Contribution short abstract:

We call for a reflexive re-examination of South Korean development knowledge production by interrogating its unwittingly Western-centric and colonial epistemic foundations of its development policies, institutional practices, and academic scholarship.

Contribution long abstract:

We critically examines the production of international development (ID) knowledge in South Korea through the lens of intellectual decolonization, challenging the dominant Eurocentric, binary, and linear development narratives embedded within its development discourse. As a former aid recipient turned donor, South Korea occupies a unique position in the global development hierarchy, presenting itself as a successful non-Western and non-white example of ‘catching up’ with the West following its liberation from Japanese imperial rule in 1945. Despite this positioning, South Korea’s ID knowledge production remains deeply influenced by Western-centric, imperial, and colonial perspectives—perspectives that local scholarship simultaneously seeks to reject. This paradox often results in the reproduction of epistemic dependencies and colonial legacies within the field of international development. We argue that South Korea’s development knowledge production operates within a framework of ‘coloniality of knowledge’, which perpetuates Western-centric racist methodologies and conceptual frameworks while marginalizing alternative epistemologies from the Global South. Within the global knowledge production hierarchy, South Korean scholarship often assumes a quasi-Western stance, reinforcing Seoul’s self-proclaimed status as a pivotal middle power in international politics. This process of development knowledge production thus serves as a form of colonial and proxy-imperial statecraft. We call for a reflexive re-examination of South Korean development knowledge production by interrogating the epistemic foundations of its development policies, institutional practices, and academic scholarship. It advocates for the promotion of decolonial epistemic plurality to foster more inclusive, equitable, and just global development discourses.