Examining the Six-Party Talks Process on North Korea: Dynamic Interactions among the Principal States

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims to provide a comprehensive and historical analysis of foreign policy behaviour of the principal states involved in nuclear talks on North Korea known as the Six-Party Talks (SPT). Despite the failure in achieving a primary objective of denuclearizing North Korea, the SPT were believed to provide interesting and informative cases to investigate dynamic interactions among states engaged in security talks with different motives and interests. For a holistic approach to foreign policy analysis, the thesis adopts a newly introduced theoretical framework called Interactionist Role Theory (IRT) which integrates the levels of analysis from individuals to international system by incorporating the concept of ‘roles’. Based on IRT, the thesis examines what drove the concerned states’ foreign policy shifts; what kinds of discrepancies the states experienced between or among competing roles (role conflicts); how successful their deliberate policy implementations were (role-makings); and what structural effects their foreign policy decisions had on the overall Six-Party Talks process. The thesis findings support the IRT premise that it is critical to understand a state’s perceived ideal roles to accurately identify the state’s motives for actions regarding particular foreign policy issues. The prevalence of inter-role conflicts at the time of states’ role-makings evinces that the SPT as social constraints did exert competing role expectations that challenged the member states’ role conceptions. Above all, the sequential analysis of the SPT process clearly shows the mutual influence between the member states (agents) and the SPT (social structure), which implies successful multilateral negotiations require reciprocal relations among participating states where all parties’ desired roles (role conceptions) are mutually verified and affirmed. The thesis is deemed to give insightful messages to conventional foreign policy readings that predominantly view the nuclear drama in the Northeast Asia region from a binary focus of US-DPRK mutual deterrence.