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Workshops and Conferences
Organizer: Bridget Martin, Fall Term 2022 & AY2021-22 SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences, Korea Institute, Harvard University; Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Korean Studies, University of Mississippi
Guest moderated by Joseph Seeley, Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia
PROGRAM SCHEDULE AND PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS
1:00 – 1:05 WELCOME REMARKS
Nicholas Harkness, Modern Korean Economy and Society Professor of Anthropology; Director, Korea Institute, Harvard University
1:05 – 1:10 INTRODUCTION
Bridget Martin, AY 2021-22 and Fall 2022 SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences, Korea Institute, Harvard University, and Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Korean Studies, University of Mississippi
SESSION I:
GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS IN A DIVIDED KOREA
1:10 – 2:20 KNOWLEDGE, POWER, AND PLACE IN NORTH AND SOUTH KOREA
The Discourse on the Location of Old Chosŏn in the DPRK / Vadim Akulenko, Research Professor, HK+RCCZ, Chung-Ang University
The historical location of Old Chosŏn, the first polity in Korean History, is still debated. This paper analyzes the works of North Korean scientists on this issue. In the 1960s, Lee Jirin systematized all the information available by that time and developed so-called “Liaodong theory” of Old Chosŏn’s location. At the same time, alternative theories of Old Chosŏn’s location in the northwestern part of Korean Peninsula and the gradual relocation of its center from the Liaodong Peninsula to northwestern Korea also existed. Following the ongoing ideologization of all aspects of life in North Korean society, the Workers’ Party of Korea established two aspects of Old Chosŏn’s history: 1) Pyongyang has always played a major role in the development of Korean culture and state; and 2) Pyongyang has never been occupied by Han China. On this basis, North Korean scientists developed the so-called “Pyongyang” theory of Old Chosŏn’s location: the bifurcation of its capital Wanggŏm-sŏng to the main capital (P'yŏngyang) and the reserved capital (Liaodong Peninsula). This theory resolved the problem of Wanggŏm-sŏng’s seizure by the Han armies described in written sources while adhering to the party’s recommendations. Today, according to North Korean textbooks and monographs, the first and the only center of Old Chosŏn was located in Pyongyang and its surroundings; in its initial stage, the borders of Old Chosŏn extended from the Yalu River in the North to the Han River in the South; and during the period of its greatest power, Old Chosŏn’s territory included the Korean Peninsula and Liaodong Peninsula, as well as part of southern Manchuria.
Sovereignty and Academia: The Birth of Kim Il Sung University and the Origins of the North Korean Intelligentsia / Ria Roy, PhD Student, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
This paper examines Kim Il Sung University in North Korea as a space of contestation marked by both the legacy of the Japanese Empire and post-colonial nationalism as it gradually transitioned into being part of a Soviet-inspired Marxist-Leninist academic order from 1946 onward. After Japan’s 1945 surrender, students, alumni, and staff at Seoul’s Keijō Imperial University occupied the school to “restore the sovereignty of academia.” Tracing the post-colonial origins of the intelligentsia who moved from the South to the North shortly after the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) announced its plan for restructuring Seoul National University in 1946, I note the “twin birth” of Seoul National University (the former Keijō Imperial University) in the South and Kim Il Sung University in the North. To many academics disillusioned with the controversies at Seoul National University, Kim Il Sung University presented an attractive alternative. Kim Il Sung University was a space marked by complex desires: nationalism, freedom from the established academic hierarchy, democratization of academia, and also the question of what it meant to be an intellectual reflecting on one’s own past. To others, it represented personal ties to the Northern region, and an active recruitment scheme, with economic and other benefits, rather than simply a place to display ideological commitment. This paper examines the very raison d'être of the nascent state through the prism of the university, surveying over four hundred pages of curriculum vitae, autobiographies, and Kim Il Sung University administrative documents seized by the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Despite the North Korean state’s commitment to its revolutionary identity, Kim Il Sung University served as a distinct space where the legacy of the Japanese Empire paradoxically lived on in the early decades.
