Keeping the Nation: Conditional Dual Citizenship in South Korea

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 24. Structures of citizenship

Abstract

This study examines how a liberal democratic state adopts a highly conditional—thus restrictive—dual citizenship regime amid a global trend toward greater acceptance. While scholars document widespread liberalization driven by norm diffusion, demographic change, and policy convergence, South Korea presents a puzzling case. Despite democratization, engagement with international human rights norms, rising emigration and immigration, and persistent diaspora advocacy, South Korea has not adopted a fully permissive dual citizenship regime. Instead, it has developed what I conceptualize as an ambivalent dual citizenship regime.

Drawing on National Assembly minutes, newspaper coverage, court decisions, and political autobiographies, this research traces the political and legal processes culminating in the 2010–2011 revisions to the Nationality Act. These reforms formally departed from the long-standing principle of avoiding dual nationality but institutionalized selective inclusion and substantive constraints. Eligibility was extended primarily to socially privileged or state-beneficial groups, while dual nationals at birth are required to pledge non-exercise of foreign citizenship and comply with strict nationality selection rules.

I argue that this ambivalence reflects a deeper political logic rooted in South Korea’s resource-scarce political economy, demographic anxieties over low fertility and aging, geopolitical patterns of emigration to advanced economies, and the symbolic centrality of mandatory military service. Embedded within discourses of national collectivism, securitization, and developmentalism, the regime seeks simultaneously to retain population and discipline allegiance. The Korean case thus challenges linear diffusion accounts and demonstrates how liberal democracies may institutionalize conditional expansion rather than full liberalization of dual citizenship.

Author

• Jinhyuk Kim, University of California-San Diego