■ See Korean Version on EAI Website

Introduction: The Collapse of Foundational Premises

Over the past three decades, South Korea's North Korea policy has shared two implicit premises. The first is the premise that North Korea ultimately remains within the trajectory toward normalization of U.S.-North Korea relations—that is, the assumption that, given appropriate security guarantees and economic incentives, North Korea can be moved toward normalization of U.S.-North Korea relations and a long-term path of denuclearization. The second is the premise that the Korean Peninsula problem can be resolved through a single package linking denuclearization, economic engagement, and regime guarantees, leading to a transition toward unification. Whether through unification by absorption, unification by agreement, or a federal arrangement, a single image—one unified Korean Peninsula—stood at the endpoint. As of 2026, however, both premises appear to have collapsed.

In September 2022, North Korea codified its nuclear force into law, declaring its possession of nuclear weapons "irreversible," and at the end of 2023 it formalized the "hostile two-state doctrine," abandoning any orientation toward unification within the Korean Peninsula. North Korea–Russia cooperation, mediated by the Russia–Ukraine war, is providing a buffer against dependence on China, and as recently revealed through the North Korea–China summit, China is working to avoid losing its relative influence over a North Korea that has moved in Russia's direction. In other words, the leverage of the denuclearization-for-incentives exchange model that South Korea and the United States have conventionally operated has been structurally disabled, and South Korea has entered an environment in which it can no longer assume, in the short term, the normalization of political relations with North Korea as its baseline scenario.

At the same time, the Korean Peninsula finds itself having to redefine its own position amid larger structural shifts—U.S.-China strategic competition, the reconfiguration of the Asia-Pacific security order, and the bifurcation of global supply chains and AI technology. A new strategic framework is required that can respond simultaneously to these two pressures—North Korea's strategic disconnection and the bifurcation of the regional order—and this paper seeks to present, in response, a preliminary essay on a strategy of individuation for the Korean Peninsula.

Part I. Diagnosis: The Security-Legitimacy Dilemma and Its Abandonment

1.1 Starting Point—The Korean Peninsula as a Field of "Incomplete Sovereignty"

Chun Chaesung defines the states of Northeast Asia as "states that appear, on the surface, to lack any formal disqualification, but that are in fact incomplete sovereign states harboring the dream of full sovereign statehood" (Chun 2020). South and North Korea were simultaneously admitted to the United Nations in September 1991 and thereby recognized under international law as two sovereign states, but as a result of division they remain in a state of sovereign deficiency, with territory, population, and government each split in two. The crucial point here is that the organizing principle among the states of Northeast Asia is not stable anarchy but "pre-anarchy." On this reading, the sovereignty game is still in progress, and the very process by which states recognize one another as full sovereign states and thereby constitute an anarchical society remains incomplete. Chun therefore argues that, for divided states, unification is not simply a matter of enhancing national power but rather "a matter of survival—the imperative of not being absorbed"—and that the sovereignty game accordingly "concerns not merely physical security but also the security of ontological identity" (Chun 2020).

Chun's characterization of Northeast Asia as an "unfinished state in which the game toward the completion of sovereignty is still under way," or as a condition of "pre-anarchy," bears a structural resemblance to what Gilbert Simondon calls the pre-individual state—a metastable field, not yet individuated, saturated with the tension of incompatible dimensions. This is because South and North Korea are not each a completed individual, but rather two units placed together within a single field of tension in which their mutual claims to sovereignty overlap and collide. This paper argues that the direction of North Korea policy must shift toward the question of how this pre-individual tension can be resolved—that is, individuated—and it takes up this question in earnest in the latter half. Before doing so, the first half traces how North Korea managed this tension from 1994 to 2019, and how its manner of handling it fundamentally changed from 2019, following the failure of the Hanoi summit, through 2026.

1.2 The Security-Legitimacy Dilemma: The Operating Logic of 1994–2019

What conditions determine North Korea's decisions to make nuclear concessions? The North Korean regime has generally decided to make such concessions when two conditions are met simultaneously. The first is a structural condition in which accumulated domestic political-economic pressure erodes the regime's substantive legitimacy and thereby lowers the long-term opportunity cost of normalization; the second is a direct condition in which the credibility of the United States' normalization commitment activates the path toward normalization. Importantly, these two conditions possess an asymmetric temporality. Domestic pressure accumulates over a period of years and functions as a structural, underlying condition that gradually tilts the regime's long-term calculations toward normalization, exerting its influence through the calculations of policymakers or elites. This condition can generate North Korea's "willingness" to accept normalization, but it does not by itself produce "action." What triggers action is the more direct condition of the credibility of the U.S. commitment. Conversely, when that credibility collapses, the regime may revert to nuclear activity even as its domestic economy deteriorates, because the security threat is immediate and existential, whereas economic pressure is gradual and manageable so long as it remains at a level that preserves regime security.

Within this framework, normalization does not function merely as a 'carrot'—as is commonly assumed—but rather as a viable substitute capable of replacing nuclear deterrence. This is because the normalization of U.S.-North Korea relations constitutes, in the form of a political relationship with the United States, a security asset that resolves the regime's existential vulnerability, while simultaneously serving as a political-economic asset that restores legitimacy by lifting economic isolation. North Korea's persistent demand, in the early 1990s, for light-water reactors (LWRs) in place of thermal power plants illustrates this in compressed form. As Christopher Lawrence (2020) shows, because a light-water reactor cannot be operated without continuous Western technical support, it constituted an institutional embodiment of U.S.-North Korea diplomacy that reflected North Korea's intent to physically bind the United States into a long-term normalization relationship. Had North Korea simply wanted an energy source as a carrot, it would have been reasonable to demand cheap, efficient fossil-fuel power plants that required no technical support from the outside world. Instead, North Korea stubbornly demanded a light-water reactor rather than a fossil-fuel plant.

Robert Carlin and John W. Lewis, former State Department analysts who participated in most of the U.S.-North Korea negotiations from 1993 to 2000, point out that North Korea's ultimate goal was "a long-term, strategic relationship with the United States," and that North Korea, once other concessions had been made, actually withdrew its demand for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea and acquiesced, over the course of the negotiations, even to an indefinite U.S. troop presence (Carlin and Lewis 2007). For Kim Il Sung, who lost both his patron alliance and the socialist trading bloc with the end of the Cold War, normalization with the United States was not a mere economic inducement but a strategic objective addressing the dimensions of security and legitimacy simultaneously. Viewed in light of this logic, the five agreements of 1994–2019 show that the variation in North Korea's nuclear concessions is explained not by the constant of regime type, but by two variables: the domestic pressure on substantive legitimacy and the fluctuation in the credibility of the U.S. commitment.

The collapse of KEDO (1998–2002), the organization established by the 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework, is in particular a decisive case for testing this framework's proposition about temporality. If nuclear concessions were sustained by economic pressure alone, then the freeze should have held most firmly precisely during the period when the North Korean economy collapsed into the Arduous March. North Korea's economic hardship during this period was the worst in the regime's history. With the collapse of the socialist bloc and the loss of its patron states, North Korea's economic growth rate fell to an average of approximately −3.3 percent per year from 1990 to 1999, meaning that its earlier growth trajectory, having reached the limits of extensive growth, was completely reversed (Pyo, Cho, and Kim 2020; Cho and Kim 2021). During the "Arduous March" of 1994–1998, the collapse of the Public Distribution System (PDS) produced an estimated death toll from starvation ranging from several hundred thousand to more than one million (Haggard and Noland 2007), and, with a cumulative economic contraction of more than 30 percent between 1990 and 1998, the North Korean economy failed to recover to its pre-crisis level and showed no sign of stabilizing even into the early 2000s (Lee 2026). The foundation of economic legitimacy on which the regime had relied, by guaranteeing basic survival, was being eroded.