The Cold War Imaginaries of Early South Korean Geographers / Jinsoo Lee, PhD Student, Department of Geography, University of Manchester
This study examines the geopolitical narrative inherent in the texts of Korean geographers in post-colonial South Korea. One of the major geopolitical narratives circulated in contemporary South Korean society is that due to the geographical nature of the peninsula, Korea (or the Korean Peninsula) is exposed to the great powers but at the same time has the possibility of promoting national development by acquiring connectivity with land and sea powers. This study historicizes this narrative. Early Korean geographers learned modern geography in the period of Japanese colonialism and sought to reconstruct the geopolitical imagination suitable for a newly independent country after Korean independence. However, by recycling the naturalized geopolitics that underpinned Western and Japanese imperialism, their academic practices faced an intellectual predicament: under this notion of geopolitics Korea’s geographical size and location made it inferior to neighboring countries and denied it the possibility of self-determined development in the future. My analysis concentrates on how geographers attempted to resolve the predicament inherited from colonial geographical knowledge by emphasizing the possibility of overcoming this geographical condition but at the cost of reifying its underlying environmental determinism. Using the articles, books, middle and high school textbooks, and columns produced by geographers from 1945 to the 1970s, this archival study seeks to contribute to a better understanding of a geopolitical narrative that remains common in contemporary geographical discourse about Korea.
2:20 – 3:10 UNIFICATION NARRATIVES
The Origins and Development of ‘Peaceful Unification’ in the Korean Peninsula / Choongil (Peter) Han, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
‘Peaceful unification’ is one of the guiding principles of Korean unification agreed by Seoul and Pyongyang through the Joint Communique of 1972. Although the term ‘peaceful unification’ has been widely used by government officials and the general public alike, little is known about the history of the concept or its feasibility. This paper aims to explore the origins and the development of ‘peaceful unification’ as a national agenda in the Korean peninsula during the Cold War period. In particular, the paper asks when, why, and how Seoul and Pyongyang’s unification strategies might have shifted from unification by force to peaceful unification. Primary sources such as presidential addresses, unification proposals, newspaper articles, dictionaries and diplomatic cables will be consulted to track the process of how the idea of peaceful unification was conceived and materialized into specific overtures by the two Koreas. The main findings of this paper are threefold. First, the rise of ‘peaceful unification’ as a discourse was mainly due to the destructive impact of Korean War to both sides. Especially, ‘peaceful unification’ discourse effectively prevented another all-out war in the Korean peninsula and created favorable conditions for both Koreas to concentrate on much needed economic development as well as reinforcing political stability at home. Second, despite the Joint Communique of 1972 which mandated peaceful unification, North Korea might have not entirely given up the idea of unifying the Korean peninsula by force up until the mid 1970s; Kim Il Sung’s adventurism was subsequently challenged by the Chinese leadership which preferred stability over armed conflict in the Korean peninsula. Third, ‘peaceful unification’ discourse redefined the main objective of unification from immediate territorial recovery to winning the zero-sum legitimacy competition between Seoul and Pyongyang. The paper concludes by exploring possibilities for peaceful unification in the Korean Peninsula.
