OBSERVARE
Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa
e-ISSN: 1647-7251
VOL. 17 Nº.1, TD 1
Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula in a Global
Context: Security, Culture, and Transnational Perspectives
June 2026
41
FROM SOLIDARITY TO SURVIVAL: AN ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSITION OF
SECURITY PERCEPTIONS IN THE KOREAN DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE DURING
THE UKRAINE WAR USING KOBERT
HAYANN LEE
bulgariyann@hufs.ac.kr
Research Professor at the Institute of European Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
(Republic of Korea). She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Sofia University “St. Kliment
Ohridski.” Her research specializations include European integration and identity, Eastern Europe,
EU–South Korea relations, the Brussels Effect, and global regulatory politics. She also focuses on
energy transition, climate governance, and digital and cultural policy in Europe.
(https://orcid.org/0009-0000-4536-1844).
Abstract
This study examines how security perceptions in Korea’s digital public sphere shifted in
relation to the Ukraine war. Drawing on 101,900 items of portal news comments and YouTube
news comments collected between 2022 and 2025, it applies sentiment-based discourse
analysis using KoBERT. Rather than relying on a simple positive–negative split, the analysis
classifies discourse into seven emotion categories and then consolidates them into security-
relevant dimensions—threat perception, hostility, and humanitarian solidarity—to trace how
emotional configurations evolve over time. The results indicate that Korea’s security framing
moved from an initially value-oriented stance centered on humanitarian solidarity, through a
period of economic pragmatism as the war prolonged, and then shifted markedly toward an
existential, survival-oriented mode following reports of North Korean troop deployments. This
transition is captured by the Security Sentiment Transfer Index (SSTI) developed in this study,
which rose from 0.85 in the outbreak phase to 4.80 during the deployment period. The pattern
suggests that when external security crises become linked to domestically salient conditions,
public interpretation tends to converge on survival concerns while normative evaluation
recedes. Platform-level comparisons further show that SSTI values are consistently higher on
YouTube than on portal news comments, with the largest divergence observed during the
deployment period. This gap aligns with the role of visually driven content and
recommendation dynamics in intensifying high-arousal emotions such as fear and anger. In
addition, keyword-weight analysis identifies concrete terms—most notably “conscription” and
“nuclear”—as salient triggers associated with the sharpest increases in SSTI, indicating that
perceived proximity to personal safety and national vulnerability amplifies security sensitivity.
Taken together, the findings underscore the importance of the emotional configuration of
digital discourse as a factor in shifts in security perception. The study therefore argues that
national crisis management may benefit from security communication strategies that address
the public’s perceived existential risk and micro-level anxieties, rather than treating security
messaging as a one-way transmission of situational information.
Keywords
Ukraine War, Security Sentiment Transfer, KoBERT, Security Sentiment Transfer Index
(SSTI), North Korean Deployment, Digital Public Sphere.
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
e-ISSN: 1647-7251
VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and
Transnational Perspectives
June 2026, pp. 41-57
From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
42
Resumo
Este estudo analisa como as perceções de segurança na esfera pública digital da Coreia se
alteraram em relação à guerra na Ucrânia. Com base em 101 900 comentários de notícias em
portais e no YouTube recolhidos entre 2022 e 2025, aplica uma análise do discurso baseada
no sentimento utilizando o KoBERT. Em vez de se basear numa simples divisão entre positivo
e negativo, a análise classifica o discurso em sete categorias emocionais e, em seguida,
consolida-as em dimensões relevantes para a segurança — perceção de ameaça, hostilidade
e solidariedade humanitária — para traçar a forma como as configurações emocionais evoluem
ao longo do tempo. Os resultados indicam que o enquadramento de segurança da Coreia
passou de uma postura inicialmente orientada para os valores, centrada na solidariedade
humanitária, passando por um período de pragmatismo económico à medida que a guerra se
prolongava, para depois se deslocar marcadamente para um modo existencial, orientado para
a sobrevivência, na sequência de relatos sobre o destacamento de tropas norte-coreanas.
