Research

What explains the striking sensitivity and concern over the free flow of persons across boundaries? I contend that international status can predict the emotions that a country feels toward another country and that these emotions determine behavioral tendencies toward these countries. I test my theory through survey experiments on immigration attitudes, which provides a unique opportunity to capture international emotions and behaviors at the individual level. Recently, the liberal paradox has further created tension between those who advocate for an ever-expanding liberal state and nationalists who feel disillusioned and excluded by the inflow of immigrants. The repercussion of this tension is a rising wave of populist regimes that advocate for nationalist foreign policies and immigration restrictions. Similarly, the rise of populist demagogues has caused anxiety regarding the potential for status-related concerns to escalate international rivalries. This dissertation builds upon the insight that the difference between the movement of people across borders from the movement of goods is ultimately a problem of national identities and entangled emotions.

Why do some human rights issues gather individual mobilization sufficient to create social pressure while others do not? While a burgeoning literature engages with the importance of social pressure created by human rights campaigns in improving human rights situations by convincing states or organizations, the mechanism underlying how this pressure is created is often assumed and thus undertheorized. I propose a microfoundational framework that emphasizes connective action formed from the bottom up, especially focusing on the role of emotions shared through social media. I examine the aftermath of the release of the photographs of Aylan Kurdi, comparing it with recent trends in online activism. I enlist Google Trends and Twitter data to test how the effect of initial individual stimulus aggregates to create social pressure. I show that the framing of the photograph acts as a trigger to elicit empathy and mobilize consensus on the issue. Moreover, social media plays an important role in dissipating and catalyzing emotions to mobilize action. These results show that a full understanding of human rights campaigns requires attention to the mechanism of emotions that will lead individuals to agree and participate. This has important implications for understanding microfoundations, human rights campaigns, and the behavioral revolution in international relations.

States have been increasingly offering apologies to redress past human rights violations. However, states select specific human rights violations to apologize for. In other words, states apologize for certain types of human rights violations more frequently, while they do not apologize for specific types of human rights violations. We know much less about what explains this selectivity regarding the human rights violations that states apologize for. States rarely apologize for sexual slavery or sexual violence in armed conflicts. It is striking that even states do often apologize for other human rights violations and choose not to apologize for sexual violence that happened in the same period. What drives states’ selectivity of political apology across the types of human rights violations during armed conflicts? This paper advances a framework for analyzing variation in the targets of state apologies. We argue that collective guilt drives states to apologize for non-gendered war crimes, while collective shame makes states distance themselves from sexual war crimes, resulting in non-apology. The lens of gender enables us to distinguish between different moral emotions that are entangled with the types of human rights violations. Eventually, gender can explain why states do not apologize for certain types of human rights violations, whereas they do not apologize for specific human rights violations. We propose a survey experiment as one of the adequate methods to examine whether collective guilt leads to a political apology, whereas collective shame induces non-apology for sexual violence. The paper’s findings help broaden our understanding of conditions in which states apologize.

This paper investigates how national sentiments towards trading partners act as a determinant factor of trade policy. It has long been questioned why countries do not always engage in the level of free trade that is expected by their material interests. Political Scientists have pointed to various reasons within domestic politics that could alter the economic interest calculation associated with policy decisions. However, the recent surge of nationalism reflects that economic interests are not sufficient to explain international trade. I draw on social identity theory to argue that nationalistic protectionism can be an important factor that impedes free trade, as observed in the 2019 South Korea-Japan trade dispute. In this paper, I first examine how identity acted as a causal variable in the 2019 South Korea-Japan trade dispute context. Then I will draw general implications of how to understand the upcoming challenges of international cooperation in the wave of nationalism.