The Global South as Mirror and Stage: Knowledge Production and Subjectivities in South Korea’s Foreign Policy
한새롬, 황의현, The Korean Journal of International Studies 24(1),131-154.
This article examines how South Korea produces knowledge of the Global South and how this process simultaneously constitutes South Korea’s foreign policy subjectivities. Drawing on critical discourse analysis informed by post-structuralist theory, we conceptualise the Global South as a discursive construct whose meanings are contingent, strategic and politically productive. The analysis identifies three dominant constructions of the Global South: an emerging power, a site of developmental need and a partner. These subject positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist through the flexibility of the Global South as a nodal point. We also argue that the Global South operates as both a mirror and a stage in Korea’s foreign policy imagination. As a mirror, it reflects Korea’s self-understanding as an in-between actor, enabling claims of moral credibility grounded in shared developmental experience and postcolonial empathy. As a stage, it provides a discursive arena through which Korea performs its global ambitions and middle-power identity. While this discursive configuration allows Korea to navigate shifting global conditions and expand its international engagement, it also (unwittingly) reproduces global hierarchies.
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