Conclusion

This concluding chapter reflects on what the framework of brokering nationhood and wifehood reveals about the cultural and institutional making of cross-border marriage. Rather than reiterating the empirical details, it considers how the preceding chapters together show marriage brokers as key actors in shaping both mobility systems and national imaginaries. It argues that understanding brokers as logistical facilitators and cultural producers opens new directions for analysing migration beyond the binaries of exploitation and agency. By situating the Korean case within wider East and Southeast Asian contexts, this chapter highlights the comparative potential of this approach for studying how gendered and racialised hierarchies are reproduced through brokered mobility.