South Korea’s two-decade effort to establish local human rights protection systems through municipal ordinances shows significant progress: all 17 metropolitan governments and 54 percent of basic local governments have enacted human rights ordinances by 2024. Yet implementation remains uneven, with stark urban-rural and regional disparities.

Three factors impede development: absence of national human rights legislation, narrow and conflicting understandings of human rights (particularly regarding sexual minorities), and weak social consensus. Political orientation heavily influences outcomes, with conservative forces often opposing ordinances while progressive governments advance them. Several cases demonstrate how ordinances were abolished or weakened following electoral shifts.

The author, seeing strengthening local democracy as crucial for human rights advancement, calls for measures including electing rights-conscious leaders, ensuring resident participation, establishing dedicated human rights institutions, and building social consensus around protection systems. Local human rights committees and specialized bureaus—mandated by many ordinances but poorly implemented—must function as genuine governance bodies rather than rubber-stamp mechanisms.

Local democracy and human rights protection must develop simultaneously in a mutually reinforcing relationship, with democratic processes enabling rights advancement and robust rights protections strengthening democratic institutions.

The COVID-19 crisis was a profound stress test for health, economic, and governance systems worldwide, and its lessons remain urgent. The pandemic revealed that unpreparedness carries cascading consequences, including the collapse of health services, the reversal of development gains, and the destabilization of economies. The magnitude of global losses, measured in trillions of dollars and millions of lives, demonstrated that preparedness is not a discretionary expense but a foundation of macroeconomic stability. Countries that invested early in surveillance, resilient systems, and inclusive access managed to contain shocks and recover faster, proving that health security and economic security are inseparable.

For the Asia-Pacific, the path forward lies in transforming vulnerability into long-term resilience. Building pandemic readiness requires embedding preparedness within fiscal and development planning, not as an emergency measure but as a permanent policy function. The region’s diverse economies can draw on collective strengths in manufacturing capacity, technological innovation, and strong regional cooperation to institutionalize the four pillars— globally networked surveillance and research, a resilient national system, an equitable supply of medical countermeasures and tools, and global governance and financing—thereby maximizing pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. Achieving this will depend on sustained political will and predictable financing, supported by the catalytic role of multilateral development banks and international financial institutions that can align public investment with global standards and private capital.

The coming decade presents a narrow but decisive window to consolidate these gains. Climate change, urbanization, and ecological disruption are intensifying the probability of new zoonotic spillovers. Meeting this challenge demands a shift from episodic response to continuous readiness, from isolated health interventions to integrated systems that link health, the environment, and the economy. Strengthening regional solidarity, transparency, and mutual accountability will be vital in ensuring that no country is left exposed when the next threat emerges.

A pandemic-ready Asia-Pacific is not an aspiration but an imperative. The lessons of COVID-19 call for institutionalized preparedness that transcends political cycles and emergency budgets. By treating health resilience as a global public good, the region can turn its experience of crisis into a model of sustained, inclusive security for the world.

This paper examines the “Korea discount,” the chronic undervaluation of South Korean stocks compared to other developed markets. Despite Korea ranking 13th globally in market capitalization, its stock market has grown only 25% over the past decade, while the S&P 500 grew 186%. The author attributes this poor performance to weak corporate governance, particularly the dominance of family-controlled conglomerates (chaebols) that prioritize the interests of founding families over those of minority shareholders. An analysis of successful reforms in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States shows that the Korea discount could be successfully resolved by strengthening corporate disclosure requirements, resolving conflicts of interest among institutional investors, and making South Korea’s voluntary stewardship code more enforceable to encourage active shareholder engagement and improve market valuations. 

This paper considers whether Japan has lost or is losing innovation capabilities, and whether the government’s apparent interest in promoting science, technology, and innovation (STI), articulated in a series of STI public policies, ultimately contributed to strengthening Japan’s innovation capabilities. 

The paper focuses on the most consistent among STI policies, namely, those related to nurturing doctorate degree holders, essential human resources for quality research and development. The paper finds that Japan is still a leading country in innovation, but its quality of innovation may be trending down. Incoherences within the STI policies, and between the STI and university reform policies, and insufficient coordination among the government, the private sector, and universities have all undermined the chance of nurturing doctorates and fully taking advantage of their talents to further innovation. The paper also notes recent changes that may contribute to reversing the trend. 

To ensure that public policies achieve their intended objectives, it is essential to assess and evaluate the policies, as well as make timely evidence-based adjustments.

To understand the transformation of Korean food from an “ethnic curiosity” into one of the world’s hottest cuisines, the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC brought together culinary experts and  academics at the conference “Korean Cuisine Gone Global.” Held on April 11, 2024, the scholars offered insights into the transformation of Korean cuisine, the role of race and place in its success story, and new directions in studying food and Korean culture. Their papers are collected in this volume.

The conference also featured celebrity chef Judy Joo, a renowned television star, an international restaurateur, and owner of the famed Seoul Bird, and Ryu Soo-young, an acclaimed actor turned culinary maestro. 

About the Contributors

Rebecca Jo Kinney is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, and an associate professor at the School of Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University. Kinney’s award-winning first book, Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), argues that contemporary stories told about Detroit’s potential for rise enable the erasure of white supremacist systems. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, Food, Culture & Society, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Radical History Review, and Race&Class, among other journals. Her second book, Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt, is forthcoming from Temple University Press in 2025. She is working on a third book, Making Home in Korea: The Transnational Lives of Adult Korean Adoptees, based on research undertaken while a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea. 

Robert Ji-Song Ku is an associate professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY) and the managing editor of Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA. His teaching and research interests include Asian American studies, food studies, and transnational and diasporic Korean popular culture. Prior to Binghamton, he taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Hunter College (CUNY). He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: Eating Asian in the USA (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014) and co-editor of Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU Press, forthcoming 2025), the sequel to Eating Asian America (NYU Press, 2013). He is also co-editor of Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019) and Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021), as well as the Food in Asia and the Pacific series for the University of Hawai‘i Press. Born in Korea, he grew up in Hawai‘i and currently lives in Culver City, California. 

Jooyeon Rhee is an associate professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature and director of the Penn State Institute for Korean Studies. She specializes in modern Korean literature and culture. Her main research concerns Korean popular literature, with particular emphasis on transnational literary exchanges and interactions. Currently, she is writing her second book on cultural imaginations of crime and deviance manifested in late colonial Korean detective fiction. Her other research interests include diasporic art and literature and food studies. 

Dafna Zur (editor) is an associate professor of Korean literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford. Her first book, Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea (2017), interrogates the contradictory political visions made possible by children’s literature in colonial and postcolonial Korea. Her second project explores sound, science, and space in the children’s literature of North and South Korea. She has published articles on North Korean popular science and science fiction, translations in North Korean literature, the Korean War in children’s literature, childhood in cinema, children’s poetry and music, and popular culture. Zur’s translations of Korean fiction have appeared in wordwithoutborders.org, Modern Korean Fiction : An Anthology, and the Asia Literary Review.