• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.143-160
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• 2016

The official development assistance (ODA) accompanies an interstate financial transaction, such as trade, foreign direct investment, and money transfer. ODA policy has designated several purposes. Among them, political purposes have been considered to be the key factors in the regional distribution of foreign aid. If we agree the traditional approach that recognizes ODA as a 'political one', the practice of ODA can be a kind of state geopolitics. This study investigates the construction and characteristics of geopolitical discourses. More specifically, this study pays special attention to the 'practical geopolitics' that is crucial to the policy-making. By analyzing the minutes of the National Assembly Standing Committee, four geopolitical discourses were identified: 'practicing humanities as a developed country', 'providing a role model to developing countries', 'developing new foreign markets' and 'coping with global geopolitics'. These geopolitical discourses have been constructed through the process of justifying the ODA policy to the domestic and international audiences. Constructing discourses on ODA shows the representation of a dichotomous and typical image of developed/developing.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.267-289
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• 2010

Nationalism endorses a collective movement to establish an authentic position in the international cultural and political arena. Arguably the dialectic of nationalism and geopolitics bears a reassuring similarity to the philosophical lineage going back, at least, to Hegelian dialectic of universality and particularity. This dialectic platform has been concerned with sustaining, among other things, the dynamics between the universal and the particular. In practical terms, nationalism prompts increased sensitivity to socio-political pressures coming from abroad to cancel the national particularity into geopolitical, so-called universal, anonymity. Drawing suggestively from psychoanalysis, Lacanian ethics in particular, this discussion articulates the ethics of nationalism. Recounting Kantian self-determination as a reference point for responsible morality, Lacan suggests the problematics of desire as an alternative index for ethics. As individual desire flows from the unfathomable abyss of misrecognition, Lacanian ethics dissuade individuals to unlearn the fantasy that their own real desire, a residue produced by the Symbolic process, can be satisfied with that very socio-cultural Symbolic. Subjecting nationalism to Lacanian implications, Zizek illuminates nationalism as a small screening object which obscures as much as displays the circuits to the individual desire. Psychoanalytic ethics addresses that the ethical base should be found upon the particular, individual, real desire. As far as the nationalist cause also puts emphasis upon particularity rather than universality, nationalism is logically positioned to exert reflective efforts on empowering its constitutive individuals. Lacanian ethics persuades us to challenge the universal claim and to work through to regenerate nationalism in presenting its final contribution towards individual particularities.