UC San Diego

As of 2020, there are a staggering 26 million refugees worldwide. While most refugees live in poor- and middle-income countries in the Global South, few get a chance to be granted asylum in rich liberal democracies in the Global North. Even in the Global North, however, the refugee recognition rate (RRR) varies widely, with countries at the low end of the spectrum, namely South Korea and Japan, granting asylum to less than 2 percent of applicants compared to the 19 percent average among the top-ten OECD countries from 2014 to 2018.

My dissertation addresses why South Korea, a wealthy democracy that is a signatory to major international treaties on refugee protection and human rights and that has an independent domestic legislation on refugee protection, accepts an extraordinarily low number of refugees relative to its Western counterparts with comparable economic, political, and social capacity. In complicating the traditional narratives that elusively point to the exclusionary national identity as the source of Korea’s restrictiveness towards refugees, I show how the Korean bureaucratic and judicial agencies adjudicating asylum claims make it nearly impossible for asylum-seekers to win their cases. This, I argue, is due to the tightly embedded internal norms of the domestic decision-making institutions that remained largely unchanged by the adoption of supranational liberal norms and their corresponding domestic legislation on refugee protection. For example, even after Korea became a signatory to international treaties protecting refugees in 1992, judges were rarely given an opportunity to be trained in refugee law, as they continued the preexisting practice of applying much higher evidentiary standards that were imported from civil law – rather than the lower standards in international refugee law – upon reviewing asylum claims. This lack of change in institutional norms, I suggest, is underpinned by insufficient political attention, a disinterested public, negative media, and a relatively weak civil society. My findings indicate how laws are executed and by which state institutions matter in the effective implementation of the laws just as much as the ratification of the laws themselves.

I support my arguments using data I gathered in Korea (2018–2019), including 35 in-depth interviews with lawyers, advocates, and former government employees; 60 hours of participant observation of asylum hearings and professional workshops; 8,000 court verdicts on refugee litigations; and various documents from the government, media, and NGOs.