"Reordering the Universe: The Unyō Crisis of 1875 and the Death of Eastphalia"
This article proceeds from the claim that the birth of the Westphalian system of international relations (IR) should be located in the death of its last viable competitor, the so-called East Asian “tribute system,” which constituted a non-nation-state, heterarchical state system. It reframes the induction of East Asia into the modern IR system as a systemic harmonization beyond the control of any single party, rather than as a triumph of Western liberalism as some have previously claimed. Not only does this article contribute to a non-Eurocentric pluralization of IR by offering a new narrative of its origins which acknowledges the constructive roles played by non-Westerners; it also suggests that our contemporary political choices are limited by our failure to recognize how modern IR’s violent formation and naturalized claims to inevitable universality rely on multiple destructions and erasures of alternatives. The analytical focal point of this article is the case study that provides the date for the death of the tribute system, which I call “Eastphalia”: the 1875 Unyō crisis between Korea and Japan.
For HJAS: “Me Myself and My Hegemony”
Intro for The Politics of the Past
"Excavating an East Asian Genealogy of Drugs"
Instead of providing a litany of non-Western examples in order to unsettle the conventional study of drugs, this project seeks a different starting point of enquiry. Informed by the counterfactual question, “what would the study of drugs look like if Western histories didn’t exist?” this paper offers a story of manufactured substances “made strange” by assuming that position. Juxtaposing twentieth-century Korean narratives of miwŏn (MSG), and hiropon (hiroppong; methamphetamines) against regulatory discourses of opium and morphine reveals surprising continuities across the aesthetics of consumption for these seemingly disparate substances. As late 19th century inventions, miwŏn (monosodium glutamate, a food additive) and hiropon have circulated at the ends of social reception, alternately characterized as miraculous and reviled substances. 20th century advertisements cheerfully heralded miwŏn for fostering childrens’ health and domestic happiness while hiropon was seen as a wonder drug that increased national productivity. As products of Japanese origin introduced under imperial aegis (1910-1945), miwŏn and hiropon also indexed a problematic colonial modernity as technological answers that addressed failings of (Korean) nature.
The aims of this paper are two-fold. First, it attempts a different kind of non-Eurocentric intervention by operating within a thought experiment that privileges East Asian genealogies of consumption and medicine—a history where the divide between ‘medicines’ and ‘food’ is ambiguous. From that vantage point derived from Korean history, the paper’s comparative analysis of miwŏn-a food additive and hiropon-a stimulant is legible, but the possibility of its unintelligibility within the field gestures to a Western conceptualization of drugs which remains hegemonic and stubbornly coherent despite decades of scholarly critique.
"Targeted" sanctions against non-sovereign actors constitute a central offensive strategy in the "Financial War on Terror" (2001-present). Currently, the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) is the primary body responsible for administering sanctions programs. As part of its enforcement scheme, OFAC maintains a Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list of foreign individuals and entities that are barred from the US financial system. US persons and entities fall under the scope of OFAC authority, and those that engage in transactions with a SDN can face civil or criminal prosecution. By analyzing OFAC civil enforcement actions (2003- 2013), this article argues that sanctions-driven "weaponization" of the financial system since 2006 has produced a quiet, destabilizing expansion of US extraterritoriality.
Importantly, this shift towards mega penalties can be correlated with, but is not caused by the declaration of the "Financial War on Terror" in 2001. The Great Recession or the recent Financial Crisis seems to have politically opened the door for a dramatic increase in OFAC enforcement focus on the banking sector, with the associated spectacular penalties (e.g. 132 million USD for Standard Chartered (2012), 176 million for Barclays (2010)) heralded as evincing policy success. However, the politics of post- recession, post-Occupy America have meant that news of banks in trouble invite little sympathy, occluding what a closer scrutiny of the sanctions plight of financial institutions might reveal about the changing borders of state power in the twenty-first century. What unsympathetic observers may miss is the fact that giant banks and individuals that fall under the scope of OFAC enforcement exhibit a common denominator in that they are both non-state, non-sovereign actors. As the norms of conflict that structure inter-state struggle contrast sharply with those that govern wars against non-sovereigns, this article's analysis of sanctions history and its associated regulatory practices finds a growing dislocation between territorially informed boundaries of state power and the limits of legal authority in other arenas of aggression, such as the financial system.
"Contradictions in the State Monopoly of Opium and Tobacco in Colonial Korea"
This paper examines the state opium and tobacco monopolies during the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910-1945). My comparison of the circulation and regulation of two psychoactive substances produced openly under state auspices first finds that bringing these two goods under colonial state control had far reaching effects that went beyond a mere monopolizing of production and profit streams. The state sponsorship of these two products revolutionized the consumption of these goods and impacted the curating of consumer preferences. Secondly, this paper finds that although the opium monopoly involved the sale of a highly addictive good, it never constituted more than a sliver of government monopoly income.
While this project does not contest the fact that opium is and was highly addictive and that its commodification capitalized on a captive and vulnerable group of consumers, the relative unprofitability of opium in the Korean case has puzzling implications. One point to consider is that the particular orientalist and imperial history of opium has understandably limited past scholars’ interest in examining it as a good like any other. And like other psychoactive drugs, opium’s popularity and consumption is not determined merely by access and its potential for addiction, but within a larger socio-cultural and historical context. In this comparative analysis of the regulation and government monopoly control of opium and tobacco in early twentieth century Korea, my work also complicates prevailing arguments that see opium financing as central to the extension of empire. Furthermore, this paper suggests that the relative unprofitability, and by extension, a lack of substantive growth in consumer desire for the then-legal opium may have implications for contemporary narcotics regulation.