Dongwook Kim

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, specializing in international relations and political methodology. I study how states build authority in spaces that do not belong to any state, such as the high seas, international airspace, outer space, and other parts of the global commons.

I came to these questions through a broader interest in the places where international order is made but not easily named. Some forms of authority are clearly territorial. Others are delegated to international institutions. But many important arrangements sit somewhere in between. They are partial, contested, and often ambiguous, yet they can still become durable parts of world politics. My dissertation, Authority without Territory, explores how that happens.

What interests me most is not simply whether a state is powerful enough to control a space, but how control becomes intelligible as a right. I ask how states justify new claims, how others learn to live with or resist them, and how legal and political vocabularies make some arrangements easier to sustain than others.

Before Minnesota, I received an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University and a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations, with a second major in Sociology, from Seoul National University. I previously worked as a translator, an experience that continues to inform how I think about concepts as they move across languages, disciplines, and the worlds of scholarship, policy, and law. A full CV is available here.

Outside research, I am drawn to maps, book arts, coffee and tea, music, theater, birdwatching, and tabletop role-playing games — small worlds that reward slow attention.