Explaining South Korea’s Diaspora Engagement Policies

Human migration has never been a one-way movement, but over the past several decades, there has been an increasing trend of peoples moving back to their “ancestral homelands.” South Korea is no exception. Beginning in the late-1980s, tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans have returned to South Korea, both on a temporary and permanent basis. There are both underlying and explicit processes and factors that make diasporic return possible, of which state policy—and more specifically diaspora engagement policy—is one of the most salient. This paper purports to identify and explain the forces that have shaped that policy using an unconventional approach, namely, foreign policy analysis (FPA). As the term implies, FPA has typically only been applied to clear-cut foreign policy issues, but as we argue, FPA can be usefully and effective applied to an analysis of diasporic engagement policy.