A Re-Examination of South Korean Unification Policy, 1948-1979 / David Singh Raymond Hall, PhD Candidate, School of Humanities, Languages, and Global Studies, University of Central Lancashire
Korean unification is a highly contested and emotionally charged issue both internationally and domestically. On the international stage, Korean unification was mostly directed by emergent post-Second World War global superpowers like the United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations. However, domestically in South Korea, this was led by successive conservative and progressive governments with different visions and plans for unification. The paper’s purpose is to draw a direct and correlative link between a social movement in South Korea, the April 1960 Revolution, and the brief liberalization of South Korea’s unification policy. The paper first examines South Korea’s unification policy during the First Republic led by Rhee Syngman (1948-1960). During this time, unification was influenced by pro-American anti-communism, militarism, and globalism. Then, the paper examines the downfall of Rhee’s government following the April 1960 revolution, its causes and effects, particularly in relation to social movement theory. Following this is an examination of the liberalization of South Korea’s unification policy during the Second Republic (1960-1963), led 1960-1961 by Chang Myon. Unification in this period was influenced by peacefulness and dialogue. The paper concludes with the ‘reuathoritarianization’ of South Korea’s unification policy following Park Chung Hee’s military coup on 16 May 1961, South Korea’s liberal government was overthrown and the country ‘reauthoritarianized.’ Unification policy during this period saw the return to anti-communism and globalism. Official South Korean government speeches and writings form the methodological framework of this paper. This paper addresses the theme of the conference as it re-examines the early development of South Korea’s unification policy through the lens of social movement theory. Authoritarianism, social movements, liberalization, and subsequent ‘reuathoritarianization’ directly framed South Korea’s views on its sovereignty over the entire Korean Peninsula and its territorial claim to North Korea.
When a Nation-State Becomes a Nation and State(s): North Korea and Its People in South Korean Intellectual Thought of the 1960s and 1970s / Ria Chae, Lecturer, Seoul National University, and Affiliate Researcher, East Asian Studies, Yale University
In their constitutions, South Korea asserts the entire Korean Peninsula as its territory while North Korea claims to represent all of the Korean people. Even though the two Korean states de facto recognize each other, the idea of Korea as the nation-state of the Korean people remains fundamental, as does the notion that Koreans North and South are the same people. Thus, there are major contradictions in the concepts of Korean nation-state, its sovereignty and people, in legal, perceptional, and practical domains. While the divergence among the domains emerged in the first few years of the ROK and DPRK’s existence, the incongruences within each domain developed later. This study traces the genealogy of contradictions in South Korean intellectual discourse on nation-state and discovers the bifurcation of the concept into the “nation” and the “state” during the 1960s, followed by the consolidation of the phenomenon during the 1970s—the period when the two Koreas internalized the division. The analysis of debates in Sasanggye (the biggest intellectual journal of the 1950s and 1960s) and uncensored transcripts of conferences discussing unification (during the 1970s) reveals painful efforts of South Korean academics and opinion-leaders to preserve the idea of Korean nation-state while separating the North Korean state from the Korean people and nation. The study also demonstrates the development of two major approaches to North Korea, both of which espoused anti-communism but differed in their interpretation of democracy. The colonial experience, in one approach, proved an unbreakable bond with the North; in the other, it operated as an impetus behind the economic competition. The analysis elucidates the origins of two main positions on North Korea in South Korean politics today and helps to explain the persistence of the idea that Koreans are a single nation and people.
3:10 – 3:20 BREAK
SESSION II:
MILITARIZED KOREA
3:20 – 4:00 THE TERRITORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Photographic Reverberations: Sensing the Korean DMZ and Expropriated Lands / Jung Joon Lee, Associate Professor, Theory and History of Art and Design, RISD
This paper probes the visualization of the spaces of transnational militarism in South Korea—the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and expropriated territories for United States Forces Korea—that are, for most Koreans, imagined spaces beyond the sovereignty of South Korea in the name of peace keeping. To that end, I explore the unexpected paths of repetition via photographic representation: looking at the ways in which selected art and photography projects undo the national rhetoric of futurity prescribed in relentless adherence to, while seemingly oscillating between, anti-communist ideology and neoliberal desire; and considering how such projects create novel paths for repetition to take. The paper examines Jung Yeondoo’s performative photography project, DMZ Theater Series-Dora Theater (2019), and the reverberations in and of landscape photographs by Kang Yong Suk, Maehyangni P’unggyŏng (1999), depicting lands - and lives -expropriated for military purposes. Jung’s collaborative, multimedia, and site-specific project problematizes the site’s historically militarized conditions and the ways in which the site has always required the visitor to perform their ideological position when facing the DMZ. On the other hand, Kang’s work enables the viewer to sense the landscape of militarism and imperialism, and not just “witness” it, encouraging different ways of engaging with and challenging the everyday militarism normalized in the Cold War Asia-Pacific. The discussion also considers the implications of focusing on multisensorial and spatial encounters with photography and art, especially in yielding the mediated experiences of the “borderlands” that complicate the representation of the territory and sovereignty of the Korean peninsula.
