Migration and Cross-Border Marriage in South Korea

Rather than treating them as logistical intermediaries, this book reconceptualizes the role of cross-border marriage brokers in South Korea, facilitating mobility while also helping to shape narratives around gender, family, and national belonging in contemporary Asia.Drawing on multi-sited, qualitative research – including discourse analysis of brokers’ online videos, interviews, fieldwork at an NGO, and government reports – the book takes a holistic approach to understanding brokers’ practices. Chapters explore how they navigate regulation, legitimise their services, manage scrutiny, and market themselves through narratives that resonate with prevailing gender norms and dominant ideals of marriage. In doing so, brokers reinforce racialised, gendered, and moral hierarchies, contributing to selective norms of wifehood and nationhood. The book also considers how these practices have prompted responses from civil society actors, including migrant rights groups and cross-border unions, who challenge cultural framings of marriage migration, migrant wives, and Korean husbands.Situating the Korean case within a wider Asian context, the book highlights shared patterns and divergent developments, framing brokerage as part of broader debates on migration, multiculturalism, and contested belonging. It will appeal to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners in migration, Asian, and gender studies.

Minjae Shin is an early-career researcher in migration studies affiliated with the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol. Her broader research interests focus on the gendered dimensions of migration, migration infrastructures, nationhood, and gender ideologies. Her work explores how diverse institutions both facilitate mobility and influence collective perceptions of migrants, and how these dynamics intersect with broader questions of nationhood, gender, and migrant experiences in Asian contexts. She is currently developing a project on mixed-heritage youth in South Korea, examining in particular how the state (im)mobilises them through military conscription and how this process reconfigures their sense of nationhood and masculinity.