Esta transição é captada pelo Índice de Transferência de Sentimento de Segurança (SSTI)
desenvolvido neste estudo, que subiu de 0,85 na fase de eclodimento para 4,80 durante o
período de mobilização. O padrão sugere que, quando as crises de segurança externas se
ligam a condições internamente salientes, a interpretação pública tende a convergir para
preocupações de sobrevivência, enquanto a avaliação normativa recua. As comparações ao
nível das plataformas mostram ainda que os valores do SSTI são consistentemente mais
elevados no YouTube do que nos comentários dos portais de notícias, com a maior divergência
observada durante o período de mobilização. Esta diferença está em consonância com o papel
do conteúdo visual e da dinâmica de recomendação na intensificação de emoções de alta
excitação, como o medo e a raiva. Além disso, a análise de ponderação de palavras-chave
identifica termos concretos — mais notavelmente «recrutamento» e «nuclear» — como
gatilhos salientes associados aos aumentos mais acentuados no SSTI, indicando que a
proximidade percebida com a segurança pessoal e a vulnerabilidade nacional amplifica a
sensibilidade à segurança. Em conjunto, as conclusões sublinham a importância da
configuração emocional do discurso digital como um fator nas mudanças na perceção de
segurança. O estudo defende, portanto, que a gestão de crises nacionais pode beneficiar de
estratégias de comunicação de segurança que abordem o risco existencial percebido pelo
público e as ansiedades ao nível micro, em vez de tratar as mensagens de segurança como
uma transmissão unidirecional de informação situacional.
Palavras-chave
Guerra na Ucrânia, Transferência de Sentimento de Segurança, KoBERT, Índice de
Transferência de Sentimento de Segurança (SSTI), Desdobramento da Coreia do Norte, Esfera
Pública Digital.
How to cite this article
Lee, Hayann (2026). From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security
Perceptions in the Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert. Janus.net,
e-journal of international relations VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1 – Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula
in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and Transnational Perspectives, June 2026, pp. 41-57. DOI
https://doi.org/10.26619/1647-7251.DT0426.3
Article submitted on December 31, 2025 and accepted for publication on January 31,
2026.
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
e-ISSN: 1647-7251
VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and
Transnational Perspectives
June 2026, pp. 41-57
From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
43
FROM SOLIDARITY TO SURVIVAL: AN ANALYSIS OF THE
TRANSITION OF SECURITY PERCEPTIONS IN THE KOREAN
DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE DURING THE UKRAINE WAR USING
KOBERT
1
HAYANN LEE
Introduction
Digital media platforms such as YouTube and online news portals have become primary
sources of information in contemporary daily life. Through these platforms, the public is
routinely exposed to large volumes of information on international affairs and security
issues. Even without direct experience of events, people form their own perceptions of
conflict and violence through mediated images and texts. Social cognitive theory
(Bandura, 2009, p. 96) describes this process as learning through indirect experience
and suggests that media information can serve not only perceptual functions but also as
a basis for concrete judgment.
The Ukraine war, which began in 2022, illustrates the influence of digital discourse in this
regard. In the early stage of the war, public discussion in Korea tended to frame the
conflict as a threat to the liberal order in Europe, accompanied by expressions of
humanitarian solidarity. As the war prolonged, however, economic strain and fatigue
gradually altered the tone of discussion. Reports in late 2024 concerning the deployment
of North Korean troops to Russia constituted a turning point, leading many to reassess
the war not as a distant conflict but as a material threat linked to security on the Korean
Peninsula.
Such perceptual changes are often more visible in news comments and YouTube
discussions than in survey results (Potter, 2014, p. 17). Reactions to the same news
story frequently include a mixture of fear, anger, cynicism, and solidarity. These
responses go beyond opinion expression and contribute to emotional frameworks through
which war and security are understood. In this sense, digital discourse functions less as
a passive reflection of information than as a space where uncertain international security
environments are interpreted and given meaning in emotional terms.
1
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research
Foundation of Korea (NRF –2022S1A5C2A02091292).
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From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
44
Previous sentiment analysis research has largely accumulated around short texts with
relatively simple emotional structures, such as movie comments or product reviews.
While these approaches have achieved technical progress, they face limitations in
analyzing international conflicts where political context and emotion overlap, as in the
Ukraine war often contain context-dependent expressions, and emotional direction may
shift with narrative development and situational cues (Kim et al., 2022). When such
materials are processed using short-text-oriented sentiment analysis methods, it
becomes difficult to capture emotional flow and cumulative effects within discourse.
In this context, tracing changes in emotional framing with an advanced Korean pretrained
model such as KoBERT provides a timely means of empirically examining how security
perceptions in Korean society are reorganized. This study therefore seeks to track
changes in emotional framing in the Korean digital public sphere from the outbreak of
the Ukraine war in 2022 through 2025. Given the frequent overlap of emotional
expressions in security discourse, it applies the logic of the sentiment combination model
and the layered model proposed in prior studies and evaluates their analytical usefulness.
To this end, the study poses the following research questions:
Research Question 1. How do the relative weight and prevalence of humanitarian
solidarity and security threat/hostility frames change across key phases of the Ukraine
war (outbreak, stalemate, and deployment period), and how does the SSTI vary
accordingly in the Korean digital public sphere?
