Time for South Korea to abandon the middle power moniker

It’s time to stop. Please stop writing papers on South Korea as a middle power

It’s time to stop. Please stop writing papers on South Korea as a middle power. For an author who was an early advocate for South Korea to fulfil its role as a middle power in international society, and over the years wrote several papers and op-eds encouraging it to do so, it’s a hard thing to say. But it’s really gone too far. It’s time to abandon the term.

There are today academic and think-tank papers on South Korea’s middle power counterinsurgency capacity, middle power environmental leadership, middle power public diplomacy, and its middle power human security. There are papers on South Korea’s rise as a middle power, it’s identity as a middle power, and its future as a middle power. There are papers on South Korea’s status as a middle power, its aspirations as a middle power, and on the ontological realism, epistemological relativism, and judgmental rationalism of calling South Korea a middle power.

A crude Google scholar search shows that as the new millennium dawned, there were…