Daniel Sneider in Korea

Center for East Asian Studies

Daniel Sneider, a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford University, has focused his studies on U.S. foreign policy in Northeast Asia, the foreign policy of Japan and Korea, and the formation of wartime historical memory in Asia. The son of a diplomat, he lived in Japan and elsewhere in Asia for much of his childhood, worked in Japan and Korea as a journalist, and traveled to Japan and Korea frequently in the last two decades as an academic, including an extended stay in Japan to work on a book about U.S.-Japan relations during the Cold War.

Sneider is a frequent contributor to several major U.S. periodicals, as well as a leading Japanese magazine, and serves as a Non-Resident Distinguished Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America where he makes regular contributions to the Institute’s Peninsula blog. As a journalist, he covered the overthrow of the military regime in South Korea in the late 1980s and has been a regular visitor and commentator on Korean affairs since that time. Most recently, he was cited in the New York Times on the historic decision to impeach the Korean president.

During our program, Sneider will discuss a wide range of issues, from Korea’s delicate geopolitics, the challenge of division and a nuclear-armed North Korea, the struggle for democracy in Korea, and the emergence of Korea as a global actor in economy, technology and culture.

Lecturer and associate faculty member, Center for East Asian Studies and affiliate of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
Former associate director for research, and director, the Divided Memories and Reconciliation project and the Nationalism and Regionalism project, Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University
Former national/foreign editor, The Mercury News; former syndicated columnist, Knight Ridder; Moscow bureau chief, 1990-1994 and Tokyo correspondent, 1985-1990, The Christian Science Monitor
Contributor, Toyo Keizai, East Asia Forum, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Slate, The National Interest, International Economy and The Christian Science Monitor
MPA, public administration, 1985, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
BA, East Asian history, 1973, Columbia University

In the news

Excerpted from “How South Korea ’s Democracy Prevailed Over a Reckless Leader,” New York Times, April 5, 2025:

To one observer, these events were a victory for the democratic institutions created in the late 1980s. “The response to Yoon’s attempted coup d’état displayed the maturity of Korean democracy—first of all, the resilience of civil society, which reacted immediately and massively to oppose the coup, most notably with the passion of Korean youth who were not alive in the 1980s and experienced the dangers of a return to autocratic rule for the first time,” said Daniel Sneider, a former journalist who covered South Korea back then and is now a lecturer at Stanford University.

“The fact that it was a unanimous decision of the Constitutional Court, with conservative appointees joining the decision, was a very important expression of not only the clarity of the case, but also the ability to overcome ideological polarization,” Mr. Sneider said.

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