Research Question 2. Between context-level and sentence-level analysis of news
comments, which approach is more suitable for capturing the multi-layered emotional
structure of security discourse while maintaining classification performance (accuracy
and recall)?
Research Question 3. When the European security crisis intersects with the factor of
North Korean troop deployment, how is Korean public interpretation restructured from
value-oriented readings toward survival-oriented perceptions as reflected in the SSTI?
KoBERT, a model adapted from Google’s BERT to better reflect Korean linguistic
characteristics, is used as the main analytical tool. Whereas BERT was primarily trained
on English-language corpora, KoBERT was pretrained on datasets that include Korean
comments and colloquial expressions and has been evaluated as showing relatively stable
performance in the analysis of unstructured Korean text (SKT Brain, 2019).
Rather than relying on a simple positive–negative dichotomy, the study reconstructs
security discourse using seven discrete emotions, including anger, fear, and sadness. It
combines post hoc integration of emotional categories with a dual-classifier approach and
employs the AI Hub Korean emotion dataset for training. The collected portal news
comments and YouTube news comments were preprocessed and used for model training
and comparative performance evaluation.
Applying sentiment analysis to the broader context of international politics and security
discourse, rather than limiting it to technical classification, constitutes a central academic
contribution of this study. In particular, by treating the emotional structure of the digital
public sphere as a meaningful variable in explaining changes in security perception, the
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From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
45
study draws attention to emotional dynamics that have received limited attention in prior
research.
Theoretical Background
Reconfiguring the Digital Public Sphere and Security Discourse
In its traditional sense, the public sphere has been structured around institutionalized
actors—such as the press, political parties, and civil society organizations—that produce
and mediate discourse (Habermas, 1989, p. 36; Kim Sujeong, 2021, p. 42). Within this
space, political issues have typically been filtered and refined through established norms
and formats, and citizens’ views have tended to be expressed through limited channels.
The spread of digital platforms, however, has fundamentally altered the very threshold
of entry into the public sphere (Papacharissi, 2010, p. 74). News comments, YouTube
reactions, and social media posts now operate not as peripheral opinions but as core
discursive arenas through which the substantive meaning of events is constituted
(Chadwick, 2013, p. 119).
The defining character of the digital public sphere extends beyond accessibility. The rapid
circulation of information and the accumulation of reactions accelerate the diffusion of
controversy, and a notable feature of this process is that emotional and intuitive
interpretations often take precedence over carefully developed argumentation. This
tendency becomes more pronounced in domains such as foreign policy and security,
where informational asymmetries are substantial and direct experience is limited. Before
encountering official policy documents or expert assessments, people often first register
and interpret events through platforms in a sensory and immediate manner. In this
respect, the digital public sphere is not simply a tool for measuring public opinion; it is a
dynamic site in which events are translated into social meaning.
News comments provide a useful empirical window into the structure of public perception.
Comments do more than signal agreement or disagreement with journalistic narratives;
they also present competing emotional frames—such as empathy, vigilance, and
cynicism—through which events are to be read. This space is thus less a mere
aggregation of individual views than a setting in which an affective atmosphere around
a given issue is formed and amplified. Analyzing the digital public sphere, therefore, is
closely connected to tracing the pathways through which social interpretations of events
take shape.
Security issues, in turn, tend to connect with more fundamental perceptions of threat
and survival. Once a given fact is named and received as a “threat,” emotional
involvement becomes difficult to avoid; fear expands uncertainty, while anger intensifies
demands for attribution of responsibility and encourages preferences for hardline
responses. By contrast, solidarity can strengthen moral legitimacy, and cynicism may
translate into declining trust in policy more broadly (Marcus et al., 2000, p. 54; Mercer,
2010, p. 8). These emotions should not be treated simply as obstacles to rational
judgment. Rather, they often play a central role as cognitive cues through which the
public seeks to make sense of complex international conditions.
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From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
46
Moreover, emotions continue to shift as events unfold. War is not a single, discrete
incident but a prolonged process, within which informational framing and the direction of
threat perception are repeatedly reorganized (Kim Dohyeon, 2022, p. 91). The affective
texture of security discourse can, through repetition and accumulation, harden into a
dominant interpretive frame or turn toward a new one. The digital public sphere is
precisely where such perceptual shifts tend to be registered most quickly and most
sensitively.
Emotional Politics and Emotional Framing
The conventional assumption that political judgment is primarily the product of rational
calculation has been repeatedly revised in recent political communication research. The
perspective commonly referred to as emotional politics does not treat emotion as an
irrational residue to be excluded; instead, it understands emotion as a core resource that
shapes political perception and choice (Nussbaum, 2013, p. 23; Seo Bokgyeong, 2019,
p. 18). When the public seeks to grasp distant and complex events—such as war or
economic sanctions—emotion often functions as the point at which information
processing begins.