North Korea, however, proved more sensitive to fluctuations in the immediate credibility of the U.S. commitment than to underlying economic conditions. Even as economic pressure intensified, once the credibility of the U.S. commitment collapsed—owing to delays in KEDO and North Korea's designation as part of the "Axis of Evil"—North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003 and restarted Yongbyon. Despite the weakening of its substantive legitimacy caused by economic stagnation, North Korea could not accept a nuclear concession without a guarantee of the political normalization of relations with the United States. Within the Six-Party Talks framework that followed, there was briefly an agreement between the United States and North Korea, but implementation of that agreement could not be sustained once sanctions were imposed on Banco Delta Asia shortly thereafter.

The September 19 Joint Statement of September 2005 contained the strongest normalization language since the Geneva Agreed Framework—mutual respect for sovereignty, peaceful coexistence, and steps toward normalization of relations (Lee 2008)—but that commitment was undermined almost immediately when, in the same month, the U.S. Treasury Department designated Banco Delta Asia as a primary money-laundering concern and froze approximately $25 million in North Korean assets. Amid this contradictory signaling—extending normalization language with one hand while imposing financial sanctions with the other—North Korea escalated tensions through a ballistic missile test in July 2006 and its first nuclear test in October, before turning, in February 2007, to the half-measure concession of a new agreement and the disablement of Yongbyon. This is consistent with the expectation of this paper's analytical framework that a medium level of commitment credibility produces a partial and unstable concession. In the end, verification procedures were never established, and once the inauguration of the Lee Myung-bak government in 2008 closed off even the inter-Korean engagement channel, the multilateral framework that had sustained the partial concession rapidly collapsed (Song 2016).

The Leap Day Agreement of February 2012 aptly illustrates a limiting case of this analytical framework. The death of Kim Jong Il in December 2011 and Kim Jong Un's succession added a new dimension to the security-legitimacy dilemma. The new regime had to establish its authority domestically and signal either continuity or change internationally, and this fragile transitional period generated a need for external legitimacy. The Leap Day Agreement, which exchanged a moratorium on nuclear and missile testing and uranium enrichment activities at Yongbyon for U.S. food aid, can be read as an attempt to mitigate the vulnerability of this succession period through external engagement. The Obama administration's stance of "strategic patience," however, offered almost no prospect of normalization or commitment. The agreement was narrow and transactional, was not embedded in a broader normalization framework, and, above all, lacked an institutional mechanism—an equivalent to KEDO—capable of sustaining the agreement amid disruption.

As a result, the agreement collapsed immediately once North Korea announced a satellite launch in March 2012. An agreement structure lacking institutional depth or physical commitment possessed no resilience. The Leap Day Agreement reveals that, even where domestic pressure generates some degree of willingness to engage—as the succession period simultaneously produced vulnerability and a desire for external legitimacy—an agreement is inherently fragile in the absence of a credible normalization commitment and an institutional mechanism binding both sides into an ongoing political relationship, and that a disturbance from either side is sufficient to trigger reversion.

Notably, over these twenty-five years, North Korea repeatedly pursued long term normalization with the United States, albeit within certain parameters. The multi-year freeze under the Geneva Agreed Framework, the disablement of Yongbyon in 2007, and the 2018 moratorium on nuclear and missile testing were all concessions selected within the security-legitimacy dilemma. If North Korea had had no willingness whatsoever to resolve the security-legitimacy dilemma through the long-term normalization of relations with the United States, the choices described above—the Geneva Agreed Framework above all—would be inexplicable. The Byungjin line of simultaneously pursuing economic construction and nuclear force building, which emerged in 2013 after Kim Jong Un took power, represents one facet of North Korea's simultaneous pursuit of a resolution to this security-legitimacy dilemma. Logically, choosing between nuclear weapons and the economy would seem the rational course, but from North Korea's standpoint, a political Byungjin (parallel pursuit) was necessary to resolve the security-legitimacy dilemma. The 2018 declaration of the line of concentrating all efforts on socialist economic construction, and the U.S.- and South Korea–facing diplomacy that followed—spanning the period after the failure of the 2019 Hanoi summit up until the adoption of the frontal-breakthrough line—likewise represent North Korea's response to this same dilemma.

Under the basic condition that relations with the United States were not improving, North Korea treated nuclear weapons and normalization as partial substitutes, while never ceasing to develop nuclear weapons as a hedge against the possibility that the U.S. commitment might retreat. North Korea made partial concessions on the nuclear issue when it judged that a political relationship with the United States could substitute for nuclear deterrence, and it reverted to nuclear weapons when it judged that relationship to be unreliable. The interpretation repeatedly advanced in some quarters—that North Korea never had any intention of giving up its nuclear weapons and that diplomacy was merely a stalling tactic—is the most convenient ex post facto reading, but had North Korea's preferences been fixed, this very pattern of variation would not have been observed.

1.3 Hanoi as a Tipping Point: An Accumulated Crisis of Credibility

Viewed in this context, the breakdown of the Hanoi summit (February 2019) was a tipping point marking twenty-five years of accumulated collapse in the credibility of the U.S. commitment. The entire 2017–2019 phase leading up to Hanoi was a microcosm of the security-legitimacy dilemma. In 2017, with commitment credibility at rock bottom, North Korea moved to maximize the security term. Beginning with the Hwasong-12 in February, more than a dozen ballistic missile tests followed that year alone, including a test of the Hwasong-14 ICBM, capable of striking the U.S. mainland, in July, and the Hwasong-15 in November. The sixth nuclear test, on September 3, claimed hydrogen-bomb-class yield and showcased a qualitative leap in nuclear capability. The Trump administration pushed a "maximum pressure" stance, accompanied by the rhetoric of "fire and fury," the deployment of aircraft carriers, sorties by strategic bombers, and a series of UN Security Council sanctions resolutions, and the mutual threats exchanged by both sides brought the Korean Peninsula to the brink of military conflict.

Yet Kim Jong Un's declaration of the "completion of the state nuclear force" immediately after the Hwasong-15 launch in November 2017 suggests that this escalation was aimed not at pursuing unlimited tension but at securing negotiating leverage. This self-declaration of the completion of the nuclear force soon became a springboard for the shift toward a negotiating phase. As the situation on the Korean Peninsula changed rapidly in 2018, inter-Korean dialogue resumed on the occasion of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, followed in succession by the April Panmunjom Declaration and the June Singapore summit between the United States and North Korea. Through the plenary session of the Party Central Committee in April 2018, North Korea declared the end of the Byungjin line (the policy of parallel development of nuclear weapons and the economy) and the adoption of a line of concentrating all efforts on economic construction. On the surface, this was read as a forward-leaning posture toward denuclearization negotiations. The Singapore Joint Statement comprehensively addressed the establishment of new U.S.-North Korea relations, the building of a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, and the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, but it lacked a concrete implementation roadmap covering the definition, sequencing, and verification of denuclearization. The September Pyongyang Joint Declaration and the accompanying military agreement, adopted at the third inter-Korean summit held in Pyongyang in September 2018, gave concrete form to North Korea's plan to exchange partial, phased denuclearization for partial reciprocal measures, by specifying North Korea's willingness to permanently dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear facility on the premise of corresponding U.S. measures. The gap between this phased, "action-for-action" approach and the "big deal" method demanded by the United States would collide head-on at Hanoi in February 2019.