Distanced Presence: The U.S. Military Occupation and War Photographs of Jeju 4ꞏ3 / Youjoung (Yuna) Kim, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
The historical archive of the U.S. military is the most widely available source in the historiography of Jeju 4ꞏ3 (Sasam, 1947-1954), an incident of state-violence which took place during the U.S. military occupation on Jeju Island, South Korea, and resulted more than 30,000 deaths. Among the archival materials, war photographs provide scenes of the events, which function as references for understanding the unfolding of the mass violence at that time. In this paper, I examine photographic images that captured violence on the ground in Jeju, taken by the U.S. military officers between April and July in 1948. I explore how Jeju Island as a territory of U.S. military operations show what it meant to be occupied by the U.S. military. These photographs downplay the U.S. military presence on Jeju Island and possible involvement in suppressing the resistance of Jeju 4ꞏ3. Furthermore, the photos frame Jeju islanders as weak to the wave of communist terror, bystanders to sites of arson, an icon of an ethnic origin, and vulnerable to diseases and death. Such examination renders thoughts on how the photographic images were informed by the military interests and how the intrinsic relations between the U.S. military and the Korean police were played during the events of Jeju 4ꞏ3. Also, it offers understanding on how the U.S. military officials perceived the territory of Jeju Island within the Korean political landscape, and within the operational landscape of the Korean War in particular. Ultimately, I argue the photographs are captured with an eye to how they would be seen and read to blur the governance of the U.S. military on the island in transition to the newly elected South Korean government in 1948.
4:00 – 4:40 MILITARIZED ENVIRONMENTS
Abandoned Bases: Military Waste and Territorial Power in South Korea / Tony Cho, PhD Student, Science Studies and Communication, University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
Over a century passes by as foreign military bases persist over the Korean landscape emerging from the Japanese occupation of 1910 continued by the U.S. military occupation from 1945 onwards as the result of Cold War geopolitics. While South Korea is often celebrated as a free democracy, the continued presence of U.S. military bases exemplifies how the state remains tethered to U.S. militarism. In this paper I explore the permanence of militarized spaces in spite of their abandonment via the decommissioning process of U.S. military bases stationed in South Korea. I argue that these sites of abandonment and the enduring military waste become a fundamental temporal exception in building territorial power in the Korean peninsula. The coupling of the South Korean state and U.S. military is well documented and theorized by various critical scholars engaged with transpacific studies. Scholars such as Jodi Kim (2022), Simeon Man (2018), David Vine (2015) speak to the racialized and gendered imperial violence that occur as a result of U.S. military base presence. Left understudied is the aftermath of bases themselves in the ongoing process of decommissioning—beginning in 2002 as part of President Roh-Moo Hyun’s Sunshine Policy. Often celebrated, decommissioning in reality has foreclosed opportunities of legal redress for harms incited by the toxic environmental waste that remains around former bases in the cruel and slow transfer of land ownership from the U.S. back to South Korea. I investigate this process of decommissioning by engaging with Korean newspaper trails, local activist archives, and available U.S. military documents from 2002-2020 of two bases (Camp Page, Yongsan Garrison) currently being decommissioned to call attention to the double management of both imagination and environment in state sponsored visions of healing, entrepreneurial class initiatives for development, and citizens movements to resist reconstructing the landscape before accountability is met.