In this study, an emotional frame refers to a structural pattern of affect that is repeatedly
invoked in the interpretation of a particular event. It is not the result of mechanically
summing sentiment scores from individual sentences. Rather, it is an analytical concept
designed to capture which emotions become dominant in a given period, and how those
emotions come to function as the central axis of interpretation.
In protracted crisis contexts such as war, emotional frames do not remain fixed. Shifts
in international responses, the dynamics of domestic politics, or unexpected external
shocks can repeatedly relocate the center of gravity of public sentiment. For this reason,
identifying emotional frames requires more than a snapshot at a single point in time; it
calls for a time-series perspective capable of tracing structural change as it unfolds. This
is also why relational analysis is necessary—for example, examining how initially diffuse
fear may come to combine with anger, and how such affective combinations may be
translated into concrete political attitudes, including support for or opposition to policies.
Linking to European Security Change and Korean Digital Discourse
For Korean society, the Ukraine war was not merely a conflict in a distant region; it was
an event that could be readily connected to the existing security landscape shaped by
the North Korean nuclear threat, alliance structures, and great-power rivalry. When
public emotion shifts from humanitarian concern grounded in moral sympathy for others
to an existential perception of threat tied to national survival, a rapid structural
reconfiguration of the emotional frame becomes possible. This study concentrates on
empirically tracing when such affective thresholds emerge and through what contexts
they become reinforced.
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From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
47
At the same time, the war made visible a major turning point in European security order—
marked by the renewed emphasis on military power, the reconfiguration of alliances, and
the recalibration of threat perception. The intense political and social debates that
followed within Europe are not simply consumed in Korea as external developments.
Rather, they operate as a decisive reference point that confronts Koreans with the
strategic choices states must make under conditions of extreme war, and with the
opportunity costs entailed by those choices, thereby prompting renewed consideration of
the substantive weight of security.
Accordingly, European responses can be interpreted in connection with the possibility of
contingency on the Korean Peninsula. Once policy changes in Europe become objects of
contestation in Korea’s digital public sphere, the war is transformed from international
news into a standard of comparison. This transformation becomes more explicit when it
is coupled with affective structure.
Discourse surrounding the Ukraine war contains both normative and realist
interpretations at the same time (Barbieri et al., 2023, p. 318). On one side, international
norms and value-based solidarity are emphasized; on the other, a strong view persists
that state choices are ultimately determined by national security and interests. This
tension recurs within Korea’s digital public sphere as well. Some comments underscore
the imperative of solidarity, while others adopt a cynical posture grounded in calculations
of cost and risk.
When value frames and national-interest frames coexist, emotions do not move along a
single line. Even in periods when solidarity and empathy are dominant, fear and anger
can move to the foreground once an external shock occurs or a linkage to threat becomes
more salient. It is in this sense that the present study accounts for these dynamics as a
shift in emotional framing.
Trends in Digital Sentiment Analysis
Advances in natural language processing have led to the rapid expansion of sentiment
analysis research on Korean texts. Unstructured materials—such as comments, reviews,
and social media posts—can be collected at scale, and sentiment classification models
offer the advantage of rendering such data analyzable in structured form. In particular,
the emergence of pretrained language models has substantially improved sentiment
classification performance in Korean and enabled a broad range of applied studies (Lee
et al., 2023, p. 104225; Park Jungeun, 2022, p. 506).
At the same time, sentiment analysis research has repeatedly exposed a gap between
technical performance and social-scientific interpretation. The question of how accurately
a model classifies texts is not identical to the question of what those results mean socially.
When addressing high-level political phenomena such as security discourse, it is therefore
necessary to combine interpretive frameworks capable of making sense of sentiment
outputs with a carefully designed unit of analysis.
Much of the relevant literature has focused primarily on refining classification accuracy
or improving model architecture in engineering terms. The orientation of this study,
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VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
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June 2026, pp. 41-57
From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
48
however, does not rest on competition over technical superiority as such. Its central
concern is to determine what substantive explanatory leverage sentiment analysis can
secure within research on international politics and security perceptions. For this purpose,
the analysis closely examines (1) how sentiment classification strategies are refined and
(2) how differences in the unit of analysis (sentence-level versus context-level) generate
variation in the interpretation of results. Ultimately, the focus of this study lies not only
in “how accurately the model classifies” but in what can be brought into view about the
underlying contours of Korean society through the data.