The subsequent three U.S.-North Korea summits, the exchange of personal letters, and the dramatic meeting at the DMZ drew diplomatic attention, but the bureaucratic support, congressional consent, multilateral framework, and institutional apparatus equivalent to KEDO needed to underpin them did not exist. At Hanoi, the talks ultimately broke down over the gap between North Korea's proposal of partial denuclearization (dismantling Yongbyon) in exchange for partial sanctions relief, and the U.S. position demanding comprehensive denuclearization as a precondition. In fact, from North Korea's perspective, the conditions at Hanoi reproduced precisely the vulnerability that the collapse of KEDO in the 1990s had demonstrated—the risk of conceding nuclear assets on the strength of a political commitment unsupported by any institutional apparatus.

The shock that this breakdown left on North Korea is epitomized in the personal letter Kim Jong Un sent to Trump dated August 5, 2019—to date the last personal letter exchanged between the two leaders. Targeting the U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises, Kim wrote that "the primary target of the war-readiness exercises is our military," and that "I do not have any intention to attack South Korea or start a war. I truly have no such intention" (quoted in Lee 2025). The tension within these sentences—repeatedly emphasizing a defensive posture while simultaneously revealing deep distrust of the U.S.-South Korea military alliance—itself suggests that the Hanoi breakdown was internalized by the regime as a considerable shock.

1.4 A Qualitative Rupture: The Abandonment of the Dilemma’s Logic

The changes after Hanoi are not another oscillation within the security-legitimacy dilemma but the abandonment of the dilemma's logic itself, and this is confirmed by three indicators. The first is the abandonment of the pursuit of normalization: Kim Jong Un's speech to the Party Central Committee in January 2020 redefined the moratorium as a "unilateral concession" and declared his release from the self-restraint. The earlier pattern—reversion followed by re-engagement, as seen even after the collapse of KEDO and the stalemate of the Six-Party Talks—has disappeared.

The second is the permanent establishment of its nuclear status. The "Law on the Policy of the Nuclear Forces of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," adopted at the Seventh Session of the Fourteenth Supreme People's Assembly on September 8, 2022, codified nuclear status into law. The law defines North Korea's nuclear force as "a powerful means for safeguarding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state and its fundamental interests, preventing war on the Korean Peninsula and in the Northeast Asian region, and guaranteeing the strategic stability of the world" (Choson Sinbo 2022). Nuclear capability is no longer treated as an asset exchangeable for a political relationship. This is a shift that elevates nuclear weapons from a substitute for normalization to a precondition for normalization.

This shift had already been foreshadowed discursively before its codification into law. At the military parade marking the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Korean People's Revolutionary Army on April 25, 2022, Kim Jong Un referred to the "second mission of our nuclear force," stating that "the fundamental mission of our nuclear force lies in deterring war, but our nuclear weapons cannot be bound to the single mission of preventing war even in a situation that we by no means wish to see arise on this land" (Jajusibo 2022). The purpose of the nuclear force thus expanded beyond "deterrence" to encompass the possibility of "offensive use."

The third is the restructuring of North Korea's alliance framework and the shift in its perception of South Korea. The Ninth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, held on December 31, 2023, gave decisive momentum to the hostile two-state theory. In his report to that meeting, Kim Jong Un defined inter-Korean relations as "a relationship between two hostile states, a relationship between belligerents in a state of war," while declaring an intent to "further develop relations with anti-imperialist, self-reliant countries that raise the banner of resistance against the hegemonic strategy of the United States and the West" so as to develop anti-imperialist joint action on an international scale (Rodong Sinmun 2023). The reaffirmation, at the June 2024 North Korea–Russia summit, of the two countries' relationship on the ideological foundation of "anti-imperialist self-reliance" extended to North Korea–Russia relations the ideological grounding conventionally accorded to North Korea–China relations.

The shift in North Korea's perception of South Korea is even more pronounced. At the plenary meeting, Kim declared that unification with South Korea "can never be achieved, no matter how long it takes," since the ROK has adopted "unification by absorption" and "unification of systems" as state policy—in his words, "in stark contradiction to our line of national reunification based on one nation, one state, and two systems." In his January 2024 policy speech, he reinforced this narrative of crisis by invoking "the special circumstance in which the Republic of Korea, our greatest hostile state, coexists as our closest neighbor" (Choson Sinbo 2024).

Chun (2020) held that South and North Korea, "though separately admitted to the UN with the status of two sovereign states, have maintained a special relationship between South and North Korea that keeps open the future possibility of unification." The hostile two-state theory negates precisely this special relationship itself. It is a shift from a "de facto two states" that kept unification open to "hostile two states" in which the possibility of unification has been discarded. One pole of what Chun diagnosed as the "dilemma of extinction"—unification as the final objective of the sovereignty game—has, at least on North Korea's side, been explicitly withdrawn. This means that the security-legitimacy dilemma has resolved into the pursuit of security alone, and that the very character of the pre-individual field that is the Korean Peninsula has itself changed.

1.5 Conclusion to Part I: The Need for a New Perspective

From 1994 to 2019, North Korea operated within the security-legitimacy dilemma—pursuing normalization when a credible U.S. commitment was presented amid the erosion of substantive legitimacy by economic pressure, and repeatedly oscillating back toward nuclear weapons whenever the credibility of the U.S. commitment collapsed. This oscillation, however, reached a tipping point at Hanoi through the accumulated failure of U.S. commitment credibility, and was abandoned there. If South Korea can no longer build policy upon two collapsed premises—the premise that North Korea remains on a path toward normalization, and the premise that the problem can be resolved through a single unification package—what can serve as an alternative? Positing the Korean Peninsula as Chun's field of "incomplete sovereignty," and as Simondon's field of pre-individual tension, this paper seeks to answer this question with a strategy of individuation for the Korean Peninsula.

Part II. A Strategy of Individuation for the Korean Peninsula

2.1 Why "Individuation"—Redescribing the Field of Incomplete Sovereignty

The existing unification paradigms—unification by absorption, unification by agreement, and federalism—share a single common epistemological premise despite their surface differences: as in the classical theory of form and matter, a single unified form is given in advance at the endpoint, and policy is the work of pushing reality toward that form. This rests on a substantialist ontology that treats political units as already-completed entities and views change as the external adjustment of relations among those entities. In the environment of the hostile two-state theory, however, this premise is not only inapplicable but counterproductive: the more directly a single form is pursued, the more North Korea reads it as a project of regime extinction, retreating into a more deeply entrenched metastable state.[1]

As noted above, Chun defines South and North Korea not as full sovereign states but as incomplete sovereign states—two units bearing a "sovereign deficiency" in which territory, population, and government were each split by division—and views the relationship between them as an unfinished state in which "the game toward the completion of sovereignty is still under way." It is worth noting here that he names the organizing principle of the Northeast Asian region not a stable anarchy but a "pre-anarchy." South and North Korea, on this view, are not each a completed sovereign individual, but two units placed together within an unfinished field in which their mutual claims to sovereignty overlap and collide. This paper introduces Simondon's concept of individuation as a heuristic frame precisely in order to redescribe this "field of incomplete sovereignty."

