Myunghee Lee
Professor Michigan State University
- East Lansing MI
Myunghee Lee's teaching and research interests include authoritarian politics, democratization, protest and foreign policy.
Media
Biography
She is currently working on a book project that examines predemocratization authoritarian education and post-democratization authoritarian legacies in South Korea and Poland. Her work appears in many prominent journals such as International Security, Journal of East Asian Studies, Politics and Gender, and International Studies Review. Before joining James Madison College, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen. Her research has been supported by the Korea Foundation and the Academy of Korean Studies.
Industry Expertise
Areas of Expertise
Education
University of Missouri - Columbia
Ph.D.
Political Science
News
Bricks in the wall: How North Korean textbooks indoctrinate support for regime
NK News online
2024-07-15
DPRK’s messages can shape defector resettlement in ROK, encouraging engagement but hampering understanding of democracy
Meet JMC's newest international relations faculty member
MSU Today online
2024-04-03
Myunghee Lee is an assistant professor of international studies in James Madison College. Lee's teaching and research interests include authoritarian politics, democratization, protest and foreign policy. Her regional focus is East Asia, particularly the Korean Peninsula and China.
President Yoon is lauded in West for embracing Japan − in South Korea it fits a conservative agenda that is proving less popular
The Conversation online
2024-03-06
When South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol broke out into an impromptu performance of the song “American Pie” at a gala White House dinner in 2023, it was more than just a musical interlude. It was symbolic of how on the big Indo-Pacific issues of the day, Washington and Seoul are singing from the same songbook.
But so, too, is Japan. And for South Korea’s karaoke-loving leader, that means humming a different tune to predecessors on the international stage – and risking hitting a sour note back at home.
Journal Articles
Protectors of liberal democracy or defenders of past authoritarianism?: authoritarian legacies, collective identity, and the far-right protest in South Korea
Democratization2024
Between 2016 and 2019, South Korean conservatives organized a movement called the T’aegŭkki Rallies to oppose the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye and to protest against President Moon Jae-in’s administration. This movement is puzzling for its timing, demographic composition, and rhetorical choices. Through in-depth interviews with rally participants and non-participants, I illustrate that a collective identity, shaped by authoritarian socialization, strengthened with positive memories about an authoritarian past, combined to mobilize rally participants.
Authoritarianism at school: Indoctrination education, political socialisation, and citizenship in North Korea
Asian Studies Review2024
It is well known that North Korea uses political propaganda to elicit popular support, and this article focuses on how primary and secondary schools play an essential role in conveying the regime’s messages. The article asks how this process shapes North Koreans’ perceptions towards citizenship and how their perceptions of ‘democracy’ differ from those in other parts of the world. School education, I argue, socialises North Koreans and shapes their everyday political attitudes and citizenship perceptions.
Authoritarian successor parties, supporters, and protest: lessons from Asian democracies
Journal of East Asian Studies2023
Are authoritarian successor party (ASP) supporters more likely to protest? I propose that ASP supporters are less likely to protest in general. The post-democratization mobilization environment is shaped upon the pre-democratization mobilization basis. During the pre-democratization period, protest was organized around the democracy movement. Thus, protest tactics and networks were accumulated through it. As former authoritarian ruling party supporters, ASP supporters are less likely to have legacies of participating in the democracy movement, which prevents them from accessing the accumulated protest resources from the democracy movement.
Field Research: A Graduate Student's Guide
International Studies Review2021
What is field research? Is it just for qualitative scholars? Must it be done in a foreign country? How much time in the field is “enough”? A lack of disciplinary consensus on what constitutes “field research” or “fieldwork” has left graduate students in political science underinformed and thus underequipped to leverage site-intensive research to address issues of interest and urgency across the subfields. Uneven training in Ph.D. programs has also left early-career researchers underprepared for the logistics of fieldwork, from developing networks and effective sampling strategies to building respondents’ trust, and related issues of funding, physical safety, mental health, research ethics, and crisis response.
Counterterrorism and preventive repression: China's changing strategy in Xinjiang
International Security2019
In 2017–18, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) changed its domestic security strategy in Xinjiang, escalating the use of mass detention, ideological re-education, and pressure on Uyghur diaspora networks. Commonly proposed explanations for this shift focus on domestic factors: ethnic unrest, minority policy, and regional leadership. The CCP's strategy changes in Xinjiang, however, were also likely catalyzed by changing perceptions of the threat posed by Uyghur contact with transnational Islamic militant groups in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and a corresponding increase in perceived domestic vulnerability.