Research Methodology
This study seeks to empirically examine how the global security shock of the Ukraine war
has generated emotional waves in Korea’s digital public sphere and how these, in turn,
have redirected public security perceptions. To this end, the study moves beyond the
classification of sentiment at the level of individual sentences and adopts a pretrained
language model–based emotional discourse analysis (PLM-based Emotional Discourse
Analysis) framework that considers how structural shifts in affect reflect changes in
security perception paradigms. As the primary analytical model, KoBERT—a Transformer-
based model optimized for Korean unstructured data—was selected in order to maintain
analytical efficiency and precision while avoiding the high computational costs typically
associated with large language models (LLMs).
The central premise guiding this study is that public perceptions of war do not remain
fixed but are continuously reconfigured in emotional terms in response to the
development of events and external shocks. In the Korean context, the Ukraine war was
initially received largely as a humanitarian tragedy affecting others. As the conflict
persisted, and especially with the introduction of the variable of North Korean troop
deployment, it reached a critical turning point at which it came to be reinterpreted as a
tangible threat directly linked to national security (Eom, 2022, p. 174). This study
conceptualizes this perceptual shift as a dynamic movement from a phase of solidarity
grounded in universal values to a phase of survival rooted in existential threat perception.
To examine this empirically, the research process was organized into four stages. First,
digital text data related to the Ukraine war were collected and refined. Second, a KoBERT-
based sentiment classification model tailored to security discourse was constructed.
Third, the SSTI was calculated to quantify changes in public security perceptions based
on sentiment distributions. Fourth, the structure of emotional discourse was compared
across different phases of the war to identify patterns of perceptual transition.
Data Collection and Preprocessing
The dataset consists of portal news comments and YouTube news comments related to
the Ukraine war, collected between February 2022 and December 2025. These materials
represent core data from the digital public sphere that capture spontaneous and informal
public perceptions not easily observed through conventional surveys. The initial dataset
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From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
49
comprised 101,900 entries and subsequently underwent multi-stage cleaning to ensure
analytical reliability.
To mitigate data imbalance across major phases of the war (Periods A–D), stratified
sampling was applied. Comments unrelated to security issues—including partisan
attacks, purely personal emotional expressions, advertisements, and spam—were
removed through regular-expression–based filtering. This step was taken to prevent
distortion of sentiment analysis results by political noise or meaningless text.
During text preprocessing, special characters were removed and normalization
procedures were applied, followed by tokenization using KoBERT’s SentencePiece
tokenizer. SentencePiece-based subword tokenization is well suited to processing Korean
particles, colloquial forms, and neologisms, making it appropriate for analyzing
unstructured texts such as news comments and comments.
Security-Oriented Sentiment Classification Strategy
Rather than directly adopting emotional categories commonly used in sentiment analysis,
this study attempts to reclassify emotions in ways that reflect the specific nature of
security discourse. This approach rests on the assumption that emotions function not
merely as individual feelings but within broader political and security-related meaning
systems.
The first strategy follows a baseline sentiment classification that applies the seven
emotional categories in the AI Hub dataset (neutral, anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness,
and surprise) to identify overall sentiment distributions. This serves as a reference point
for subsequent analyses.
The second strategy, termed security-driven consolidation, restructures functionally
similar emotions in light of their political implications within security perception research.
Fear and surprise were grouped as threat perception, given their shared role as
immediate responses to perceived external danger. Anger and disgust were integrated
under hostility, as both express outward rejection toward specific actors. Sadness,
reflecting moral sympathy toward civilian suffering and the tragedy of war, was
reinterpreted as an indicator of humanitarian solidarity.
This consolidation of categories is not a technical adjustment aimed at improving
classification accuracy. Rather, it represents an analytical decision intended to more
clearly capture the broader directional tendencies of security perceptions underlying
fragmented emotional data.
The third strategy, contextual weighting, addresses limitations arising from treating
individual comments as isolated units. Instead of analyzing each comment
independently, original comments and their subsequent replies were grouped into a
single discursive unit. This design reflects the observation that perceptions of security
threats are shaped not only by individual reactions but also through interaction and
debate with others. It allows the analysis to trace how particular emotions circulate and
intensify within the public sphere. In this sense, the digital public sphere is approached
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From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
50
not as a static collection of opinions but as a dynamic discursive space where emotions
and perceptions interact and evolve.
Development of the SSTI
To directly link the distribution of emotions in the data to structural changes in public
security perceptions, this study develops and introduces the SSTI. SSTI quantifies how
public cognitive frames shift from a normative phase grounded in universal values and
moral sympathy toward an existential phase prioritizing national survival and material
risk in response to exogenous shocks such as the Ukraine war. In other words, the index
is designed to measure when and to what extent the perception of an external tragedy
becomes internalized as one’s own security concern. The formula for calculating the index
is as follows.
