South Korea’s Engagement with Africa is the first scholarly attempt to overview South Korea’s relationship with Africa, since its first establishment of diplomatic tie with some African countries in the early 1960s. In describing this relationship, the book mainly focuses on Korea’s attempt to cooperate with African countries in diverse perspectives: academic engagement, developmental cooperation, civic and cultural interactions. The volume does note that the quantity and quality of South Korea’s relations with Africa differ not only from those of the major international stakeholders, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and other European countries but also from those of the other Asian countries, such as China, India, and Japan.
This is because South Korea has a different historical and geopolitical connection to Africa, and until recently, South Korea had never considered Africa as a significant diplomatic and economic counterpart. For example, South Korea’s share in the total volume of Africa’s trade occupied only 1.8% in 2009 (Kang 2011), and the volume even decreased into 1.5% in 2017 (Kang 2017). In terms of diplomatic relations, Africa has hardly been a major partner to the South Korean government. Moreover, in terms of economic cooperation the African continent has been reserved as the ‘last blue ocean’. In South Korean academia, African studies are always isolated from the mainstream. Overall, it would still be going too far to say that the relationship between South Korea and Africa has entered into a full-fledged stage. Nevertheless, no one can deny that recently there have been dramatic changes in this same relationship.
Since the de-escalation of tension and constraints on international affairs in the post-Cold War era, the international collaboration between South Korea and Africa has opened up unlimited possibilities. In particular, the South Korean government’s entry to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2006 was a historical turning point in the relationship between South Korea and Africa. With this, South Korea has become a significant stakeholder in international development cooperation, and Africa becomes one of the major recipients. This book illuminates the whole arc of the historical development of South Korea’s engagement with Africa. It also recognizes that South Korea–Africa relations, though relatively new, also break ground by acknowledging the importance of a constant endeavor to carry out international development and that they continue to grow as we find encouraging progress and fresh opportunities in the cooperation between these two partners.
This book is all inclusive, covering South Korea’s academic, economic, diplomatic, and civil and cultural engagements with Africa. It is unique in that it investigates many hitherto untold aspects of South Korea–Africa relations. Part One introduces the trends in African studies that have been conducted in South Korea with two chapters. These chapters examine specific topics, approaches, and methodologies, as well as limitations found in the existing research, particularly in the fields of humanities and social sciences.
In Chap. 2, Chang describes the 40 year-history of the institutionalization of Korean African studies and evaluates the achievements and challenges therein. The first institutionalization of African studies began in 1977 at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) under the name of the Institute of African Affairs (now Institute of African Studies [IAA]). Chang contends that along with the Korean Association of African Studies (founded 1982) and the Department of KiSwahili (1983, now the Division of African Studies) at HUFS, IAA has led Korean African studies for the last four decades years.
Chang continues to argue that, 40 years from now, some major universities and para-governmental institutions will have partaken in African studies, thus expanding and diversifying the boundaries of this area of study. African studies has also been developed from without ‘traditional’ boundary of academia. Para-governmental and government-affiliated institutes, such as the Korea-Africa Center (2015), a consultative institute affiliated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Korean Institute for International Economic Policy, have primarily focused on more practical and economic researches on African countries. All these recent academic developments are positive signals, as Chang points out, for the further development of South Korea and Africa’s relationship.
The chapter then continues with a critical look at the challenges that Korean African studies faces. Chang diagnoses that the most severe challenges are academic sectionalism among researchers and the isolation of Korean African studies from international African studies. He suggests that Korean Africanists should open their doors and deliberately interact with other academic disciplines and institutes, and even civil societies related to Africa.
In Chap. 3, Choi, Han, and Lee analyze the development of social sciences in Korean African studies. They categorize the development of social sciences in African studies into three periods. Choi’s team stress that, since its advent in the 1950s, Korean social science research on Africa has grown immensely in scope and scale. As both international and domestic political and economic environments have evolved, research too has adapted to meet the demands of the time. They point out that, during the 1950s and 1960s, research mainly focused on diplomacy and political factors within the context of the Cold War and diplomatic competition with North Korea. But researchers then began to shift their attention to economic and trading factors in Africa, as Korea’s economy grew and Africa became an attractive choice for foreign market entry. Finally, they describe how, after Korea’s admission to the OECD DAC in 2010, researchers have increasingly focused on official development assistance (ODA) and how aid can be effectively utilized in Africa.
Choi and his team use a bibliometric analysis method to analyze common keywords in research sources from the 1950s–1960s, 1970s–1980s, and 1990s–2010s. The results of this analysis led to the development of cluster maps, in which terms were grouped by frequency of occurrence and their relationship to one another. An examination of these clusters can readily depict the major research trends in South Korea according to era, thereby showing the evolution of research over time as well as providing a basis for the direction of future research on Africa.
In Part Two, the authors discuss the Korean government’s practical engagements with Africa. Two chapters in this part also describe patterns of development cooperation in the form of trade, investment, development assistance, and military missions, and thereby consider how these aspects address mutual interests.
Lee, in Chap. 4, mainly focuses on Korea’s ODA policies in Africa. For instance, in 2017 Korea’s total ODA was USD 2.3 billion, which was 0.16% of its GNI (gross national income). African countries shared 23% of this total ODA, largely centered on rural development, education, health, social and economic infrastructure, and so on. The scale of Korea’s ODA projects has been small in many cases; in such instances, it has been claimed that they are fragmented and less efficient. There were 47 African recipient countries, including seven priority countries, within the Country Partnership Strategy. The Country Partnership Strategy is the formulation that the Korean government has initiated for the better engagement with recipient countries in the international development cooperation. Seven African countries are selected as priority countries.