Knowledge Production through Legal Mobilization: Environmental Activism against the U.S. Military Bases in South Korea and Japan / Claudia Junghyun Kim, Assistant Professor, Department of Public Relations and International Affairs, City University of Hong Kong
In South Korea and Japan, two of the largest hosts of U.S. military bases overseas, anti-base activism has long been equated with radicalism. Anti-base activists, however, are increasingly turning to institutional means of claims-making—in particular, noise pollution lawsuits and information disclosure requests—to generate new knowledge and unearth hidden information about the U.S. bases in their backyards. Building on sociolegal scholarship and social movement studies, we show how these supposedly ideologically driven movements overcome knowledge asymmetries stemming from government secrecy and contribute to public knowledge through institutional tactics. We argue that the process of legal mobilization activates mechanisms that bolster movements’ credibility, reveal or generate information, and thereby facilitate social movement knowledge production. We theorize these dynamics by analyzing environmental activism against U.S. military bases in South Korea and Japan, which allows us to leverage most similar legal contexts and types of claims to illustrate the mechanisms.
4:40 – 4:50 BREAK
SESSION III:
THE EAST ASIAN REGIONAL ORDER
4:50 – 5:40 GENEALOGIES OF EAST ASIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND TERRITORY
(Re)Negotiated Sovereignty: Late Goryeo Adaptation as a Chinggisid Realm (1259-1368) / Aaron Molnar, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of British Columbia
Goryeo’s integration into the Mongol Empire posed a series of challenges to the territorial integrity of the state and royal sovereignty. Kim Hodong has most recently argued for the embeddedness of Goryeo in the Mongols’ rulership system. Yet, discussion still largely centers on Mongol power over royal enthronement, material exploitation, military colonies or regional political organs (eg. Jeongdonghaengseong征東行省). That approach ultimately leaves a sliding bar of subjugation-independence to evaluate sovereignty. This paper argues for moving beyond simple definitions of sovereignty to see Goryeo as a Chinggisid realm with blurred political and economic boundaries that were the object of active attempts at adaptation for Goryeo’s benefit like other regions within the Mongol Imperium. This paper looks at three aspects that challenge simple narratives of domination or independence: jurisdiction over human and material mobility, and currency regimes. The royal government intermittently exercised influence over its subjects beyond its ostensible territorial jurisdiction demonstrated by the repatriation of subjects beyond its borders and establishment of trans-border logistical organs such as the yeongseong irgen 營城伊里干. Second, the example of ginseng demonstrates that the king fought for jurisdiction over the material submissions to the Mongol court, while the royal house simultaneously engaged in international commerce like other Chinggisids. Finally, examining currency sheds further light on the hybridity of economic sovereignty. The Yuan imposition of paper currency, though accepted as pan-imperial tender, functioned peripherally alongside state policy that supported the continued use of domestic coined and uncoined silver for state finance and international trade. This approach demonstrates the vacuity of sovereignty as an absolute value in relationships with the continent and specifically the transformation of Goryeo into a Chinggisid realm with (re)negotiated sovereignty adapted to the Mongol hegemon.
Sovereignty and Territory in Qing-Chosŏn Investiture Practices / King Kwong Wong, PhD Student, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
In the interstate arena, tributary relations were ritual space through which rulers of historical East Asian states articulated sovereignty over their territories. As a hallmark of tributary rituals, the investiture practice defined the personal-cum-political relationship between rulers of the Chinese and other states in terms of a feudal arrangement that was based on the one in the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046-256 BCE). It had two facets. By bestowing the patent of investiture and its edict, the Chinese state ruler placed other rulers as his vassals and recognized their right and authority to rule their territory. By accepting the investiture from the Chinese state, foreign rulers acknowledged their benefactor as the Son of Heaven and his right to rule All-under-Heaven (Tianxia 天下), a concept of universal sovereignty that rhetorically speaking included their own territories. These rulers confined interstate relations to tributary rituals as the only legitimate means to conduct diplomacy, and in turn, these rituals offered space for them to conceptualize sovereignty vis-à-vis other rulers in the known world. From the perspective of international law, the investiture practice embodied two contradicting ideas in interstate relations and sovereignty: autonomy and hierarchy. By examining the Qing (1636-1912) Yongzheng 雍正emperor’s (r. 1722-1735) investiture of Yi Kŭm 李昑 (1694-1776), later King Yŏngjo 英祖 (r. 1724-1776) of Chosŏn (1392-1897), and the visual and textual languages of the investiture edict, this paper suggests that the hierarchical relationship, which scholars have often observed between these rulers, did not preclude other forms of relationship. One of these was the reciprocity between the two rulers that could partly account for the coexistence of autonomy and hierarchy and illustrates how the two rulers envisioned sovereignty and defined their realms in ideological and geographical terms.