𝑆𝑆𝑇𝐼 = 𝐸Threat + 𝐸Hostility
𝐸Solidarity
The numerator, consisting of 𝐸Threat and 𝐸Hostility, captures the degree to which the external
conflict is internalized as an existential risk connected to security on the Korean
Peninsula, along with emotional expressions of fear and hostility toward perceived threat
actors. The denominator, 𝐸Solidarity, represents the emotional weight of moral sympathy
that views the conflict as the tragedy of others from a universal human rights perspective.
A distinctive feature of the index is that neutral and cynical responses are treated as
background values and excluded from the calculation to highlight substantive attitudinal
change. This allows shifts in emotional dominance between value-based and survival-
oriented orientations to appear more clearly. An SSTI value exceeding 1 indicates a
structural break in which threat perception outweighs moral solidarity. This point is
interpreted as a threshold of domestication, where an external security shock is
translated into a personal or national concern.
For analysis, the pretrained KoBERT model was fine-tuned on a security discourse–
specific dataset. Model performance was evaluated primarily using accuracy and recall.
In the context of security discourse, the ability to detect subtle threat signals—such as
fear or anger—is crucial for analytical validity. Recall is particularly important as it
indicates how effectively the model captures emotionally charged signals during crisis
situations without omission. This provides a basis for considering how the findings may
inform crisis management policy and security communication strategies.
Results and Discussion
This chapter reports the empirical findings from applying KoBERT-based sentiment
analysis and the SSTI to 101,900 portal news comments and YouTube comments related
to the Ukraine war.
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Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
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Table 1. Validity of Periodization and Data Composition
The overall study period was divided into four phases based on points at which major
international developments appeared to coincide with psychological thresholds among
the public and with shifts in the tone of discourse.
Changes in data composition and dominant keywords across periods indicate how Korean
society moved from observing the Ukraine war as an external tragedy affecting others
toward gradually internalizing it as a threat more directly linked to national security. In
this sense, both the quantitative distribution of data and the qualitative evolution of
keywords provide an empirical basis for examining how public interpretive frames were
restructured across turning points.
The number of data points shows a gradual decline from Period A (28,532) to Period C
(22,418). This pattern is consistent with the accumulation of public fatigue and reduced
attentiveness as the war became a routine news item. However, in Period D (26,494),
following reports of North Korean troop deployment, the data volume rose again. This
rebound indicates that public discourse, which had entered a relatively subdued phase,
was reactivated when the conflict became linked to security concerns on the Korean
Peninsula. This can be understood as a form of emotional re-ignition in public attention.
Shifts in high-frequency keywords suggest a three-stage qualitative evolution in public
interpretive frames.
Stage 1 (Period A: Normative Response)
Keywords grounded in universal values, such as #peace and #refugees, were prominent.
The war was frequently approached from a moral perspective, often framed as a violation
of international norms.
Stage 2 (Periods B–C: National-Interest Reframing)
As the war prolonged, keywords directly referencing economic burdens—such as #gas
bills and #price surge—became more visible. This indicates an early phase of
Period
Phase
Key Events and Rationale
Core Keywords
Data
Volume
A
Outbreak
phase
Russian invasion (Feb 2022).
Discourse centered on humanitarian
support and condemnation.
#peace, #refugees,
#condemnPutin
28,532
B
Stalemate
phase
Frontline stagnation (from Jan
2023). Growing fatigue as the war
became normalized.
#prolongation,
#ceasefire talks,
#exhaustion
24,456
C
Economic
crisis phase
Intensified inflation (from Jan
2024). Expansion of cynical,
national-interest–oriented
discourse.
#price surge, #gas
bills, #oil prices
22,418
D
Deployment
phase
Reports of North Korean troop
deployment (from Nov 2024).
Heightened perception of security
threats.
#NK deployment,
#participation,
#security crisis
26,494
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
e-ISSN: 1647-7251
VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and
Transnational Perspectives
June 2026, pp. 41-57
From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
52
domestication in which the war was increasingly interpreted not as others’ suffering but
in terms of personal or national cost.
Stage 3 (Period D: Security Internalization)
Terms closely tied to survival and national defense—such as #NK deployment and
#security crisis—became dominant. In this phase, the war was no longer treated
primarily as a comparative case but was reinterpreted as a direct and material threat to
the peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.
The periodization adopted in this study is not merely chronological. It corresponds to
points at which public psychological thresholds appear to have shifted. The transition
from Period C to Period D aligns with a structural break in the SSTI proposed in this
study. It captures a moment when external shocks were increasingly translated into a
national security narrative and therefore provides a meaningful unit of analysis for
examining perceptual change.
Taken together, the dataset of approximately 100,000 entries displays distinct emotional
structures across periods. This supports the analytical claim that public perception moved
from solidarity-oriented interpretations toward survival-oriented ones, and that the
dataset is sufficient in both scale and content to examine this transition.
