Book Talk | Minju Kim | ‘Taming the Careerists: The Politics of Foreign Policy Implementation’

Over two million bureaucrats serve in the US federal government under various employment contracts. Minju Kim’s Taming the Careerists asks how the design of those contracts—specifically, the features that strengthen or weaken job protections – shapes the behavior of bureaucrats and, in turn, American foreign policy. While past studies identify tools that help the president control the bureaucracy, Kim demonstrates that the president can additionally control the behavior of bureaucrats by weakening job protections, which makes bureaucrats more accountable to presidential preferences.

The book shows that bureaucrats adjust how they implement policy based on the structure of their job protections, and that weakening these protections can unintentionally disrupt the stability of foreign economic policy. Drawing on administrative data, policy memos, interviews, and computational text analysis, Kim reveals the trade-off between accountability and stability, shedding light on the personnel management rules that quietly sustain the daily work of America’s foreign policy bureaucracy.

Minju Kim is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. An expert in international relations and international political economy, her research investigates how individual bureaucrats shape domestic and international institutions.

She is the author of Taming the Careerists: The Politics of Foreign Policy Implementation (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which explores how civil service job protections influence foreign economic policy outcomes. Her work is also published in leading academic journals, including International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Organizations, and World Politics. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and previously completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Commerce and Diplomacy at UC San Diego.