ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature on Korea’s place in the world, its position vis-à-vis other states, and how Korea has related itself to the outside world. It looks at the literature on Korean collective identity and external relations in chronological order, starting from the Sino-centric world order to the colonial era and the national division after liberation and the present with a democratized South Korea on the global stage. From this literature review, a double gap in the research on South Korean foreign policy and international identity emerges. First, there is no comprehensive assessment of the international state identity of South Korea as an emerging global power yet. Korea’s place in the world developed, but most of the time Korea was not simply a small and marginal “shrimp,” and neither was its self-understanding. Second, there is a lack of agency-oriented approaches to studying the state identity of South Korea as an international actor. Identity as an analytical concept in IR has been applied in various divergent ways in the study of South Korean foreign policy, often conflated with the concept of “role,” but with an overall lack of taking South Korean perspectives and ultimately agency into account.