An East Asian Genealogy of a Non-Territorial Modern International Order: Transformations of Fractal Space / Inho Choi, USC-Berggruen Fellow, Berggruen Institute and University of Southern California Dornsife Center on Science, Technology and Public Life
This article seeks to contribute to the expanding investigations of the non-Western productions of the modern international order by tracing its East Asian genealogy. I argue the pre-modern East Asian spatial order continues to constitute the modern international order in East Asia. The pre-modern East Asian polities shared a distinctive fractal spatial order in which each and every place implicated the entire spatial relations among political units from its particular perspective. Thus, no place could be a part of another place. This East Asian fractal spatial order went through two major transformations. It first underwent partial territorialization in the early 18th century when it appropriated the linear and homogeneous space of early modern European geography. In the late 19th century, under the pressure of the expanding imperial powers, it lost its immediate institutional presence but persisted as the topos of the region. Instead of being the primary spatial order in the region, it became the suppressed topos of a composite order which consists of both fractal spatial order and European territorial order. This composition generated a discordance between the territorial norms and the topos of fractal spatial order. The discordance has manifested in the form of intensifying historical disputes that have threatened the national identity and stability of East Asian states. The resolution to the compounding identity and, increasingly, security crisis can be sought only if the composite reality of the modern international order in East Asia is properly understood.
5:40 – 5:50 BREAK
SESSION IV:
BEYOND THE TERRITORIAL TRAP
5:50 – 6:40 LIQUID BORDERS AND AIRY TERRITORIES
Territorializing the Air: Border-Crossing Air Pollution and the Geopolitics of Atmospheric Science in South Korea / Sungeun Kim, PhD Candidate, Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, KAIST
In East Asia, border-crossing air pollution has emerged as a cause of international conflicts and scientific debates. In order to verify the Chinese impact on Seoul’s bad air quality, the Korean government has heavily funded the scientific monitoring of transboundary pollutants. While many Koreans considered air science a strategy to secure the nation’s aerial territory from foreign incursion, others suggested that this narrative underestimates the significant contribution of domestic polluters. Combining insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and political geography, this presentation analyzes how atmospheric science became the state’s apparatus for territorial security when border-crossing pollution challenged its aerial sovereignty. I elaborate on this entanglement of geopolitics and geoscience through a case study of KORUS-AQ, a field study of Korean air quality co-organized by NASA and Korea’s National Institute for Environmental Research (NIER). With varying motivations, Korean and U.S. scientists produced diverging assessments of the same airshed. Korean participants used the joint mission to quantify China’s exact contribution to Seoul’s air quality. American scientists, on the other hand, focused more on revealing domestic influence without blaming outside polluters. They depicted air pollution as humanity’s collective challenge rather than a geopolitical problem with nation-specific interest. As a result, KORUS-AQ conjured the dual aspect of the atmosphere as a national territory under attack and the natural laboratory for the global environment. Examining the knowledge politics of transboundary air pollution, I argue that atmospheric sensing is not a neutral reading of preexisting nature but a political process for claiming and governing the volumetric territory. Conceptualizing atmospheric science as geopolitics by other means, this presentation asks us to explore the role of government-funded geoscience in producing and securing territorial spaces.
