• Strategy21
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• s.34
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• pp.5-25
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• 2014

On July 3~4, 2014, the Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Seoul might be seen as a step on the path toward strategic outcomes for both country. For South Korea, Seoul shrewdly retains some degree of self-reliance by balancing between ROK-China strategic cooperative partnership relationship and ROK-US alliance. For China, Beijing appears to put its interests on the Korean Peninsula increasingly within China's larger geopolitical influence. To what extent can ROK-China relationship maintain futuristic strategic cooperative partnership between them? As we observed joint press communiques of the Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit on July 3, 2014, four agendas of bilateral relationship between Seoul and Beijing can be identified: intractable rivalry between the two great powers, North Korea nuclear issues, disparities of their displeasure with Japan denying the past wrongdoing and enhancing its military capabilities and Chinese imposing of its core interests on its Korea policy. With these evolving strategic environments, however, China and the ROK appear justifiably be pleased with the state of their relations: their strategic cooperative partnership is the cornerstone of peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific or Indo-Pacific region and continues to grow broader and deeper.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.522-535
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• 2002

Increased integration of the countries of East Asia is occurring following the geopolitical changes that took place after the collapse of the USSR. In a geographical sense, establishment of external economic links is occurring in special territories that include the border regions of two or more countries. These territories have come to be called international transboundary territories. In this article the characteristics of international transboundary territories are analyzed, definitions are given. Division of international transboundary territories in the south of the Russian Far East into districts has taken place; examples of their hierarchical classifications based on the geosystem of V.B. Sochava are provided. Guidelines for further research on transboundary territories to develop sustainable natural resource use programs in border regions of these countries are outlined.

• Asian review of World Histories
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.105-127
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• 2014

The Silk Road, a trans-Eurasian network of trade routes connecting East and Southeast Asia to Central Asia, India, Southwest Asia, the Mediterranean, and northern Europe, which flourished from roughly 100 BCE to around 1450, has enjoyed two modern eras of intense academic study. The first spanned a period of little more than five decades, from the late nineteenth century into the early1930s, when a succession of European, Japanese, and American scholar-adventurers, working primarily in Chinese Turkestan (present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which comprises China's vast northwest) and China's Gansu Province (to the immediate east of Xinjiang) rediscovered and often looted many of the ancient sites and artifacts of the Silk Road. The second era began to pick up momentum in the 1980s due to a number of geopolitical, cultural, and technological realities as well as the emergence of the New World History as a historiographical field and area of teaching. This second period of fascination with the Silk Road has resulted in not only a substantial body of both learned and popular publications as well as productions in other media but also in an ever-expanding sense among historians of the scope, reach, and significance of the Silk Road.

• Strategy21
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• s.36
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• pp.121-149
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• 2015

This paper will examine some past and current issues concerning the Republic of Korea's national strategy, focusing predominantly upon how the ROK should respond to the urgent maritime-oriented strategy highlighted by the recent developments and achievements of national prosperity achieved during last three decades and identify some of successful cases in East Asia. Some consideration will also be given to more general emergent issues of trends and developments of East Asian countries which might affect to define the ROK's future national strategy in the context of its national grand strategy to enhance national interests and prosperity. ROK is especially dependent upon open Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC) and its national security emphasizes the sea as the medium of geopolitical and geo-economic development, given the sea known as core geographic option remains that ROK is an important maritime power, ranking the world-level nation in term of GDP, sea-borne trade, container processing capability, shipbuilding capacity and so on. It should be apparent, therefore, that ROK's national strategic development depends upon the relationship between its peninsula geography and its national development based on sea-borne economic growth and its maritime-oriented future national strategy will be the best option to maintain its national development and economic prosperity.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.221-228
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• 2015

To protect and manage the Korean space assets including satellites, it is important to have precise positions and orbit information of each space objects. While Korea currently lacks optical observatories dedicated to satellite tracking, the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) is planning to establish an optical observatory for the active generation of space information. However, due to geopolitical reasons, it is difficult to acquire an adequately sufficient number of optical satellite observatories in Korea. Against this backdrop, this study examined the possible locations for such observatories, and performed simulations to determine the differences in precision of optical orbit estimation results in relation to the relative baseline distance between observatories. To simulate more realistic conditions of optical observation, white noise was introduced to generate observation data, which was then used to investigate the effects of baseline distance between optical observatories and the simulated white noise. We generated the optical observations with white noise to simulate the actual observation, estimated the orbits with several combinations of observation data from the observatories of various baseline differences, and compared the estimated orbits to check the improvement of precision. As a result, the effect of the baseline distance in combined optical GEO satellite observation is obvious but small compared to the observation resolution limit of optical GEO observation.

