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Why do some societies achieve high standards of living, relatively broad access to education and quality health care, serviceable infrastructure, predictable and largely impersonal legal procedures, and relatively accessible avenues to peaceful political expression, while others stagnate with guarded islands of extravagant wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty, corrupt autocratic systems, and simmering conflicts—or even full-blown civil wars? Why, did South Korea, a dictatorship that faced devastating war from 1950-1954, and whose 1960 GDP per capita was half that of Mexico and twice that of India, have, by 2015, a per capita GDP that exceeded Mexico’s by a factor of three and India’s by a factor of 17—in addition to a largely peaceful transition to democracy? How might a society, trapped in stagnation, corruption, and repression, initiate and sustain processes of economic and political development?

Territorial disputes are one of the main sources of tension in Northeast Asia. Escalation in such conflicts often stems from a widely shared public perception that the territory in question is of the utmost importance to the nation. Yet that’s frequently not true in economic, military, or political terms. The tiny and remote islets, known as Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan, for instance, have no such value. Yet citizens and groups in both countries have mounted sustained campaigns to protect them as the heart of the nation. Similar movements are taking place throughout the region and have wide-ranging domestic and international consequences. Focusing on non-state actors rather than political elites, Alexander Bukh explains how and why apparently inconsequential territories become central to national and nationalist discourse in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. These Islands Are Ours gives us a new way to understand the nature of territorial disputes and how they inform national identities by exploring their social construction, amplification, and ideological consequences.