This paper does not claim that Simondon's theory of individuation predicts or verifies the causal mechanisms of Korean Peninsula politics. Such a claim would amount to an unwarranted transposition of a concept from natural philosophy into a social-scientific causal model. Rather, this paper's claim is that the concept of individuation allows us to redescribe the problem space that existing unification paradigms have obscured—the very space that Chun captured as the "unfinished sovereignty game." The heuristic frame's validity lies not in predictive power but in the new policy implications that the redescription yields.[2]

The point at which Chun's diagnosis and Simondon's concept structurally interlock is that both shift the focus of analysis from substance to process. Whereas traditional philosophy takes the "already individuated individual" as its starting point, Simondon treats not the individual but the process of individuation itself—ontogenesis, or the genesis of the individual—as primary reality. He inverts the thinking that grants ontological superiority to the constituted individual, proposing instead that we "seek to know the individual through individuation, rather than individuation through the individual" (Simondon 2017, 40–41). This idea—that the starting point of analysis should be not the resulting individual but the process that produces it—directly corresponds to this paper's attempt to read the Korean Peninsula not as the sum of two completed sovereign states but as a single generative field not yet individuated. This shift targets simultaneously the two classical schemas he criticizes: substantialism, which treats the individual as a self-sufficient substance, and hylomorphism, which holds that an external form is imposed upon passive matter. For Simondon, the pre-individual state that precedes the individual is not a lack but a domain of potentiality that is "more than unity, more than identity"—a domain in which the coexistence of incompatible dimensions itself constitutes potential energy.[3]

On one hand, Chun's "incomplete sovereignty" corresponds to Simondon's "pre-individuality" when the latter is applied to the Korean Peninsula. Simondon's concept, however, goes a step further here. Whereas incomplete sovereignty is conceptualized as oriented toward a sovereignty yet to be completed, Simondon's theory of individuation offers a perspective in which the sovereign deficiency is interpreted not as a lack to be filled but as a reservoir of potentiality not yet crystallized in any direction. Individuation is the event in which this tension is resolved—in a state that is neither stable nor unstable but metastable—and a new structure emerges; Chun's "pre-anarchy" corresponds precisely to this metastable state. Simondon's favored analogy for individuation is crystallization in the physical sciences: a supersaturated solution appears stable on the surface but is in fact a metastable state charged with potential energy, and when a small crystal seed is introduced, that tension resolves into a structured crystal.

What is notable here is that the seed does not impose a form. The seed is not a mold that casts the crystal's structure from outside; it is merely a singularity that triggers the structuring of a molecular potentiality already inherent in the solution itself. In Simondon's terms, what the seed does is not the imprinting of form but the introduction of information—where information here does not mean a message given in advance, but rather the event in which communication is established between what had been incompatible. The final form of the crystal comes not from the seed but from the conditions of the solution. This asymmetry—triggering without imposing—can become the strategic core of a Korean Peninsula individuation strategy.

2.2 Two Levels of Individuation: Where the Sovereignty Game Meets Individuation

The Korean Peninsula individuation strategy operates on two distinct levels. These correspond respectively to Simondon's conceptual hierarchy—individuation and the transindividual—while simultaneously overlaying Chun's distinction between two games: the sovereignty game (in which regional states contend over the completion of sovereignty) and the international politics game (in which regional and extra-regional states jointly contest power and interest). The distinction between the two levels is not a mere analytical convenience; it reflects the structural fact that the Korean Peninsula problem proceeds simultaneously on an internal dimension (inter-Korean relations) and an external dimension (the Korean Peninsula's position within the regional order), each defining the other.

2.2.1 The Macro Level—Individuating the Korean Peninsula as a Unit of Regional International Politics

Even in a scenario in which the hostile two-state theory becomes entrenched, the Korean Peninsula must be treated as an independent unit of analysis and strategy within U.S.-China relations and the Asia-Pacific regional order. This goes beyond merely sustaining the agenda of a "Korean Peninsula problem." In Simondonian terms, it means securing self-positioning as a relational individual that emerges together with its associated milieu—the ROK-U.S. alliance, U.S.-South Korea-Japan cooperation, the South Korea-China-Japan network, the North Korea-China-Russia linkage, the security order of ASEAN and the Pacific Island states, the global technology and trade network, and the diffusion of AI as a general-purpose technology. For Simondon, the individual never exists prior to, or apart from, its milieu. As he emphasizes, "what individuation reveals is not only the individual but also the individual-milieu pair" (Simondon 2017, 41–42). The individual emerges from a state of being in which it exists neither as an individual nor as a principle of individuation, and individuation appears as a partial and relative resolution of the incompatibility inherent in that system. The moment the Korean Peninsula is posited, apart from its associated milieu, as a "unit already completed in advance," analysis falls into precisely the error Simondon warned against—the inversion of placing the result in the position of the cause. Individuation produces the individual and its associated milieu simultaneously, and the boundary of the individual is continually reconstituted at the surface where it negotiates with its milieu.

Chun's theory also explains why this macro level is unavoidable. He holds that, in Northeast Asia, the sovereignty game among regional states is inseparable from the international politics game of extra-regional great powers such as the United States and Russia, and that the full realization of a regional state's sovereignty is directly linked to their regional strategies. The sovereignty problem of the Korean Peninsula, on this view, cannot be confined to the South-North bilateral relationship. Simondon's account of the transindividual describes a structurally similar situation. The transindividual names a resolution an individual cannot reach on its own, achieved only at the collective level, in relation with other individuals. The two insights converge. At a moment when the Korean Peninsula's internal tension (the South-North disparation) cannot be resolved bilaterally in the near term, South Korea's agency needs to be constituted transindividually within the regional relational network—that is, at the node where the sovereignty game and the international politics game meet.[4]

This framing carries a concrete implication. Rather than positioning itself as a part of the ROK-U.S. alliance or a dependent variable of U.S.-China competition, South Korea should secure diplomatic agency as a metastable individual that individuates together with its own milieu while still operating within the ROK-U.S. alliance and the constraints of U.S.-China competition. Concretely, one could envision positioning the Ministry of Unification as a substantive Korean Peninsula strategy ministry, tasked with the long-term design of North Korea policy and Korean Peninsula strategy amid the interlocking of the North Korea-China-Russia linkage and U.S.-China relations. To this end, one might also consider expanding the Ministry's role to include engagement with and response to North Korea-China and North Korea-Russia relations, as well as lobbying vis-à-vis the United States and Japan. In a situation where North Korea has downsized its United Front Department into Bureau 10 under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is unable to design a forward-looking strategy that treats the Korean Peninsula as a cohesive unit—a situation produced by its abandonment, via the hostile two-state theory, of any orientation toward unification—South Korea's North Korea strategy should take the regional interaction at the level of the Korean Peninsula itself as the unit of analysis and strategy. Even if progress on the denuclearization agenda proves difficult in the short term, the Korean Peninsula's own regional visibility, connectivity, and capacity for mediation can be strengthened through separate multilateral tracks (the G7, G20, ASEAN+3, NATO-IP4, MIKTA, among others). This is the strategic advantage of decoupling the short-term stalemate on denuclearization from the long-term strengthening of Korean Peninsula agency.

2.2.2 The Micro Level—Redescribing South and North Korea as a State of Pre-Individual Tension

Under international law, the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea are two UN member states, but as Chun's (2020) theory of incomplete sovereignty shows, in international-political terms they are two units in a pre-individual state rather than fully constituted individuals. Following Chun's diagnosis, both states maintain overlapping constitutional claims to sovereignty over the entire Korean Peninsula (or, alternatively, are separated only in the negative form of the hostile two-state theory); neither can complete its own security and identity without alliance with, and patronage from, an external great power; and the armistice system, in the absence of a peace treaty, is inherently a metastable state. This is how what he calls the "sovereign deficiency" manifests at the level of the unit.

