The role of the Korean diaspora in South Korea’s policy toward Central Asia.

Abstract

This thesis examines South Korea's diaspora policy toward the Koryo-saram — the ethnic Korean community of Central Asia — and its implications for South Korea's broader engagement with the region. The Koryo-saram are the descendants of Koreans who migrated to the Russian Far East from the 1860s onward and were forcibly deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan by Stalin in 1937. Over more than a century of displacement, Soviet incorporation, Russification, and post-Soviet reconfiguration, this community developed a distinctive identity shaped far more by its Central Asian and Soviet experience than by any connection to the Korean peninsula. The thesis argues that South Korea's diaspora policy toward the Koryo-saram has been driven not by ethnic solidarity but by a sequence of economic, demographic, and geopolitical pressures, and that the gap between official rhetoric and policy reality is particularly pronounced in this community's case. Drawing on legal analysis, discourse analysis, and institutional mapping, it traces the evolution of South Korea's approach across four historical phases — from pre-1991 non-engagement through the post-Soviet opening, the institutionalization of diaspora law, and the current era of strategic partnership — and evaluates the outcomes of that policy for the Koryo-saram themselves, for South Korea, and for Central Asian states. The analysis demonstrates that South Korea's legal framework has systematically positioned Koryo-saram at the lowest tier of a hierarchical diaspora architecture, granting them access to the most restrictive visa categories while framing them rhetorically as members of the 'global Korean community.' Institutionally, the overwhelming share of resources is directed toward identity mobilization and economic utility rather than diaspora welfare. In practice, the Koryo-saram have served primarily as a cultural legitimation instrument for South Korea's economic and energy engagement with Central Asia, with the bilateral relationship having grown far beyond its ethnic origins to rest on economic complementarity, educational exchange, and geopolitical alignment. The thesis concludes that South Korea's diaspora policy constitutes a partial success measured against its own economic and strategic objectives, but reveals structurally embedded shortcomings when assessed against the standard of equitable treatment for the communities whose labor and cultural capital it mobilizes. Future policy will need to move beyond the ethnonationalist framing of the 'global Korean community' toward a more differentiated, needs-based approach that recognizes the Koryo-saram's Central Asian identity on its own terms.