The period-based analysis further shows that public attention in Korea’s digital sphere
declined after the initial surge in Period A and dropped notably during the stalemate
phase (B). At the same time, once economic strain became more visible in Period C, the
tone of discourse began to shift from sympathy toward others to concern about one’s
own situation. Period D represents a particularly consequential turning point, as the war
was increasingly redefined not simply as external information but as a matter connected
to survival and security on the Korean Peninsula.
Quantifying the Transfer of Security Perceptions Using SSTI
Table 2. SSTI Values by Period and Structural Break Interpretation
Period
Numerator
𝐸Threat
𝐸Hostility
Denominator
𝐸Solidarity
SSTI
Analytical Interpretation
A
29.1%
34.2%
0.85
Value-oriented
(solidarity outweighs threat perception)
B
32.1%
24.6%
1.30
Perceptual reversal
(security concerns become more
prominent)
C
36.3%
18.1%
2.01
Internalized anxiety
(war repercussions viewed as affecting
national interests)
D
59.5%
12.4%
4.80
Survival-oriented response (existential
concern dominates discourse)
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VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
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From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
53
The time-series pattern of the SSTI indicates that security perceptions in Korea’s digital
public sphere do not change in a purely linear manner but exhibit structural breaks
associated with events. Here, the term “structural break” is used descriptively to indicate
discontinuous shifts in SSTI values across periods, rather than formal econometric break
tests.
First, during Period A (the outbreak phase), the SSTI recorded 0.85, the only value below
1.0 across all periods. This reflects a situation in which humanitarian 𝐸Solidarity (34.2%)
exceeded security-related threat factors (29.1%). At this stage, public engagement with
the Ukraine war was largely framed in terms of moral sympathy and humanitarian
solidarity toward a foreign tragedy, while security concerns remained relatively
observational.
Second, across Periods B (stalemate) and C (economic crisis), the index rose stepwise to
1.30 and 2.01, respectively. This pattern corresponds to a cognitive shift in which the
focal point of discourse moved from values to national interests and material costs. The
fact that the SSTI exceeded 2.0 in Period C suggests that the economic repercussions of
the war—such as inflation and rising energy prices—had entered domestic discourse as
tangible concerns. At this stage, the war began to be internalized not merely as an
external event but as a potential threat linked to Korea’s own security and economic
conditions.
Third, in Period D (deployment phase), when reports of North Korean troop involvement
intensified, the SSTI rose sharply to 4.80—approximately 2.4 times higher than in the
preceding period. This represents a marked change relative to earlier phases.
Humanitarian solidarity 𝐸Solidarity which forms the denominator of the index, declined to
roughly one-third of its initial level (12.4%), while threat and hostility factors (59.5%)
became the dominant emotional components in public discourse.
Taken together, the sharp rise in SSTI suggests that when external security shocks
intersect with the concrete variable of North Korean involvement, public perception tends
to move away from normative or moral evaluation toward a survival-oriented frame. This
pattern is consistent with the interpretation that Korea’s digital public sphere functions
as a space where international developments are interpreted and amplified through the
particular security context of the Korean Peninsula.
Across all periods, the YouTube-based public sphere recorded higher SSTI values than
portal news comments, with the gap reaching its maximum (1.90) in Period D. This
pattern is consistent with the interpretation that YouTube’s recommendation system may
cluster users around highly arousing emotions such as fear and anger, a dynamic often
discussed in relation to echo chamber effects.
Whereas text-centered portals tend to host relatively more policy-oriented criticism or
reasoned concern, YouTube’s reliance on visual immediacy can make threats appear
more concrete, potentially heightening perceptions of risk and contributing to higher SSTI
values.
To identify linguistic triggers associated with SSTI escalation, keywords linked to fear
responses were extracted and their influence examined.
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
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VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and
Transnational Perspectives
June 2026, pp. 41-57
From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
54
Table 3. Comparison of SSTI Across Platforms and Gap Analysis
To examine how media characteristics shape the formation and diffusion of security-related
discourse, SSTI values were compared across platforms.
