In this presentation, Dr. Yongwook Ryu reviews the hedging literature, which reveals two main perspectives of hedging in IR. The first treats hedging as a mixture of balancing and bandwagoning strategy adopted by small states toward great powers. In this usage of the concept, hedging loses any leverage as a theoretical concept as it is little more than some variation of balancing or bandwagoning behavior, resulting in the under-utilization of the concept. The second perspective understands hedging essentially as risk management strategy. While Dr. Yongwook agrees that this is how hedging should be understood, he argues that scholars neglect three critical issues that need to be examined prior to applying the concept: (1) the actor’s subjective understanding of risks; (2) the initial foreign policy decision that is to be hedged against and (3) the issue domain over which hedging is applied. The general usage of the concept suggests that hedging is context-specific risk-averse policy decision, not a general foreign policy behavior or orientation. Dr. Yongwook shows how usage of the concept leads to a completely different and more accurate analysis of hedging strategy with two case studies -- Japanese foreign policy toward China and a comparison of Thailand’s and Singapore’s foreign policy toward the US-China strategic rivalry.