The Global South as Mirror and Stage: Knowledge Production and Subjectivities in South Korea’s Foreign Policy
The Korean Journal of International Studies 24(1), 2026
저자: 한새롬(숙명여자대학교), 황의현(아시아연구소)
한국은 ‘글로벌 사우스‘를 어떻게 담론적으로 구성하며, 이를 통해 어떤 외교 정체성을 형성하는가?
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.