June Park

June Park is a 2021–22 Fung Global Fellow of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) at Princeton University. She is a political economist by training and works on trade, energy, and tech conflicts, analyzing different policy outcomes as a response to pressures based on governance structures—domestic institutions, leaderships, and bureaucracies that shape the policy formation process. Her current work pertains to post-pandemic geoeconomic conflicts in data governance and emerging technology.

She is concurrently pursuing the publication of her first book manuscript Digital Trade Wars & Currency Conflict: China, South Korea and Japan’s Responses to U.S. Protectionism since COVID-19 under a National Research Foundation of Korea book grant. Building a triangular “state-bureaucracy-industry” framework based on institutional variance and the nexus of government and business interests in critical sectors—ranging from vaccines and semiconductors, batteries and electric vehicles, data governance in digital trade, to cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in decentralized finance (DeFi) and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in centralized finance (CeFi) in digital currency conflict. Her book attempts to answer why the three countries have not acted the same upon encountering U.S. protectionist pressures pre-and post-COVID-19 and offers a mechanism for predicting policy moves.

Outside academia, she advises public and private sectors with analyses at global, regional, and domestic levels. She provides expert commentary to various international media outlets and contributes her analysis to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis division of Economist Group. She serves as an expert for global consulting firms Duco and Enquire. She is concurrently a Korea Foundation Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar and a member of the Democracy in Asia Project of the Foreign Policy Program of the Brookings Institution.

Dr. Park earned her BA and MA in political science with a focus on international security from Korea University and has held an internship at the UN Security Council Sanctions Subsidiary Organs Branch. She received her PhD in Political Science with a focus on international political economy from Boston University as a Fulbright Fellow and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.