Drawing Lines in the Water: The Peace Line and the Struggle for Maritime Sovereignty / Gene Kim, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
In January 1952, the Syngman Rhee government promulgated a so-called “Peace Line” across the East Sea/Sea of Japan that would replace the MacArthur Line, established by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II. Any Japanese fishing boats that crossed the Peace Line were apprehended by the ROK Coast Guard and its crew detained. The Rhee government insisted that the Peace Line was in keeping with the international maritime law trends of the time, citing as precedent key post-1945 proclamations by the United States and Latin American states. Arguing the direct opposite, the Japanese government condemned the line as entirely illegal according to international law of the time. This paper attempts to situate the Peace Line in the wider context of the international struggle to define the limits of territorial and high seas. It also seeks to understand this Peace Line conflict as part of a larger endeavor to not only assert terrestrial-based concepts of territory onto the seas, but also to then use the sea as both stage on which and means to secure postcolonial sovereignty.
Strategic Contention Between South Korea and China in the Yellow Sea / Sojeong Lee, Global Security Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
The South Korea-China contention in the Yellow Sea has received less attention because of relatively less violent clashes between South Korea and China, compared to other territorial and maritime disputes in East Asia and the Indo-Pacific. Chinese illegal fisheries have been a major problem in the Yellow Sea, while there are continued bilateral efforts to manage the illegal fishing issue such as the 2001 Fisheries Agreement and the 2018 Fishing Pact. Disagreement over Socotra Rock, as well as exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and air defense identification zone (ADIZ) cause diplomatic tensions between South Korea and China, none of which was escalated into actual violent conflict. Due to their complex relationship with close economic ties and security challenges, both South Korea and China seem to enjoy this relatively peaceful contention in the Yellow Sea over the past years. Yet, in the midst of the U.S.-China power competition and China’s growing intention to strengthen its naval presence and power in the region, the status-quo is likely shifting. Due to the geopolitical location of the Yellow Sea, South Korea-China maritime disputes become strategically more important. As China becomes more aggressive in its maritime and territorial disputes with other countries in the region, it pushes South Korea into a more insecure, uncertain, and potentially unfavorable position in the boundary dispute with China in the Yellow Sea. In this context, this study examines how a changing strategic security environment affects South Korea’s perception toward its contested maritime boundary in the Yellow Sea and how it influences the dynamics of maritime disputes between South Korea and China in the Yellow Sea.
6:40 – 6:50 SPECIAL PRE-RECORDED PRESENTATION
Geography and Great Power Military Intervention in China-Korea Relations / Ji-Young Lee, Associate Professor of International Relations and CW Lim and KF Professor of International Studies, School of International Service, American University
There is a popular belief that expansionist great powers invaded Korea on numerous occasions – some 900 invasions throughout history – due to its geostrategic location. The idea that Korea is “a shrimp among whales” is pervasive in policy circles, academia, and popular dialogue, portraying its history of international relations as a victim of geography. The purpose of this paper is to submit the assumptions that underpin this conventional wisdom to empirical scrutiny. I argue that that the discourse on Korea that simply repeats the “curse of geography” warrants a careful rethinking, especially when one makes a more rigorous investigation of historical records on the role of geography in military interventions from the viewpoint of Korea’s great power next door – China. Theoretically, the paper problematizes these assumptions because they rest on a form of environmental determinism, combined with realists’ ahistorical thinking on the role of geography in the field of international relations. The paper shows how geography may not just be a material, but social, construction, with geographic proximity creating the social conditions for identity formation, which can inform how actors calculate their strategic interests.
6:50 – 7:00 BREAK
7:00 – 7:50 EXCEPTIONS AND EXPERIMENTS
Territory of Exception: Special Laws, Colonization, and the Land Question in Jeju / Youjeong Oh, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Jeju has been a “special region” since the 1960s due to a series of special acts applying to the island. Why has Jeju been imagined as a “special” part of the territory? Engaging with theories of “spaces of exception,” this presentation delineates the special region not as a space for the exercise of exclusive sovereign power but as a meticulous technology that reorganizes accumulation regimes and distributional processes. Designing Jeju as a special region is a part of the state’s territorial reorganization to assign industrial production in the mainland and tourism and leisure on the island. Drawing on Lefebvre’s notion of “colonization”—referring to a state-bound practice of producing hierarchical territorial relations—this paper explores how the special laws are parts of the state’s territorial orchestration to make Jeju an internal colony. The special laws render Jeju not as a special zone for production, but as a site for numerous tourism/urban/real estate development projects. What is under (de)regulation, therefore, is not labor subjects and production, but land, landscapes, and the commons in Jeju. Since the special laws allow expedited project approval, undisrupted eminent domain, speedy commodification of land, and relaxed environmental regulation, Jeju has turned into a terrain of dispossession, expropriation, and extraction. Both colonization and the production of space of exception intervene in logics of accumulation through dispossession and rent extraction, making the land question become critical for social struggles around distribution. This paper offers historical explorations of how Jeju people have grappled with the land question at every moment in which a new special act is imposed.
