Subempire’s Embrace is the first monograph to examine South Korea’s refugee policy and discourse from the 1950s to the present. Nora Kim, a sociologist, traces how U.S.-led wars have shaped the country’s refugee landscape from Korean War refugees and Vietnamese refugees to Yemeni asylum seekers, Karen resettlement refugees, Afghan evacuees, and North Korean defectors.

Building on and advancing critical refugee studies, the book introduces the concept of the “subempire” to argue that U.S. imperialism relies on subordinate empires to sustain its hegemony in Asia. It shows how war functions dually: producing refugees and enabling (sub)imperial expansion. South Korea’s path exemplifies this logic—emerging from an aid recipient during the Korean War to a subimperial nation during the Vietnam War, and later extending military, political, and economic influence into the Middle East and Central Asia during the war in Afghanistan. Each war has generated new categories of refugees and new rationales for their reception.

At its conceptual core, Subempire’s Embrace theorizes refugee hosting as an embrace, an exercise of sovereign power that operates through both law and violence. This framework illuminates how South Korea’s legal apparatus and war-driven interventions jointly shape its authority to determine who counts as a refugee and how they are “embraced.” The book identifies five modalities of embrace, Militarized, Surrogate, Disenchanted, Calculated, and Ambivalent; each reflecting a historical moment in South Korea’s evolving relationship with empire and humanitarianism.

Ultimately, Subempire’s Embrace reveals how the formation of the U.S. hegemony and the rise of the neoliberal global order have together produced a “disenchanted” refugee landscape, where refugees have shifted from Cold War symbols of anti-communism to depoliticized objects of humanitarian management. By situating South Korea within the networks of empire and war, the book redefines the geopolitics of refugee reception in contemporary Asia.

• Nora Hui-Jung Kim, Author

  Nora Hui-Jung Kim is professor of sociology at University of Mary Washington.

• With this new and insightful book, Nora Kim provides the first, path-breaking academic study focusing on the history of refugee policy in the Republic of Korea, with a highly original interpretation: the entire trajectory of refugee policy in South Korea is best understood through the lens of its role as a “subempire” within the international system dominated by the United States
  —Hans Schattle, Yonsei University