclear tests by North Korea. Neither the engagement policy of the Clinton Administration nor the coercive policy of President Bush succeeded in resolving the North Korean nuclear conundrum. The North now claims it should be treated as a nuclear weapons state.

North Korea is currently waging a "peace offensive" to deflect criticism from the international community for its reckless military provocations against South Korea last year. The North may also need dialogue with the international community more than we do, to obtain economic assistance, since starving people would not support their regime and nuclear weapons cannot feed its people. The United States and South Korea agree, however, that under present circumstances, engagement with North Korea would be futile. They maintain that their refusal to resume talks with North Korea is a deliberate and strategic decision. Looking back on real-world experience, North Korea has consistently used provocations as "leverage" to arrive at negotiations on its terms. In most cases, it has gained considerable concessions, using its well-known brinkmanship tactics.

Now that North Korea has confirmed the existence of its uranium enrichment program and announced it will begin constructions of LWRs on its own, neighboring countries are deeply concerned about nuclear safety—not to mention nuclear security—in North Korea. This provides a reason for an unconditional dialogue with North Korea, apparently precisely the situation North sought. In this light, Mr. Yu will review the last twenty years of negotiations with North Korea to draw lessons for dealing with the regime in the future.

Mr. Yu is a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Korea. He served as Korea's Ambassador to Israel, Japan and Philippines.