Greetings and Selamat Datang!

I am a research professor at the Institute of East Asian Studies, Sogang University, Seoul, South Korea. In 2021, I earned PhD at the Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore (NUS). My academic interests are generally related to East Asian politics, with specific country foci on Indonesia and South Korea. The primary one is the rise of political Islam, as manifested in not only an increase in vote shares and seats of Islamist/Islamic parties but also a growing personal and communal Islamic piety. I also have paid attention to testing, conceptualizing, and measuring the qualities of democracies in East Asian countries and other developing countries.

During my doctoral program, I had conducted a research entitled “Islamist Political Mobilization in Contemporary Indonesia: The Case of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS)”. This research is mainly based on the following three projects: 1) rethinking the impact of moderation on the Islamist parties’ electoral performance by using a concept of normalization; 2) a district-level study on political mobilization of the PKS, the largest Islamist party in Indonesia, given the varied context of local politics (being accepted by Journal of Southeast Asian Studies); and 3) an in-depth case study on whether and how the Islamist PKS can mobilize non-Muslim voters. All these projects have been published by SSCI-indexed peer-reviewed journals.

I also have published several articles (in Korean journals) on a range of topics on Southeast Asian politics, including combability of Islam with democracy in Indonesia, relationship between natural resources and regime type, political players of halal certification, and Indonesian context of political power.

Last but not least, I have recently attempted to apply my understandings on Southeast Asian party politics to the cases in South Korea, my home country. Thanks for the generous sponsorships from Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), one journal article (published in Asian Journal of Comparative Politics) and two chapters of the book, entitled Rethinking Parties in Democratizing Asia (published by Routledge), will be released soon.

You can contact me by email: jhpark [at] u [dot] nus [dot] edu / jhpark82 [at] sogang [dot] ac [dot] kr. 

My CV is available here.