Chung Min Lee is a professor of international relations at the Graduate School of International Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, and a nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Lee served as Korea’s ambassador for national security affairs from June 2013 to January 2016 and is a council member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Lee has been a visiting professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (2005–2007) and the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo (2004–2005) as well as a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation (1995–1998) and a visiting research fellow at the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo (1994–1995). Before that, Lee was a research fellow at the Institute of East and West Studies at Yonsei University (1988–1989), the Sejong Institute in Seoul (1989–1994), and the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1985–1988).
He received his master’s degree and PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1988 and his bachelor’s in political science from Yonsei University in 1982. Since the late 1980s, Lee has written extensively on Asian security, strategic developments in Northeast Asia, and the political-military balance on the Korean Peninsula. Lee has lived in the United States, Japan, Indonesia, Uganda, France, Republic of the Congo, Germany, Mexico, and Singapore.