• The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.237-259
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• 2010

This paper first gives a brief overview of the history of space law making in the international geopolitical context and recalls some of the main principles as elaborated in the framework of the United Nations. Next, several topics are discussed that will require the attention of space lawyers in the near future. They are the International Space Station, space debris, exploitation of space resources, space tourism, private property rights in space, and militarization and weaponization of space. The paper raises some questions in each of these areas that need to be addressed and concludes that the general legal framework for space activities under public international law as contained in the UN treaties is in place, and is sufficiently general and flexible to enable and encourage states to carry out space activities in an orderly manner. However, as demonstrated by the examples discussed in the paper, the time has come for the international community to agree on the further development of these general principles, starting perhaps with space debris, imminent 'new' uses of space such as space tourism, or some of the 'age old' issues such as the weaponisation of outer space that will continue to require our attention and vigilance. Whether such rules can be in the form of non binding guidelines, codes of conduct and the like, or should be embodied in solid legal instruments creating rights and obligations remains to be seen.

• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.6-19
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• 2019

The purpose of this article is to problematize the existence of a possible Ibero-American informational thinking. It was initially observed that a relative absence of Ibero-America in the international presentations and mappings of information science exists. Below, the reality of the 22 countries that compose Ibero-America is discussed, a region that can be understood from a sociocultural and geopolitical perspective. Then, a mapping of the information science research in these countries is made. The main research topics found are: epistemological studies, relationships with library science, information literacy, representation and organization, bibliometric studies, information management, user studies, technological dimensions, and relationships with archival science and museum studies. Finally, a general epistemological configuration of information science is presented at a global level, highlighting the great trends of study of information that marked the decades of the 1960s and 1970s (physical model), 1980s and 1990s (cognitive model), and the 21st century (sociocultural model), and which manifested themselves in the different subareas that make up the field. The most recent research in information science, in addition to addressing information transfer (physical dimension) and its relationship with data and knowledge (cognitive dimension), has also incorporated aspects related to the social effects of information, its role in the constitution of identities and culture, and the importance of its material conformations. Such expansion reflects attempts to address the complexity of informational phenomena. Therefore, it is concluded that it is important to place the specific contributions of Ibero-America in this context.

• Gut and Liver
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.615-622
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• 2018

Despite the well-proven, safe and effective therapies for hepatitis B infection, delivery of treatment remains a significant challenge in resource-poor settings. Geopolitical and economic restrictions present additional difficulties in providing care in North Korea. However, treatment of patients with chronic hepatitis B remains a top priority for both the North Korean Ministry of Public Health and international agencies working in North Korean hepatitis healthcare facilities. Working in partnership, a path was created to institute this much-needed program. A consortium of United States and Australian humanitarian non-governmental organizations along with generous individual and corporate donors working in concert with local and national health authorities have succeeded in establishing the first hepatitis B treatment program in North Korea. The essential elements of this program include renovation of existing hepatitis hospitals, access to antiviral medications, establishment of laboratory facilities, creation of medical documentation and record-keeping, training of local health care professionals, and quarterly visits by international volunteer physicians and laboratory experts. Management and treatment decisions are made bilaterally. To date, nearly 1,500 patients have been evaluated, and over 800 have been started on long-term antiviral therapy. It is envisioned that this program will eventually be managed and funded by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Ministry of Public Health. This program's success demonstrates a potential model for delivery of antiviral therapy for patients suffering from hepatitis B in other developing countries.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.1-24
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• 2019

Bloody wars between Arab Muslims and Khazar Turks in the Caucasus continued for a more than a hundred years from the mid $7^{th}$ century to the end of the $8^{th}$ century CE. The Khazar state survived but had to withdraw from Caucasian Albania, the present territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan. However, the Khazars managed to expand their political control over the trade routes north-east and north-west of the Caucasian ridge. A trade partnership was established between former rival powers in the region that allows us to call the period after the end of the Arab-Khazar wars up to the time of the collapse of the Khazar state in the middle of the 10th century an era of Arab-Khazar partnership and domination of the Silk Road. This article highlights the impact made by geopolitical shifts in the regions of the time upon international trade tracks and particularly on the development of trade facilities, infrastructure, and local production in Azerbaijan, which became a major transit country of goods from the north to markets in the Muslim Near East.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.23-48
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• 2018

The Silk Road usually implies a network of trade and communications that stretched from east to west and connected China and the countries of the Far East via Central Asia and the Middle East to the eastern Mediterranean, or through the northern coast of the Caspian Sea and the Volga basin to the Black Sea coast. However, at certain historical stages, a network of maritime and overland routes stretching from north to south, commonly called the Volga-Caspian trade route, also played a significant role in international trade and cultural contacts. The geopolitical realities of the early Middle Ages relating to the relationship of Byzantium, the Sassanid Empire, and the West Turkic Khaganate, the advance of the Arab Caliphate to the north, the spread of Islam in the Volga region, the glories and fall of the Khazar State, and the Scandinavian campaigns in the Caucasus, closely intertwined with the history of transport and communications connecting the north and south through the Volga-Caspian route. In a later era, the interests of the Mongolian Uluses, and then the political and economic aspirations of the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid State, and Russia, collided or combined on these routes. The article discusses trade contacts existing between the north and the south in the 15th and first half of the 17th century along the routes on the western coast of the Caspian Sea.