Dr. Minseon Ku

Minseon Ku is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Diplomacy Project at the Global Research Institute and a faculty affiliate at William & Mary. She is also a member of the 2024 cohort in the NCAFP’s Korea Peninsula Emerging Leaders Program. In September 2025, she will join the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University as an Assistant Professor.

Her research interests focus on theorizing the social practice of diplomacy as an extension of international security. Her book project, The Power of Performance: Summit Diplomacy and World Politics, which was selected for the Scholar's Circle at the 2024 ISA Northeast Baltimore, is based on her dissertation. The project develops a theoretical approach to understanding the function of summit diplomacy in world politics by emphasizing the performance and audience dimensions. She argues that summit diplomacy serves as a performance of the international system, shaping the international political reality for the audience. Through an original dataset of bilateral summits, survey experiments, and focus group studies, she demonstrates that the ritual-like effects of summitry allow for a re-imagination of world politics.

Previously, she was the Spencer Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. She earned her PhD in Political Science from Ohio State University, as well as her Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from Yonsei University in Seoul.

Washington’s relations with Beijing have reached an ominous low ebb. Both American political parties have identified China as the country’s preeminent geopolitical challenger and, in the eyes of many, a systemic threat. What is driving this deterioration of Sino-American relations, and what are America’s strategic options in the face of Chinese power and ambition?