Here, structurally, lies what Simondon calls disparation—the coexistence of two incompatible dimensions. It is worth noting that Chun distinguishes the sovereignty game of divided states from the ordinary international politics game of sovereign states, holding that it "concerns not merely physical security but also the security of ontological identity." Each row of the table below represents not a mere policy difference but a distinct dimension of the sovereignty game in which the two units stake their respective ontological identities.

Reading this disparation in international-political terms yields four principles that form the epistemological foundation of the strategy as a whole. First, the South-North disparation is a matter of dimension, not conflict. To read the incompatibility between the two Koreas, and between North Korea and the United States, disparation should be understood neither as a "difference of position" nor as a "conflict of interest," but as the coexistence, within a single geographic and historical unit, the Korean Peninsula, of two political orders belonging to different dimensions. The dimension of democracy/denuclearization/global trade and the dimension of nuclear force/authoritarianism/sanctions-circumventing trade are not a distance on the same dimension that can be narrowed through negotiation and compromise; they are the coexistence of two dimensions that do not translate into one another. This distinction carries a practical implication—if the gap were a distance along the same dimension, it would be reasonable to narrow it through negotiation; but if disparation at the present moment is the coexistence of different dimensions, then the very attempt to narrow it rests on a category error and is, in practice, counterproductive.

Second, resolution is the emergence of a new dimension. The resolution of disparation is neither the averaging of the two dimensions nor the absorption of one by the other. For Simondon, it is the event in which the two dimensions are integrated while being transformed into, and emerging as, a new dimension. Applied to the Korean Peninsula, neither unification (absorption by one side) nor permanent division (the permanent separation of the two dimensions) constitutes a genuine resolution of the disparation; a genuine resolution is the event in which the two dimensions are transformed into some new political dimension—for example, a competition in attractiveness within bifurcated coexistence, or a phased nonproliferation-and-peace-regime arrangement.

Third, disparation is potential energy. Simondon's central insight is that this incompatibility is not a defect but a source of potential energy. Translated into Chun's terms, the sovereign deficiency and the unfinished sovereignty game are not a lack to be filled—even though, because ontological security is at stake, compromise is inherently difficult—but a field of potentiality not yet crystallized in any direction. A view that treats the incompatibility as a defect diagnoses it as a "failure to normalize" and prescribes a single deterministic unification model, whereas a view that treats it as potential energy reinterprets that same incompatibility as a generative foundation that makes multiple pathways of transformation possible.

Fourth, policy as a crystal seed. Just as a supersaturated solution does not crystallize without a seed, disparation does not resolve on its own; a crystal seed is needed to trigger its resolution. In the Korean Peninsula individuation strategy, South Korea's policy interventions—the role of mediator, small points of stability, and self-demonstration in the dimension of technodiversity—perform precisely this seed function. South Korea cannot directly resolve the disparation, but it can plant, in the associated milieu, seeds that shape the direction in which the disparation is resolved. This is the political meaning, applied to the Korean Peninsula, of what Simondon terms transduction.

2.3 The Core Dynamics of the Strategy: Metastability · Seed · Transduction · Recrystallization

What is original about the Korean Peninsula individuation strategy lies not in a static classification of scenarios but in its dynamics. These dynamics correspond to four phases of crystallization, each of which translates a Simondonian concept into the language of Korean Peninsula policy.

First, the recognition of metastability—that is, the redefinition of the current state—is required. The present Korean Peninsula, entrenched in the hostile two-state theory, is not a "failed unification" but a metastable state: outwardly static, but a field of tension charged with potentiality. This redefinition is not mere rhetoric; it changes the temporal horizon of policy. If the current state is defined as "abnormal" or "a failure," policy tends toward short-term pressure aimed at its immediate resolution; if it is defined as "metastable," policy is reset as a medium- to long-term task of managing tension while cultivating the conditions for crystallization. The starting point of the strategy lies in restraining the impulse to resolve this state prematurely and in acknowledging that it is a manageable tension.

Second, the planting of crystal seeds—a standing task independent of any particular scenario—is required. South Korea does not directly pursue unification as a single objective. Instead, it plants small points of stability (crystal seeds) throughout the associated milieu. These include engagement with North Korea-China and North Korea-Russia relations, lobbying vis-à-vis the United States and Japan, agricultural and humanitarian cooperation with the Global South, AI technical assistance, joint responses to public health and infectious disease, climate cooperation, separated families, disaster management, minimal mechanisms for military confidence-building, and channels for preventing accidental clashes. These seeds do not, by themselves, produce a single image of the Korean Peninsula in the way unification would. Like Simondon's seed, they do not impose a particular form but are the work of pre-positioning nuclei from which crystallization can begin once the tension is later resolved.

Crucially, seed-planting is not a sub-task subordinated to any particular scenario, but a standing task that shifts the probability of bifurcation in South Korea's favor regardless of which scenario is realized. Whereas ordinary policy planning follows the structure of "predicting which future will come and preparing accordingly," the seed strategy is structured to bias the direction of crystallization toward South Korea whatever future arrives. When and by what trigger crystallization begins cannot be predicted, but whether seeds have already been planted determines the direction that crystallization takes. In this respect, the seed strategy does not depend on the accuracy of prediction, and it is precisely for this reason that it can function even in an environment of high uncertainty.

Third, there is the possibility of shock and transduction. Simondon's transduction is a self-amplifying operation in which structuring that occurs in one domain propagates to adjacent domains while simultaneously generating new dimensions and mediations. Just as one already-formed layer in crystallization becomes the condition for the formation of the next layer, in transduction each structured domain becomes the principle of structuring for the adjacent domain. When a shock arrives on the Korean Peninsula—a shift in the internal dynamics of the North Korean elite, a change in U.S.-China relations, the exposure of a decisive limit to North Korea-Russia cooperation, a leadership variable, the structural pressure of AI technological development, among others—if seeds have already been planted, that shock can lead to structured propagation rather than disorderly collapse. This is a layered propagation in which trust formed in one domain (for example, humanitarian cooperation) becomes a condition for structuring in an adjacent domain (for example, economic, health, or security cooperation). The shock itself cannot be controlled, but the central implication of transductive dynamics is that the path along which the shock propagates can be biased to a certain degree by the seeds positioned in advance.

Fourth, the simultaneous recrystallization—or simultaneous individuation—of the individual and its associated milieu must be pursued. As crystallization proceeds, the individual (South and North Korea) and the associated milieu (the regional order) are transformed simultaneously. The individuation of the Korean Peninsula does not occur in a vacuum. Just as Chun holds that the sovereignty game of regional states and the international politics game of extra-regional great powers are inseparably bound together, the recrystallization of the Korean Peninsula occurs together with the reconfiguration of the regional order, including the United States, China, Japan, and Russia. Whichever direction the sovereignty game between South and North Korea crystallizes, it immediately transforms the international politics game of the associated milieu, and conversely, changes in that international politics game alter the conditions again under which the South-North sovereignty game crystallizes. South Korea's strategy must therefore target not only the interior of the Korean Peninsula but the entire associated milieu simultaneously—this is the point at which the macro and micro levels are integrated into a single undertaking.

