South Korea has no place for geopolitics in business schools?

Business schools in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and even Southeast Asia are currently hiring scholars with expertise in strategic competition, political risk, and global security to help firms and future leaders make sense of an increasingly unstable world.

A recent advertisement at Australia’s Monash University, called for an Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Business, reflecting the school’s aim “to address some of the challenges of the age” including “Climate Change, Thriving Communities and Geopolitical Security”.

Geopolitics was once the domain of political scientists and foreign affairs wonks. It is now being actively integrated into MBA curricula, risk management courses, and executive education modules. Not in South Korea. Geopolitics is yet to enter South Korea’s business schools.

Despite being on the frontlines of global strategic fault lines—wedged between a rising China, a declining Japan, a volatile North Korea, and an unpredictable U.S.—South Korean business schools have not moved to embrace geopolitics as a serious academic specialization within their institutions.

There are no tenure-track positions advertised, no dedicated research centers within business faculties, and no evident effort to integrate geopolitical risk into the analytical toolbox of Korean-trained executives. The question isn’t whether Korea needs this—it clearly does—but rather why the university system is institutionally and culturally unprepared to deliver it.

Institutional inertia?

Korean universities are deeply hierarchical and bureaucratic. Hiring decisions are less driven by market responsiveness or emerging trends than by rigid departmental needs, accreditation standards, and opaque internal politics. Many business schools remain narrowly focused on traditional disciplines—finance, accounting, operations, and marketing—rather than interdisciplinary or emergent fields.

Moreover, university departments in Korea tend to guard disciplinary boundaries jealously. Geopolitics is seen as a subfield of political science or international relations, and therefore outside the purview of economics or business. Even within one of the several graduate schools of international studies (GSIS) established in the late 1990s, there is an unspoken separation between those teaching different disciplines. The idea of appointing a political scientist in a business school simply to teach executives about strategic risk is institutionally alien to most Korean faculties.

And even when there is interest in innovation, decision-making in Korean universities is slow and consensus-driven. Unlike private institutions in Singapore, the UK, or the U.S., where a business school dean can swiftly create a new program or hire an unconventional candidate, Korean universities are beholden to ministry-imposed guidelines, accreditation bottlenecks, and conservative hiring committees that favour pedigree and conformity over adaptability and relevance.

Cultural blind spots?

One of the most paradoxical reasons for Korea’s resistance to integrating geopolitics into business education is that Koreans are already surrounded by geopolitics in daily life—but they don’t treat it as novel or instructive. In many countries, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S.-China trade tensions, or the Red Sea disruptions have shocked corporate leaders into realizing that geopolitics affects supply chains, prices, and strategic decisions. In Korea, geopolitical volatility is the default background.

However, this background is rarely converted into structured analysis or formal education. Korean CEOs may face the risks of doing business in China, the implications of a U.S. policy shift, or the possibility of another missile test from the North, but they do not take it into active consideration. It’s left to intuition, instinct, and personality—feeling built on experience rather than formal modeling or comparative theory. As a result, South Korean business schools and their students, including future and current executives, don’t feel the need to be “taught” geopolitics.

This normalization dulls demand for academic input. There is little pressure from industry to reconfigure business education to include political risk modeling or geopolitical forecasting. Korean business elites tend to rely on informal networks, gut instinct, or government briefings (to their own misfortune) rather than structured academic insight. That in turn reinforces the perception in universities that geopolitics is not a value-added specialization within the business curriculum.

Demographic gaps?

South Korea’s aging professoriate and shrinking student base also play a role. Many tenured professors in Korean business schools were hired in the 1990s or early 2000s. Their intellectual formation occurred in an era when globalization was assumed to be irreversible, liberal economics was hegemonic, and geopolitics belonged to diplomats—not supply chain managers. They were never trained to see the strategic landscape as a meaningful variable in business performance. And now, many of them are the ones shaping hiring decisions.

Meanwhile, the demographic crisis facing Korean universities has made them increasingly risk-averse. With falling enrollment numbers and growing competition for students, schools are reluctant to experiment with new disciplines that may not have immediate payoffs.

Hiring a specialist in great power competition might win applause in Washington or Brussels, but it doesn’t necessarily convince Korean parents paying steep tuition that their child will land a job at Samsung or LG. Indeed, most Korean companies are far behind their international partners in the appointment of strategic competition, political risk, global security, and even cyber security advisors.

Lastly, in a hyper competitive society, young Korean students are focused on immediate employability, not broad strategic thinking.

The corporate hiring process rewards high grades, technical specialization and conformity more than curiosity or big-picture analysis. That cultural and institutional climate leaves little room for speculative disciplines like geopolitics, which resist easy quantification and rarely lead to clear career paths.

Not if, but when

The global environment is changing too rapidly for Korea’s business education sector to ignore forever. Major conglomerates are expanding overseas under precarious conditions—into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—where political risk is real and rising.

Trade frictions, sanctions, and export controls are now regular obstacles, not exceptions. And most importantly, Korea’s strategic position is becoming more complex as U.S. hegemony fragments and China’s assertiveness grows.

Eventually, business schools in Korea will have to follow the global trend and integrate geopolitics into their teaching and research. It might begin with executive education or consultancy projects before trickling into academic hiring.

It may require external pressure—from multinational firms, global accreditation bodies, or foreign university partners. But the inertia will break.

For now, South Korea remains an outlier. On the world’s most dangerous peninsula, business schools continue to teach as if strategy stops at the border. And that is the most dangerous assumption of all.