The international relations academic paper is dead

The closest to policy that academic papers about South Korea as a middle power come is when they’re wedged under the minister’s door as an ad hoc doorstop.

There was a time when the international relations academic paper was the cornerstone of policy debate. It was precise, rare, rigorous. If a senior policymaker wanted to understand a complex issue—be it nuclear proliferation, foreign policy, or multilateralism—they’d pick up a dense, footnoted article written by an academic with decades of expertise.

At the moment, I’m reading acacdemic papers written about Korea from the 1950s. You can tell these papers would have been shared among colleagues, perhaps even discussed in closed-door seminars or cited in speeches. These academic papers mattered. They informed thinking. They were designed to shape decisions.

That era is gone. Long gone.