Jinwon Lee is Ph.D. candidate of Political Science at University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign. She served as a researcher at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy and a research associate at the Korea Institute for National Unification. She was a 2023-2024 Hans J. Morgenthau Grand Strategy Fellow at Notre Dame’s international Security Center. Her research focuses broadly on international security and alliance politics. Specifically, she analyzes the dynamics between patrons and protégés in military alliances. Her research agenda includes examining how protégés respond to patrons’ military commitments and policy decisions, the interaction between a patron’s military commitments and non-proliferation policies affecting its protégé, and the credibility of nuclear extended deterrence. She has investigated these topics using original large-N data and conducting archival research for in-depth case studies on the US-South Korea and China-North Korea alliances and their intra-alliance relations.
