Kyuri Park

Biography

Kyuri Park is a post-doctoral fellow in Security and Foreign Policy at the Global Research Institute (GRI). Prior to GRI, Kyuri was a post-doctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations (POIR) at the University of Southern California (USC). She holds MA in Asian Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service (SFS) and BA in International Studies at Ewha Womans University, South Korea. 

Her research lies primarily in international security and cooperation, with a regional focus on East Asia. Kyuri is interested in theorizing and examining the interaction between great and non-great powers (small and middle powers) and drawing out the implications for regional order, stability, and the US grand strategy.

 At GRI, Kyuri will work on her book manuscript, which explores how East Asian countries are responding to the rise of China and why they are responding the way they are. In this project, she sheds light on joint military exercise as an important indicator of cooperation and challenges the widely held belief in security studies that East Asian countries are militarily aligning with the US against rising China. Drawing on the networked perspective on capabilities, she posits that cooperative security ties are important social capitals that increase a state's strategic autonomy. Thus, from this perspective, opting for a Cold-War style alignment with a particular great power or bloc is the second-best strategy at best for East Asian countries, and the optimal strategy is to diversify cooperative ties. Using social network analysis and case studies, Kyuri presents original mixed-methods evidence that the regional countries are pursuing cooperative security ties with both China and the US to ensure their strategic autonomy.

Kyuri's other works on South Korea's middle power diplomacy and cultural dimension of unipolarity have been published in International Politics and Palgrave Macmillan. Previously, she served as a contributing author of 'Korea-Japan Relations' in Comparative Connections, published by the Pacific Forum. She was also a 2022-2023 US-Korea NextGen Scholar, an initiative by the CSIS Korea Chair and the USC Korean Studies Institute (KSI), and a 2019-2021 US-Asia Grand Strategy predoctoral fellow at the USC KSI.

More details on Kyuri's profile and research can be found at: http://www.kyuripark.com.