Park-Kang demonstrates how much richer our investigations can be if we contemplate tears, insecurity, unknowing and the emotional responses of grief, pain and love. . . . It shows us how meaning can survive the pressures for research to be useful, effective and scientific. . . . This is a phenomenal contribution to narrative and autoethnographic IR.

International Affairs

My own favorite fictional sleuths are Icelandic, Japanese, Indian and Singaporean. All of them are storytelling-worriers. So is Sungju-Park-Kang. His investigation of the mysterious downing of flight KAL 858 has taken him into encounters with state intelligence agents, confused students, and unsettled survivors. Accompanying Park-Kang along theorizing’s ill-lighted corridors will ensure that IR will never look the same. Tears of Theory will stick with you.

Cynthia Enloe, Author of The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging Persistent Patriarchy

This will be seen as one of the boldest efforts to date to craft a new style of writing about International Relations. An auto-ethnography combined with fiction and theory, the author challenges us to look at the international, not through a safe and reified detachment, but in a thoroughly unsafe way – itself a metaphor for the very unsafe world we purport to study.

Stephen Chan, OBE, SOAS University of London

From the Foreword:
Tears of Theory beautifully draws together stories of the personal, political, theoretical and international. It is “simply” theory – which for me, is profound. […] about failure and hurt but also, so importantly, about survival and the ability to transform wounds in the most luminous of ways.

Marysia Zalewski, Cardiff University

Looks like a fascinating book, about a most important topic.

Noam Chomsky, Laureate Professor, University of Arizona

With strikingly honest writing and a rare fresh perspective, Tears of Theory at once reconceptualizes what International Relations (IR) theory ought to be, how IR scholarship ought to be practiced, and how one might think about the conflict in Korea. Equal parts empirical, imaginative, and autobiographical in his writing, Sungju Park-Kang has produced a must-read contribution!

Laura Sjoberg, Royal Holloway University of London, UK / University of Florida, USA