The Korea Project: Planning for the Long Term

On Tuesday, January 22^nd, from 930AM to 530PM, the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul in collaboration with the Office of the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Korean Studies Institute at University of Southern California (USC), will host an international conference in Seoul, South Korea on the study of Korean unification. Through the generous support of the Korea Foundation, this conference is the third and final iteration of a multi-year research project called The Korea Project: Planning for the Long Term that looks at core tasks associated with longer-term integration issues of unification. Victor Cha, Senior Advisor and Korea Chair at CSIS, and David Kang, Director of the Korean Studies Institute at USC, are the principal investigators of the project. They will host a special press conference from 12:15-13:00 on January 22^nd.

The potential collapse of the DPRK and the subsequent unification of the Korean Peninsula will raise a wide variety of issues, ranging from environment and public health, to migration, energy and education, to transitional economy and justice. Such issues will affect not only South Korea but also surrounding countries such as China, Russia, Japan, and the United States. Despite the magnitude of such crisis, there has been far less work done on the longer-term but inevitable tasks of knitting the two nations together. This research project is designed to bring together a wide variety of experts from different disciplines to explore the various longer-term transitional issues that will arise from a unification of the Korean peninsula.

Two previous conferences have been held in the United States, and CSIS and USC are bringing the final conference to South Korea to put the lessons learned from the first two conferences into a more political and general context, exploring regional reactions to, and interests in, unification. Experts from Korea, Japan, China and Russia are brought in to share their views on our project findings as well as to discuss their regional reactions to Korean unification.