South Korea has no place for geopolitics professors in business schools?
Business schools remain narrowly focused on traditional disciplines rather than interdisciplinary or emergent fields - Geopolitics is yet to enter.
Business schools in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and even Southeast Asia are currently hiring scholars with expertise in strategic competition, political risk, and global security to help firms and future leaders make sense of an increasingly unstable world. A recent advertisement at Australia’s Monash University, called for an Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Business, reflecting the school’s aim “to address some of the challenges of the age” including “Climate Change, Thriving Communities and Geopolitical Security”.
Geopolitics was once the domain of political scientists and foreign affairs wonks. It is now being actively integrated into MBA curricula, risk management courses, and executive education modules. Not in South Korea. Geopolitics is yet to enter South Korea’s business schools.
Despite being on the frontlines of global strategic fault lines—wedged between a rising China, a declining Japan, a volatile North Korea, and an unpredictable U.S.—South Korean business schools have not moved to embrace geopolitics as a serious academic specialization within their institutions.
There are no tenure-track positions advertised, no dedicated research centers within business faculties, and no evident effort to integrate geopolitical risk into the analytical toolbox of Korean-trained executives. The question isn’t whether Korea needs this—it clearly does—but rather why the university system is institutionally and culturally unprepared to deliver it.