2.4 The Individuation Scenario Matrix: Four Axes and AI as a Transformation Coefficient

Each scenario is derived from the bifurcation of four axes: (i) continuity versus change in North Korean policy (leadership and domestic factors); (ii) the trajectory of U.S.-China relations; (iii) the strength of the North Korea-China and North Korea-Russia linkages; and (iv) the external pressure generated by the global advance of AI technological innovation. The causal mechanism identified in the first analysis—the accumulation of domestic pressure and the fluctuation of external commitment credibility—continues to operate within this matrix as well, but it must now be evaluated in an environment that takes the hostile two-state theory as its baseline.

The fourth axis differs in character from the preceding three. It is not simply an additional variable but an exogenous shock that transforms the structure of the associated milieu itself, functioning as a transformation coefficient multiplied across the other three axes. The simultaneous advance of AI, semiconductors, autonomous weapons, and synthetic biology alters the crystallization conditions of the Korean Peninsula along three paths. First, it can accelerate the widening gap between the global technological system and the authoritarian self-reliance model, deepening the North Korean regime's technological-economic legitimacy crisis (amplifying the "domestic pressure" term in the security-legitimacy dilemma discussed in Part I). Second, it reconfigures the security dilemma through AI competition and the militarization of AI. Third, it accelerates the bifurcation of global supply chains and technology standards. Because the AI axis is not a separate scenario but a transformation coefficient applied across all four scenarios, it constitutes a new dimension of scenario analysis.[5]

It should be noted, however, that this "technological-economic legitimacy crisis" must be understood not as short-term economic collapse but as a structural, long-term gap. Following a stepwise economic contraction of roughly −2.0 percent per year on average during 2017–2022, driven by tightened sanctions and the aftermath of COVID-19, the North Korean economy entered a recovery phase in 2023–2024, growing 3.1 percent and 3.7 percent respectively, aided by the resumption of trade and North Korea-Russia cooperation (Lee 2026). Real GDP in 2024 recovered to roughly 95 percent of its pre-sanctions 2016 level, but per capita income remains at roughly one-twentieth of South Korea's (in purchasing-power-parity terms) and has still not returned to the level it held before the economic crisis of the 1990s. What the AI transformation coefficient amplifies, in other words, is not an immediate pressure toward regime collapse but the technology-productivity gap between South and North Korea—a gap that persists, and indeed widens further through the bifurcation of advanced technology, even amid recovery—and this gap will, over the long term, erode the legitimacy foundation of the authoritarian self-reliance model.

Scenario A is frozen metastability, close to a continuation of the present state. This denotes a combination in which the hostile two-state theory persists, U.S.-China strategic competition remains entrenched, the North Korea-China-Russia linkage strengthens, and the AI arms race intensifies; here, the two individuals remain deeply embedded within their respective milieus in a prolonged metastable state. South Korea's task is to strengthen regional agency (diplomatic cohesion, hub status in technology and trade, the credibility of extended deterrence) and to restore or build alternative crisis-management infrastructure (channels for preventing accidental clashes).

Scenario B is gradual transduction. This is a scenario where a combination of factors—such as internal change within North Korea (elite differentiation, generational turnover, and accumulating economic pressure), strategic stabilization between the United States and China, a rupture in North Korea-China relations or the exposure of limits to North Korea-Russia cooperation, the discovery of vulnerabilities in dependence on trade with China, and a deepening of North Korea’s technological-economic crisis driven by the AI gap—creates an environment in which the security-legitimacy dilemma logic of the first analysis may be partially reactivated. This is not, however, a simple restoration of the 1994–2019 model, but a transformation into an approach that pursues nonproliferation on the basis of an acknowledgment of the reality the Korean Peninsula currently faces. South Korea uses crystal seeds—confirming a denuclearization commitment between the United States and China, humanitarian cooperation including the Global South, and cultivating the conditions for negotiations on freezing and reducing North Korea's nuclear program through engagement with China and Russia—as the medium of transformation, performing the role of convener in bringing the United States and China to the same table.

Scenario C is bifurcated coexistence. Here, amid intensifying U.S.-China bifurcation of supply chains and technology and deepening competition over AI and semiconductor standards, the two individuals coexist within different technological worlds. Here the concepts of the philosopher of technology Yuk Hui provide the macro coordinates. Hui offers the concept of cosmotechnics—the idea that all technology is embedded in a particular cosmology and ethics and therefore plural rather than a single universal—together with technodiversity, resistance to a single, unified global technological monoculture, and the proposition that we should think in terms of multiple futures through bifurcation rather than a single unifying endpoint. Applied to the Korean Peninsula, the liberal-technology-network world (the South) and the authoritarian-self-reliance-anti-imperialist world (the North) bifurcate in a form of coexistence rather than collision. Unification is treated not as a goal but as one pathway that may occur once conditions are met; the more central task is crisis management to prevent the collision of the two technological worlds from escalating into military conflict, and, ultimately, the self-demonstration, over the long term, of the attractiveness and superiority of the liberal-democratic technological world.[6]

Scenario D is forced individuation triggered by an external shock. This encompasses uncontrolled, abrupt structural transformations such as a domestic political crisis within North Korea, an incapacitation of leadership, or a sudden shift in China's or Russia's North Korea policy (particularly a reduction in Russian engagement with North Korea following the end of the war in Ukraine), changes in the AI-based information and surveillance environment, and North Korea's excessive dependence on China as it responds to AI—with the outcome determined ex post by the crisis-management capacity of South Korea, the United States, and China. South Korea's task is to prepare, during peacetime, multilateral, non-public contingency-consultation channels, humanitarian and civil-affairs operational capacity, and scenarios for controlling nuclear and missile assets.

Crucially, these four scenarios are not mutually exclusive future states but a distribution of potentials that operate simultaneously and partially. Just as Simondon's pre-individual field holds several incompatible potentialities at the same time, the present of the Korean Peninsula likewise implies the potentialities of all four scenarios simultaneously. Even while the hostile two-state theory persists (A), the seeds of internal change within North Korea may accumulate (B); the bifurcation of the two technological worlds (C) is already under way; and the contingency of forced individuation (D) is unlikely but requires preparation. South Korea's policy, therefore, should consist not in guessing which single scenario will materialize, but in managing all four scenarios simultaneously while steering the bifurcation in a direction favorable to South Korea. This assessment does not point to a single "best" scenario; its central insight is that South Korean policy should not be a deterministic pursuit of a single scenario, but rather the work of shifting the probability of bifurcation among scenarios in South Korea's favor.

2.5 Recognizing the Tension: The Dual Readability of Seed-Planting

The Korean Peninsula individuation strategy must confront one uncomfortable tension head-on. The "crystal seeds" that South Korea plants may be read as a project of regime subversion from North Korea's perspective. Engagement with North Korea-China and North Korea-Russia relations, humanitarian cooperation including the Global South, the inflow of information, market contact, and lobbying vis-à-vis the United States and Japan—all of this may appear as an attempt to erode the foundation of the regime's legitimacy to Pyongyang. Concealing this tension would compromise both the honesty and the robustness of the strategy. This paper therefore explicitly identifies this dual readability as a structural feature of the strategy.[7]

Here Simondon's insight offers a kind of defensive resource. As emphasized above, the seed does not impose a form. The crystal structure derives from the potentiality inherent in the solution itself, and the seed is merely a trigger point whose direction of crystallization remains undetermined. The seed that South Korea plants is not a tool for forcing a particular unification form (absorption) but a nucleus that allows the inherent potentiality of the pre-individual field that is the Korean Peninsula to lead, when a shock arrives, to structured propagation rather than disorderly collapse. Its final form is not something South Korea can unilaterally cast or determine.

