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This article examines how melancholia constitutes a psycho-geopolitical space interweaving Korean subjects' psychic and political lives with the dynamics of the (post) Cold War alliance between Japan and the US. The Wednesday Demonstration is the weekly protest in Seoul that calls for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government for comfort women who worked in the sexual slavery system under the Japanese Empire during WWII. The fact that the weekly protests have continued for 30 years since 1992 signifies that the comfort women issue has remained an unresolved (geo)political issue between South Korea and Japan for three decades, despite apologies and monetary compensations by the Japanese government. This article offers a psychoanalytic-geopolitical rationale for the endless grief of Korean postcolonial subjects who cannot accept the measures of the Japanese government regarding the comfort women issue. Based on 1-year's participant observations and in-depth interviews with Korean activists who engaged in the Wednesday Demonstration from September 2019 to August 2020, this article aims to accomplish three goals. Firstly, this article shows how Korean postcolonial subjects were/are haunted by colonial past. Secondly, I examine why Koreans cannot complete mourning for comfort women in the context of ROK-US-Japan geopolitical relations. Lastly, this article interrogates how ethno-nationalists intervene to turn melancholia into a motivation for ethnic solidarity and how their attempt might have failed by exploring a Korean postcolonial subject's psychic lives. In doing so, I argue that the wounds of Koreans related to the comfort women issue are not simply from colonial history, but they are postcolonial wounds that have not healed 'appropriately' under the (US-sponsored) South Korean/Japanese (post-)Cold War security arrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the practical, normative, and theoretical import of large-scale organizational change in public organizations, scant research exists on this topic by political science, public administration, or public management scholars. Moreover, scholars have classified the broader literature on this topic as rife with complexities, competing theoretical pressures, and inconclusiveness. This article returns to basics by using a grounded theory approach to develop and illustrate an empirically informed and theoretically integrated "polity-centered" framework for studying large-scale organizational change in public organizations. Informing the framework are the patterns of politics driving, and driven by, efforts in the post-Cold War era to "green" the U.S. military by incorporating environmental and natural resource protection values into the services' core missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although state failure has assumed considerable importance in the post-cold-war world, attempts to predict its occurrence statistically have not been very successful. Such attempts rely on off-the-shelf data collected for other purposes. To predict state failure, we need data more specific to the problem. A better body of theory is required to identify causal patterns, and case studies are a promising way to proceed. Case studies of paradigmatic state failures in Somalia and Afghanistan suggest a pattern: rulers attack the state apparatus in order to prevent opposition by the bureaucracy and military, precipitating the collapse of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]