Strategic Communication, Public Diplomacy, and International Legitimacy in South and North Korea: A Heuristic Comparison with Differentiated Implications for Latin America

Abstract

Introduction: This article examines how South Korea and North Korea use international communication as an arena of external legitimation within a highly specific geopolitical conflict.

Main objective: It compares their agenda, framing, institutional mediation, and reputation-building repertoires through common categories and delimits which analytical implications -rather than automatic policy transfers- may be discussed for heterogeneous Latin American settings.

Method and technique: The study uses a structured and focused qualitative comparison based on documentary analysis and a specialized literature review. The framework follows this order: neorealism; soft power, sharp power, and reputational security; agenda setting; and framing. The corpus includes academic literature, foreign-policy documents, institutional reports, and secondary studies concerning specific Latin American countries.

Results: South Korea combines material resources, cultural industries, cooperation, social actors, and public diplomacy to accumulate reputation. North Korea achieves high issue visibility through security, sanctions, and propaganda, but has fewer mediators capable of converting attention into sustained attraction. Available evidence for Latin America is uneven and does not support claims about a uniform regional reception.

Conclusion: The article distinguishes visibility, attraction, and reputational security and proposes three levels of inference: general theoretical principles, institutional adaptations conditioned by national capacities, and heuristic analogies that generate questions rather than prescribe models.