This aligns with the "dilemma of extinction" raised by Chun in his theory of incomplete sovereignty. Chun holds that the security dilemma of divided states is fundamentally different from that of ordinary sovereign states: among fully sovereign states, security may weaken without the state itself disappearing, but for an incompletely sovereign divided state, the security dilemma operates as a dilemma of extinction in which the state itself may cease to exist. Because unification is a matter of survival—the imperative of not being absorbed—the completion of one side's sovereignty can imply the extinction of the other. Translated into the language of individuation, under conditions of division the completion of individuation into a single crystallized form is itself the extinction of one of the units. This is why the dual readability, in which the seeds South Korea plants may be read as a "project of regime subversion," is not an incidental side effect of the strategy but a condition imposed by the dilemma of extinction.

It is precisely at this point that South Korea's strategy, while starting from Simondon, shifts its weight at the decisive juncture toward Hui's bifurcation. Facing the dilemma of extinction squarely, what should be pursued is not the completion of individuation (a single crystallization resulting in the decisive victory of one side) but rather the maintenance and management of the tension as a productive metastability, while shaping the probability of bifurcation in South Korea's favor. As Simondon suggests, the premature completion of individuation means the cessation of all change, process, and becoming.[8] Chun's framework makes this even clearer—in a field where the dilemma of extinction is operative, rushing toward a single crystallization only drives the other side, in fear of extinction, into deeper entrenchment (the strengthening of nuclear forces and anti-imperialist solidarity). What South Korea should pursue is not a premature, singular crystallization, but an open metastability that manages the threat of extinction while preserving the potentiality for the next individuation. This is the only way in which a seed strategy that "triggers without imposing" can be reconciled with the dilemma of extinction.

2.6 Policy Implications: A Combinatorial Synthesis Strategy

The foregoing analysis suggests that South Korea's policy should be designed not as the sum of fragmented scenario-specific responses, but as a combinatorial synthesis strategy that manages all four scenarios simultaneously. No single scenario arrives alone; at any given point or phase, two or more operate partially and simultaneously. The synthesis consists of the simultaneous operation of the following four layers.

(1) The A·D Foundation Layer: Integrating Peacetime Crisis Management, Deterrence, and Contingency

The crisis management, extended-deterrence, and regional hub-building assets of Scenario A (frozen metastability) are operated on the same infrastructure as the contingency preparations for the uncontrolled transition of Scenario D (forced individuation). Peacetime, multilateral, non-public contingency consultations serve simultaneously as Scenario A's channel for crisis prevention and Scenario D's asset for post-crisis management; the responses to the two scenarios are not separate tracks but two operating modes of a single standing infrastructure. In a situation where the hostile two-state theory has severed direct inter-Korean channels, the core task at this layer is to restore, through multilateral channels (including informal South Korea–U.S.–China tracks) or alternative pathways, the minimal mechanisms needed to prevent accidental clashes and to enable crisis communication.

(2) The B·C Transformation Layer: Combining Mediating Infrastructure with Self-Demonstration

The small points of stability in Scenario B (gradual transduction)—humanitarian, health, climate, and ICBM-moratorium cooperation, and the freezing and reduction of nuclear capabilities—and the cosmotechnical self-demonstration of Scenario C (bifurcated coexistence) share the same assets, differing only in time horizon. Informal South Korea–U.S.–China tracks and multilateral diplomatic assets function as crystal seeds in Scenario B and as collision-prevention infrastructure in Scenario C. The very fact that South Korea, within the democratic, technology-networked world, is attractive is itself a long-term asymmetric asset in Scenario C, while in Scenario B it is transposed into external pressure that promotes the accumulation of internal change within North Korea. The accumulation of cooperative seeds in low-politics domains and cosmotechnical self-demonstration are therefore not separate tasks but must be operated in an integrated manner within a single transformation layer—with the proviso, mindful of the dual readability discussed above, that the design must minimize the extent to which the seeds can be read as regime subversion.

(3) The Transversal Operation of the AI-Technology Axis

The fourth scenario axis (AI innovation) is not a separate response item but a transformation coefficient applied transversally across all four scenarios above. In Scenario A, it functions as AI-augmented deterrence and information-warfare response capacity; in Scenario B, as a new mediating form for humanitarian, health, and climate cooperation through AI; in Scenario C, as the core content of cosmotechnical superiority; and in Scenario D, as the core technology for contingency tracking of nuclear and missile assets and for civil-affairs operations. South Korea's advantage in AI and semiconductors is an asymmetric asset that traverses all scenarios, and it must therefore be integrated not as an incidental element of North Korea strategy but as a central resource of the synthesis strategy.

(4) The Layer of Actively Operating Incomplete Sovereignty

South Korea cannot currently act as a fully sovereign state. Yet if Chun's insight is actively inverted from Simondon's perspective, this incompleteness is not a weakness but a space for mediation, linkage, and transformation within a complex anarchy. South Korea's synthesis strategy actively operates this space—leveraging the strategic implications that the Korean Peninsula, as a unit, carries within U.S.-China relations amid the "one China" incomplete-sovereignty condition surrounding cross-strait relations, and integrating the ROK-U.S. alliance, U.S.-South Korea-Japan cooperation, the South Korea-China-Japan network, ASEAN+3, NATO-IP4, MIKTA, and other multilateral diplomatic and regional-mediator roles into the work of transduction that shifts the probability of bifurcation among the four scenarios in South Korea's favor. This paradoxical reframing—that incomplete sovereignty is not a deficiency to be filled but an asset to be operated—is the final proposition reached by the macro level of the individuation strategy.

These four layers together constitute the space in which a single synthesis strategy is operated simultaneously. (1) The foundation layer provides the base that prevents the military escalation of tension; (2) the transformation layer accumulates crystal seeds and self-demonstration; (3) the AI axis supplies the asymmetric asset that traverses every layer; (4) and the layer of operating incomplete sovereignty integrates all of this into regional agency. The core of the combinatorial synthesis is not predicting which scenario will arrive, but securing, through the simultaneous operation of all four layers, a direction of crystallization favorable to South Korea whichever scenario arrives.

2.7 Conclusion: From the Imposition of Form to the Cultivation of Conditions

The Korean Peninsula individuation strategy proposes a paradigm shift in South Korea's North Korea policy. Where the conventional strategy was the work of pushing reality toward a single unification form, the individuation strategy is the work of cultivating conditions within the field of pre-individual tension and bending the probability of bifurcation, when a shock arrives, in South Korea's favor. This is a shift from the imposition of form to the cultivation of conditions.

This shift does not mean abandoning denuclearization or unification. Rather, by repositioning them not as a deterministic endpoint but as an individuation pathway that may occur once conditions are met, it opens a path by which South Korea can sustain active agency even amid the new reality of the hostile two-state theory. Chun's theory of incomplete sovereignty diagnoses the Korean Peninsula as "a field in which an unfinished sovereignty game is under way"; Simondon's concept of individuation describes the dynamics of that field (metastability, seed, transduction); and Hui's concept of bifurcation supplies the macro coordinates for an era of U.S.-China technological bifurcation. What we cannot control is the timing and form of the shock. What we can control is whether the seeds have been planted before the shock arrives, so that crystallization begins in a direction favorable to South Korea. That is the point of the Korean Peninsula individuation strategy proposed in this essay. ■

[1] Relational and processual ontologies, which treat political units not as entities already completed in advance but as arising within relations, have also been actively discussed in recent international relations theory. Whereas existing relational ontologies tend to be predominantly static and constitutive in character, Simondon’s concept of individuation, as employed in this paper, is distinctive in that it supplies a dynamic vocabulary of metastability, transduction, and phase transition.

