Description
Why do some decision-makers, even when facing an adversary, dare to hope and respond not through threats and coercions but by initiating conciliatory gestures? This paper investigates the role of hope in the initiation and types of conciliatory gestures between two adversary states. Many studies supported that the relationship between emotion and reason is no longer dichotomic or contradictory in decision-making and is widely incorporated into foreign policy analysis. However, existing studies have marginalised hope in that they assume fear and anxiety usually dominate over hope in a self-help anarchic international system. Moreover, hope has been paid biased attention at best in terms of an obstacle to impede sensible decision-making. In order to fill this gap, cases between the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been selected from two different time points: Sunshine Policy and Trustpolitik. There are two South Korean leaders who initiated conciliatory gestures at different times, but of different types. Also, we can see variations between the presence and absence of hope by the state leader at those times. This paper is expected to help us understand how individual emotion works in an East Asian structural context and promote peace in East Asia by exploring the relationship between hope and conciliatory gestures.
