The misadventure of Korea Aid: developmental soft power and the troubling motives of an emerging donor

Korea Aid was a development project delivering Korean medical services, food and pop music via trucks to rural communities in Africa. The project was poorly conceived, vulnerable to corruption and ultimately ineffective. While Korea Aid marked a backward step for Korea’s development cooperation, revealing many of the challenges associated with emerging donors, it also reflected Korea’s aspiration to become a cultural and developmental alternative to hegemonic nations. This paper examines the historical circumstances that led to the formation of Korea Aid, and further argues that Korea Aid embodied a synthesis of ‘cultural soft power’ and ‘developmental soft power’ intended to create the perception of Korea as culturally and developmentally attractive and benign. Korea’s current pursuit of developmental soft power intentionally transforms the country’s development experience into a ‘politically odourless’ model, masking its authoritarian undercurrent and in turn camouflaging growing aspirations to expand its global influence.