Kaesong Industrial Complex as a Gendered Space of Exception / Hyunjoo Jung, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University
Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) is often evaluated as a model of successful economic cooperation between the two Koreas and a breakthrough project toward unification. Between 2004 and 2016, KIC accumulated over $3.1 billion by hiring 55,000 North Korean laborers from 125 participating South Korean companies by the time of closure. Located just 5-6 km north of the Demilitarized Zone, KIC illustrates the exceptional operation of sovereignty and territory. It was constructed within North Korean territory by a South Korean company (Hyundai) and government agencies (e.g., Korea Land and Housing Corporation). Made possible by new legislation following the two Koreas' agreement, it shows a novel approach in the governance of Special Economic Zones (SEZ). The unique model appeared in the context of rising geo-economic interests of the post-developmental South Korean state and the emergence of a "reformist" North Korean regime that admired the Chinese use of economic zones. The concept of "space of exception" (Ong, 2006), a spatial strategy often adopted by neoliberal Asian (post-) developmental states in pursuit of a disjuncture of sovereignty and territory, might advance the understanding of the flexible territoriality of KIC. Critically engaging Ong and related literature on SEZs in developing regions, this paper investigates the generality and specificity of KIC as a space of exception or as a post-territorial SEZ. One notable feature of KIC is that it utilized the gendered division of labor, recruiting female laborers (70%) in clothing industries (60%). However, it is hard to say that it generated “disposable women” (Wright, 2006) out of gendered exploitation, a frequent criticism of SEZs leveraged in most Western literature. I would argue that gender, nationalism, and the mutual monitoring system of the two strong states intersected in KIC in complex ways to generate a space of exception that is also, in a sense, general: it utilizes a gendered division of labor and a spatial strategy similar to other spaces of capitalist accumulation.
Cyber Sovereignty and Cyber Territory in North Korea / Abhishek Sharma, PhD Student, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi
North Korea has exponentially increased the use of cyberspace for the regime’s political objectives since Kim Jong-un inherited power. Cyberspace is now considered an all-purpose sword for the political regime. The necessity to adapt to the new technological development model has forced to expand the regime’s territorial control, virtually leading the state to venture into new spaces within and beyond. In the effort to expand and control the virtual, it has forced the regime to define the nature of the beast, cyberspace. Cyberspace has emerged as the fourth space of warfare, beyond land, air, and water that traditionally defined the territory of the North Korea state. Cyber sovereignty is the outcome of the effort and ambition to go beyond the traditional ways to exercise power and control over territory. The concept of cyber sovereignty has come into vocabulary since cyberspace started growing with the penetration of the internet, as mobile networks and new technologies have proliferated in North Korea’s territory. The need to formulate the concept has become more critical, with cyber becoming a part of the military strategy. With cyber now becoming a part of internal and external security, considerations, and strategy, the regime has moved to define the concept quite differently from both cyber sovereign models of the west on one side and China and Russia on the other. This paper aims to analyze the definition of cyber sovereignty through two perspectives: external and internet cyberspace emerging as a critical virtual territory. In addition, with security implications for the regime tied to cyberspace, it becomes important they understand how to new model of cyber sovereignty stands apart from other models of control.
7:50 – 8:00 CLOSING DISCUSSION Closing
Generously supported by the SBS Foundation Research Fund at the Korea Institute, Harvard University