Economic Development and South Korea’s UN PKO Participation:

In this paper, we develop a theory on how economic development in South Korea has reshaped its foreign policy and examine the rising middle power’s personnel contributions to the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs) using a supply-side rational choice model. Not only do the results reaffirm economic development as the fundamental driving force of South Korea’s growing contributions to UN PKOs, a handful of factors that influence South Korea’s decision on UN PKO participation were also discovered. This study highlights an important approach to bridge our knowledge of the global peacekeeping endeavors and individual countries’ self-interested calculation.