Event Date: October 7, 2026 - 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Registration: Google Forms

Presented by CIPS, IPEN and the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada

This presentation examines the rapid growth of South Korea’s defense industry and the strategic dilemmas accompanying its global expansion. It first reviews South Korea’s major defense exports and achievements in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and other regions. It then assesses the industry’s prospects for further expansion into European and U.S. markets, highlighting the strengths of Korean defense firms and their potential for collaboration with European and American counterparts. Despite its commercial success, South Korea faces growing challenges, including protectionist pressures from NATO members, Western concerns about its strategic orientation, and the risk of becoming entangled in conflicts involving its customers. Against this backdrop, the presentation explores opportunities for defense cooperation between South Korea and Canada and, more broadly, examines South Korea’s perspective on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s call for greater cooperation among middle powers.

Speaker:

Sungmin Cho is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea. He is also a nonresident fellow at the Center for China Analysis of Asia Society. Previously, he worked for six years as a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS), an institute of the US Department of Defense, based in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr.Cho’s areas of expertise include US-China competition, Chinese politics, and the geopolitics of northeast Asia. Cho has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, including World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Democratization, Journal of Contemporary China, the China Journal, and Asian Security, among others. His policy analysis has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Washington Quarterly, and War on the Rocks. Cho has contributed commentaries at the invitations of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brookings, and other think tanks. Prior to his academic career, Cho served in the Korean Army as an intelligence officer for three years, including a seven-month deployment to Iraq. Cho earned a PhD in government from Georgetown University, an MA in international relations from Peking University, and a BA in political science from Korea University.

Chair:

Pascale Massot is an associate professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is also non-resident Honorary Fellow, Political Economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in New York, and a Senior Fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada in Vancouver. She is the author of China’s Vulnerability Paradox: How the World’s Largest Consumer Transformed Global Commodity Markets (Oxford University Press, 2024) – Winner of the 2025 Best Book Award in International Political Economy from the International Studies Association and the 2025 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize.