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Since South Korea gained a substantial degree of political and economic development, the South Korean government has tried to eradicate corruption by introducing institutional frameworks in addition to a number of new laws and institutions. As a matter of fact, the Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index score of South Korea is improving over time, but it still far behind other leading countries. The purpose of this chapter is to review the South Korean government's efforts at curbing corruption. This chapter first reviews the development of major anti-corruption infrastructure such as the anti-corruption legislation and the South Korean government's independent agency for anti-corruption, followed by discussion of the development of major anti-corruption measures, the international evaluation on corruption, and the role of civil society in curbing corruption. After that, there is a discussion of policy implications and the conclusion.

Despite children’s academic excellence in East Asian countries, school education in this region faces a range of challenges to build inclusive and quality education for all. This chapter aims at examining how these challenges occur and what actions have been taken to deal with them. By focusing on China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, the chapter first reviews reforms of school education since the 1990s in these countries. The subsequent sections then present educational disparity and a new mode of teaching and learning in these countries. It concludes by addressing that East Asian countries must explore more common ground for building a more collective sense and identity to share responsibility for building a resilient, inclusive and sustainable world through global citizenship education and education for sustainable development.

This study attempts to introduce South Korea's unique experiences of civic operations made in Iraq and Lebanon. Koreans approached it with extreme caution since they are seeing through two different lenses: “paying back syndrome” from the Korean War experiences is colliding with the “Vietnam syndrome” from the experiences of Vietnam War. Expanding its regional role through revitalizing PKOs is not an easy job for the ROK government despite the fact that President Lee has committed himself to increase its efforts since his campaign days. South Korea recently decided to send its KDX-II type destroyer to Somalia for joining the maritime peacekeeping while people in Korea strongly suspect that the Obama administration would soon request to send its troops to Afghanistan as a part of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). As the Korean society is getting democratized, progressive NGOs have been opposing the government decision to send forces to assist the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It remains to be seen how President Lee persuades people to bear the burden and endure sacrifices. At least, four problems need to be addressed for Korea to become a major troop-contributing country (TCC): first, Korea needs to enact laws to deal with South Korea's participation in the UN PKOs. Second, Korea needs to find a way to include civilian experts in future activities of UN PKOs. Third, it needs to increase the budget and size of standby forces. Lastly, it needs to educate people to understand why Korea has to contribute further to make a safer world. It remains to be seen whether South Korea will continue to focus on its stabilization and reconstruction efforts without sending its combat troops.

Purpose – The purpose of the research was to examine the process of new teacher evaluation policy development in South Korea, in order to gain insight into how a controversial policy could be established in education. Research questions were about the process of the policy development, political actors involved and their influences, and the meaning of teacher evaluation in the newly established teacher evaluation policy.Methodology – The study uses a qualitative and descriptive-analytical process from a hermeneutics perspective that views policy as text to be interpreted. This perspective allows policy to be connected to a larger social context through interpretations of text. The main data sources included policy documents, statements by various organizations, research reports, and public media artifacts produced between 2000 and 2012. For data analysis, constant comparison and content analysis methods were used.Findings – The findings show that the process of developing a teacher evaluation system demonstrated an unsuccessful attempt to apply the Habermasian notion of discursive democracy. Relevant stakeholders were invited to deliberate on the reform, but official meetings ended prematurely without consensus. In the end, the government proceeded without full support of any stakeholders. During the deliberation process, teacher organizations and parent groups demonstrated conflicting perspectives on teacher work and the new evaluation system only partially accommodated both perspectives. The effectiveness of the new evaluation system remains to be researched.Value – The policy development process and the evaluation system shown in this study should inform similar efforts in other contexts.