Period
Portal News
Comments
YouTube News
Comments
Gap
Platform-Specific Emotional
Mechanism
A
0.75
0.95
+0.20
Visual footage of invasion on YouTube
appears to stimulate fear at an earlier
stage
B
1.10
1.50
+0.40
Amplified exposure to negative
information through YouTube algorithms
C
1.80
2.22
+0.42
Circulation of sensational economic crisis
narratives on YouTube
D
3.85
5.75
+1.90
On-site deployment footage appears to
function as a catalyst for SSTI escalation
Table 4. Keyword Weight Analysis Driving SSTI Increases
Rank
Core Keyword
Weight (Standardized
coefficient)
Interpretation Based on Observed
Usage
1
Nuclear weapons /
nuclear technology
0.92
Existential fear that deployment could
accelerate nuclear advancement
2
Conscription / draft
0.85
Anxiety framed through family and
military service concerns
3
World War III
0.78
Framing escalation as a global
historical crisis
4
Russia–North Korea
alliance
0.71
Hostility tied to perceived disruption of
the security order
The weighting analysis indicates that SSTI reacts more strongly to keywords linked to
bodily safety (conscription) and catastrophic threat (nuclear risk) than to abstract
geopolitical dynamics. This suggests that security discourse becomes more influential
when threats are perceived as emotionally proximate.
The findings are consistent with the view that public communication on security issues
may resonate differently depending on how directly messages address perceived risks to
personal safety and survival.
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
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VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and
Transnational Perspectives
June 2026, pp. 41-57
From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
55
Table 5. Velocity of SSTI Transfer
Event
SSTI
Before
SSTI
After
Change
Time to Threshold and Characteristics
Energy price surge (C)
1.45
2.01
+0.56
Approx. 3 months (economic strain
gradually linked to security concerns)
North Korean
deployment reports (D)
2.01
4.80
+2.79
Within 48 hours (rapid surge associated
with heightened alarm)
Security sensitivity was assessed by measuring how rapidly SSTI values crossed critical
thresholds following major events.
Economic threats in Period C were associated with gradual SSTI increases, whereas
reports of direct military involvement by North Korea in Period D coincided with a sharp
rise over a short time span. This pattern aligns with the interpretation that references to
North Korea carry salience in the Korean context and can quickly reframe public
perception toward security concerns.
Taken together, the findings suggest that Korea’s digital public sphere underwent a
process of domestication in its interpretation of the Ukraine war. What initially appeared
as a distant conflict gradually became framed in relation to Korea’s own security context.
By the later stage (Period D), the SSTI reached 4.80, indicating a marked shift in the
emotional structure of discourse. This shift illustrates how moral or humanitarian frames
can weaken when threats are perceived as personal or nationally relevant.
The results point to the importance of considering the emotional dynamics of digital
discourse in national crisis management and risk communication.
Conclusion
The central finding of this analysis concerns how the external shock of the Ukraine war
reshaped public security perceptions within Korea’s digital public sphere. Tracing the
discursive landscape from 2022 to 2025 shows that public sentiment moved from a phase
of humanitarian solidarity grounded in universal values toward a phase in which
existential concerns about survival became more salient.
This shift provides empirical support for the view that public security perceptions are
influenced less by purely logical reasoning than by emotional thresholds. Normative
discourses that dominated the early stage of the war gradually declined as the conflict
prolonged and economic fatigue accumulated. When the direct variable of North Korean
troop deployment entered discourse, public responses increasingly reflected survival-
oriented interpretations rather than extended deliberation. This pattern is consistent with
the interpretation that Korea’s digital public sphere functions as a sensitive arena where
international developments are interpreted and amplified through the particular security
context of the Korean Peninsula.
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
e-ISSN: 1647-7251
VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and
Transnational Perspectives
June 2026, pp. 41-57
From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
56
The contribution of this study lies not in technical model competition but in adapting
KoBERT as an analytical tool for research on international politics and security
perceptions. The recategorization of emotions and the use of contextual weighting were
designed to uncover the broader directional tendencies of security perception embedded
in fragmented emotional data, thereby extending the analytical scope of unstructured
data research.
The proposed SSTI further distinguishes this study by offering a quantitative way to trace
when and to what degree international crises are internalized by the public. Treating
comments not as isolated units but as interconnected discursive units reflects an effort
to conceptualize the digital public sphere as a dynamic space where emotions and
perceptions circulate and reinforce one another.
The empirical patterns observed here indicate that contemporary security discourse is
closely intertwined with the emotional dynamics of digital platforms. Accordingly, security
communication may be more effective when considering not only the transmission of
situational information but also the public’s perceived vulnerabilities, including concerns
related to personal safety and military service.
This study does not incorporate detailed demographic characteristics of users, which
remains a limitation. Nevertheless, given the evidence that digital discourse is associated
with shifts in security perception, future research should examine how these emotional
currents translate into voting behavior and concrete policy preferences.
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e-ISSN: 1647-7251
VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1
Thematic Dossier – The Korean Peninsula in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and
Transnational Perspectives
June 2026, pp. 41-57
From Solidarity to Survival: An Analysis of the Transition of Security Perceptions in the
Korean Digital Public Sphere During the Ukraine War Using Kobert
Hayann Lee
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