[2] Framing individuation as a heuristic is a preemptive answer to the most common criticism this strategy is likely to face — namely, whether the social-scientific appropriation of a concept from natural philosophy is legitimate. This paper does not present the concept of individuation as a testable causal law; it is used strictly as a tool of redescription that opens up policy space unseen by existing paradigms.

[3] For the standard formulation of Simondon’s critique of hylomorphism and substantialism and of the concepts of pre-individuality and metastability, see Simondon (2005 [1958]). His own caveat — that while he takes crystallization as the paradigm of physical individuation, it does not exhaustively explain physical individuation — is consistent with this paper’s status as a "heuristic frame."

[4] For Simondon, the transindividual is originally a concept concerned with psychic and collective individuation (Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective); this paper repurposes it as an analogy to describe how state-level agency is constituted within a regional relational network.

[5] Introducing the AI-technology axis as a transformation coefficient is a provisional proposal of this essay; the concrete mechanisms of operation and measurable indicators within each scenario remain tasks for future research.

[6] For Yuk Hui’s concepts of cosmotechnics and technodiversity, see Hui (2016; 2024). Applying Hui’s proposition of bifurcation to the Korean Peninsula makes it possible to place the asymmetric competition in attractiveness between the two systems at the center of strategy, without presupposing unification as the single endpoint.

[7] Dual readability is a conceptualization of the dilemma that engagement policy toward North Korea has historically faced — the problem whereby engagement is interpreted by Pyongyang as a threat to the regime and thereby becomes counterproductive. This paper does not deny this dilemma, which Chun terms the "dilemma of extinction," but instead explicitly identifies it as a structural condition of the strategy.

[8] The insight that the completion of individuation is itself the cessation of change, process, and becoming — and, further, death — is one of the central implications of Simondon’s theory of individuation, connected to his argument that a living being is alive only insofar as it sustains perpetual individuation. This paper repurposes this insight as the strategic rationale for the injunction to "guard against premature, singular crystallization."

References

Korean Sources

Cho, Tae-hyung, and Kim Min-jung. 2021. "Estimating North Korea’s Long-Term Economic Growth Rate and National Income: 1956–1989." The Korean Journal of Economic Studies.

Choson Sinbo. 2022. "Supreme People’s Assembly Law ‘On the Nuclear Force Policy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.’" September 9.

Choson Sinbo. 2024. "Kim Jong Un’s Policy Speech at the Tenth Session of the Fourteenth Supreme People’s Assembly." January 16.

Chun, Chaesung. 2011. "A Historical-Sociological Examination of the East Asian International Political Order: Centering on the Concepts of Empire and Sovereignty." Korean Political Science Review.

Chun, Chaesung. 2018. Jugwon-gwa Gukje Jeongchi: Geundae Jugwon Gukga Chegye-ui Jeguk-jeok Seong-gyeok [Sovereignty and International Politics: The Imperial Character of the Modern Sovereign-State System]. Seoul: Seoul National University Press.

Chun, Chaesung. 2020. Dongbuka Gukje Jeongchi Iron: Bulwanjeon Jugwon Gukga-deul-ui Gukje Jeongchi [International Relations Theory in Northeast Asia: The International Politics of Incomplete Sovereign States]. Institute for International Studies, Seoul National University, Monograph Series 32. Seoul: Sapyoung Academy.

Jajusibo. 2022. "[Full Text] Chairman Kim Jong Un’s Military Parade Speech." April 26.

Lee, Jung-chul. 2025. Bukmi Daerip-gwa Chinseo Oegyo [U.S.–North Korea Confrontation and Personal-Letter Diplomacy]. Seoul: Seoul National University Press.

Lee, Jong-min. 2026. "North Korea’s Macroeconomic Trends and Industrial Policy." Unpublished manuscript.

Lee, Soo-hyuck. 2008. Jeonhwanjeok Sageon: Bukhaek Munje Jeongmil Bunseok [A Pivotal Event: A Close Analysis of the North Korean Nuclear Problem]. Seoul: JoongAng Books.

Ministry of Unification. 1996. Compendium of North Korean Economic Statistics. Seoul: Ministry of Unification.

Pyo, Hak-kil, Cho Tae-hyung, and Kim Min-jung. 2020. "Estimating North Korea’s Capital Stock and Its Implications." Bank of Korea Economic Research.

Rodong Sinmun. 2023. "Report on the Enlarged Ninth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea." December 31.

Shin, Wook-hee, and Cho Dong-jun (interviews and eds.). 2009. Gowi Gwallyo-deul, ‘Bukhaek Wigi’-reul Malhada [Senior Officials Speak on the "North Korean Nuclear Crisis"]. Gwacheon: National Institute of Korean History.

Simondon, Gilbert. 2017. Individuation in Light of the Notions of Form and Information. Translated by Hwang Su-young. Seoul: Greenbee. (Originally published 1958.)

Song, Min-soon. 2016. Bing-ha-neun Umjik-inda: Bihaekhwa-wa Tong-il Oegyo-ui Hyeonjang [The Glacier Moves: On the Front Lines of Denuclearization and Unification Diplomacy]. Paju: Changbi.

English and French Sources 

Carlin, Robert, and John W. Lewis. 2007. "What North Korea Really Wants." Washington Post, January 27.

Haggard, Stephan, and Marcus Noland. 2007. Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hecker, Siegfried S., with Elliot A. Serbin. 2023. Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hui, Yuk. 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

Hui, Yuk. 2024. Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lawrence, Christopher. 2020. "Normalization by Other Means: Technological Infrastructure and Political Commitment in the North Korean Nuclear Crisis." International Security 45, 1: 9–50.

Pritchard, Charles L. 2007. Failed Diplomacy: The Tragic Story of How North Korea Got the Bomb. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Qin, Yaqing. 2016. "A Relational Theory of World Politics." International Studies Review 18, 1: 33–47.

Sigal, Leon V. 1998. Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Simondon, Gilbert. 2005. L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information. Grenoble: Millon. (원저 1958.)

Walt, Stephen. 2021. "The Geopolitics of Empathy." Foreign Policy. June 27. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/27/the-geopolitics-of-empathy/.

Way, Christopher and Jessica L. Weeks. 2014. "Making It Personal: Regime Type and Nuclear Proliferation." American Journal of Political Science 58, 3: 705–719.

Wit, Joel S., Daniel B. Poneman, and Robert L. Gallucci. 2004. Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

National Security Archive. 1991–1994. Briefing Books and Declassified Cables on U.S.–DPRK Nuclear Diplomacy (Briefing Book 610; "U.S.-ROK Basic Positions," 1991; State 140071, 1994; Clinton–Kim Young Sam Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, 1994). Washington, D.C.: National Security Archive, George Washington University.

United Nations Security Council. 2006–2017. Resolution 1718 (2006) and subsequent sanctions resolutions on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, including those adopted in 2017. New York: United Nations.

■ Inhwan OH is Senior Research Fellow at EAI and Lecturer at Seoul National University.

■ Translated and edited by Sangjun LEE, EAI Research Associate; Inhwan OH, EAI Senior Research Fellow; Suhyung KANG, EAI Intern.
    For inquiries: 02 2277 1683 (ext. 211) | [email protected]