Lee argues that, in recent years, there has been a growing demand for Korean partnerships from African countries that wish to share Korea’s development experiences. Prior to this, the partnership between Korea and Africa was rather inactive for many years due to political and economic factors and progress was slow until the 1990s. As many developing countries, especially in Africa, have been inspired by the Korean case of economic development, the Korean government has increased activities to foster partnerships with Africa. To strengthen these connections, from the early 2000s Korean presidents have visited Africa more often and organized regular forums and conferences among the public and private sectors in Korea and Africa. The Korea-Africa Foundation was established in 2018 as a government entity to enlighten partnerships with Africa. Korea’s ODA to Africa has increased and could be consolidated by focusing on projects related to the development of specific countries. This could be made possible through a holistic approach by bringing together academia, private companies, and public institutions.
In Chap. 5, Kim and DeLancey present a case study of the Korea–Africa relationship by discussing Korea’s engagement with Ethiopia. They argue that Ethiopian troops’ participation in the Korean War in 1950 was a laborious and uncommon effort to be made by an African country. Despite their honorable service, the Ethiopian Korean War veterans were badly treated by the communist government under Mengistu Haile Mariam in the Cold War era. That endeavor to fight for South Korea in the past, however, was brought to light after the Cold War and started to yield favorable diplomatic outcomes in the relationship with South Korea. In the chapter, Kim and DeLancey briefly review Ethiopia’s participation in said war, its motives and actions, and then investigate the Korean government’s efforts to (re)engage with an old ally in a new context. Examining the dialogues, attitudes, and actions Korea has taken to engage with Ethiopia, the authors find that the fact that Ethiopia dispatched its troops to combat in aid of South Korea within the United Nations mission has very heavily weighed on Korean government decisions to calibrate its foreign policy toward favoring Ethiopia.
Part Three concerns Korea’s civil and cultural engagements with Africa. In the era of globalization, culture has become a central topic of international relations. Korea has undertaken cultural ODA in cooperation with UNESCO in order to promote the recipient countries’ capabilities in the field of human resources. Kim, in Chap. 6, describes Korea’s growing cultural engagement with Africa in this context. A distinctive feature of Korea’s cultural engagement is that its cultural policies, in large part, are driven by the government and reflect the changing global dynamics of cultural soft power. Even though North Korea outpaced South Korea in its initial cultural engagement with Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, current transcontinental cultural exchange is predominantly led by the South.
The chapter discusses the patterns of growing cultural engagement between Korea and African states. Kim examines the reception of Korean pop culture in Africa and Korea’s development projects in the cultural sector, and highlights the Korean government’s understanding of cultural engagement as public diplomacy. Even though the volume of cultural engagement has been increasing, with other dynamics in trade and distribution of cultural products enduring, the question remains as to which side will benefit from this growth.
In Chap. 7, Yuk, a civil activist-com-scholar, argues that civic engagements with Africa began to appear late in the 2000s. Since Korea joined DAC, the Korean government has been asked to undertake humanitarian actions on global issues such as poverty and famine in Africa, so that South Korea has entered into new relations with Africa led by civil society organizations (CSOs). In the past, due to geographic and cultural similarities, most Korean CSOs preferred to work in Asian countries. However, as the Korean government’s engagement with African countries evolves, CSOs have begun to collaborate more with African societies. The number of CSOs operating development projects and humanitarian campaigns in Africa significantly increased when South Korea promised to increase ODA.
Furthermore, religious groups that initially carried out mission work in Africa have tended to convert to development NGOs in the same period. According to a report issued by KCOC (Korea NGO Council for Overseas Development Cooperation) in 2015, 59 South Korean CSOs were working on 700 projects in 39 countries in Africa. Moreover, these were mostly targeted at education, health, social welfare, agricultural development, water, and hygiene at the grassroots level. Yuk, in this chapter, analyzes how Korea’s CSOs have been working on the issues African countries face due to their particular geographical exigencies, as well as how those CSOs act on matters such as rights of Africans immigrants to South Korea and improving awareness of Africa in the home country.
The unique contribution of this book is that three different approaches—academic, economic-developmental, and civil and cultural—are combined in the process of offering an overview of the relationship between Korea and Africa. Korea’s, or more precisely the Korean government’s, prime focus with Africa is in economic interests and developmental cooperation, as is the case with other major stakeholders in the continent. The contributors to this book reflect this trend in some chapters, but also try to introduce broader academic and sociocultural engagements with Africa. We would be rewarded if readers find themselves better able to understand the contemporary relationship between South Korea and Africa through this book.
References
- Kang, G. S. (2011). The Korea-Africa Partnership: Beyond Trade and Investment. AfDB. Africa Economic Brief, 2(9), 1–8.
- Kang, K. H. (2017). Korea-Africa Business Forum Statement. Retrieved July 29, 2019, from http://www.mofa.go.kr/www/brd/m_20140/view.do?seq=302567&srchFr=&srchTo=&srchWord=&srchTp=&multi_itm_seq=0&itm_seq_1=0&itm_seq_2=0&company_cd=&company_nm=&page=2.