Julian Dierkes

South Korea, a country once mired in the myth of national identity based on hyultong (혈통, bloodline), in 2006 officially declared its efforts to invest in building a damunhwa sahoe (다문화사회, multi-ethnic and multicultural society). Yet, despite various efforts South Korea has not been able to avoid discrepancies between its migrant integration policy objectives and their outcomes. In this thesis, I propose that both a problem and a solution lie in the boundaries of belonging embedded in South Korea's mainstream policies. I build my conceptual framework through reviewing literature written in English and Korean by migration and policy scholars and build my analytical framework on comparative policy analysis. This is a primarily theoretical thesis that makes use of real-world citations when possible, aiming to be a building block for subsequent empirical studies. I highlight South Korea’s resident registration policy as an example that illustrates how the policy practice of “fringing” (as opposed to mainstreaming) migrant issues and integration has contributed to the integration gap in South Korea. I then suggest how South Korea's history in negotiating institutionalized gender boundaries to reform its family registration system can be used to evolve the exclusionary boundaries of belonging within its resident registration system and similar mainstream policies.

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How does adoption of information communication technology (ICT) alter the balance of power between state and society in Asia? There is no question that these tools – the Internet, mobile phones, and social media – are transforming the political communications landscape across the region. Since political science views power as zero-sum, a central question is how its distribution is altered between digitally-strengthened states and digitally-empowered societal actors. On the one hand, societal actors are empowered through increased information access and dissemination, as well as decreased costs of mobilization and organization. At the same time, the state's digital capacity is greatly enhanced through increased information collection, monitoring, and control. This study hypothesizes that adoption of ICT in Asian states empowers societal actors over time enhancing non-electoral democratic processes subject to regime legitimacy and the digital state capacity governments build and apply. It first develops a theory for how ICT empowers both societal actors and states before testing this across Asian states through a quantitative analysis. The results suggest that Asian state policy determines whether and how ICT empowers societal actors and net political change. It then develops this policy concept through the lens of digital state capacity - how states control and manage digital information. Finally it conducts a qualitative analysis for China on the interaction of ICT adoption, regime legitimacy, and digital state capacity policy to determine net political change. The results demonstrate that while ICT adoption has strengthened the Chinese state through digital state capacity this has come at the loss of state control over a range of political issues. For these issues, the net result in China has been empowered-societal actors and enhanced transparency and accountability.

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My thesis briefly discusses decision-making basic theory, in particular the deliberation method, and applies it to decision-making in the mining sector when making investment agreements between government and the private sector. However, decisions could be examined and applied in every industry sector. For instance, the mining sector includes many different decision making methods such as cost benefit analysis and socio-economic, environmental and health impact assessments. Every analysis and impact assessment requires different stakeholder participants and analysts from different sciences. This can sometimes make decisions more complicated. My thesis analyzes the planned Oyu Tolgoi (OT) copper and gold project in Mongolia using the Multi Account Evaluation method, which includes financial, economical, social and environmental analysis. It also briefly discusses social and environmental impacts from the Mongolian government point of view and whether this project will have a positive or negative influence on Mongolian economic and social development. My thesis also shows the current Mongolian decision-making situation and its problems.

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