A year on from the sudden arrival of some 500 Yemeni refugees on the resort island of Jeju, it is worth asking why non-North Korean refugees are generally not as accepted in South Korea.What does South Korea’s failure to provide moral leadership in the face of a global refugee crisis tell us about entrenched ideologies of ethnic nationalism in one of the region’s wealthiest liberal democratic states?CHECKBOOK HUMANITARIANISMSouth Korea is legally obligated to accept asylum seekers, having signed the 1951 United Nations’ Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1992, and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status
A year on from the sudden arrival of some 500 Yemeni refugees on the resort island of Jeju, it is worth asking why non-North Korean refugees are generally not as accepted in South Korea.
What does South Korea’s failure to provide moral leadership in the face of a global refugee crisis tell us about entrenched ideologies of ethnic nationalism in one of the region’s wealthiest liberal democratic states?
Dr. Markus Bell is a migration and social inclusion expert who has published broadly on politics and social change in East Asia. He has lectured at the Australian National University, Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Sheffield and is a Research Fellow at La Trobe University.
