How Vulnerability Holds: Structural Interaction and Marriage Migration in South Korea

The vulnerability of marriage migrants has been extensively documented, and scholarship identifies a wide range of structural domains that shape their experiences, including family relations, policy and institutional frameworks, and nationalist imaginaries.This article does not seek to replace these accounts but to offer an alternative way of understanding vulnerability.Rather than treating vulnerability as an outcome attributable to identifiable causes, it conceptualizes it as a process that emerges from interactions among structural domains.Instead of asking what causes vulnerability, the article asks how vulnerability holds.This article advances a conceptual framework that shifts attention from identifying discrete domains of vulnerability to examining the relations among them.Drawing on structuration theory, particularly the work of Giddens and Sewell, the paper conceptualizes vulnerability as a relational and temporally sustained process produced through the interaction and alignment of multiple structures with unequal depth and power.The framework does not seek to assign causal responsibility to specific actors or policies.Rather, its purpose lies in according meaning to vulnerability as a systemic configuration in which the whole exceeds the sum of its visible components.South Korea has been selected as the theoretically generative site in this paper because multiple structural domains shaping marriage migration converge there in explicit, institutionalized ways, alongside emergent and contested social currents.This alignment renders South Korea an analytically productive case as it illustrates how established institutional domains and emergent ideological formations operate concurrently-and often in tension-within the same national context.