Seung Joon Paik

Major — International Relations

Minor — Comparative Politics

I am a predoctoral fellow at Yale University’s Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence, and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the George Washington University. My research interests include political violence, civil wars, and international security. In my doctoral dissertation, I explore the timing, location, and scale of civilian victimization in conventional civil wars by conducting mixed method research on the Korean War. Based on extensive archival documents, oral history records, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports, and secondary sources, I built an original panel dataset that contains information on political, military, and geographic aspects of the Korean War during each month of the war in each of the 162 administrative counties of South Korea. My dissertation project received generous support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University, Association for Asian Studies, the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and the Department of Political Science at the George Washington University.

In addition to the dissertation, I conducted research that explores the impact of an army’s combat effectiveness on its counterinsurgency (COIN) outcomes by focusing on South Korean COIN experience before and during the Korean War; this paper is forthcoming in Small Wars and Insurgencies. I am also performing a statistical analysis that investigates the relationship between military outcomes and the treatment of prisoners of war during the Korean War by expanding the large-N dataset from my dissertation project.