Concrete July: Forging peace in Korea from fragments of the past
Topics:
Keywords: Korea, geopolitics, peace, grassroots organizing, memory, imperialism, feminist geopolitics, dispossession, decolonialism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Sheen Kim, Dartmouth College
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Abstract
Peace is not simply the ceasing of overt violence. Rather, it entails multiscalar entanglements of actors and ideologies and is a process that is actively defined by grassroots actors working to repossess and redefine histories that they have been dispossessed of by war and its legacies. To challenge classical peace and further investigate the power of people at the intimate scale, as feminist political geographers have, I turn to Koreans organizing for a demilitarized Korea and forging varied definitions of “peace” to unsettle focuses on the state as the sole arbiter of power and challenge critical perspectives that paint the state as an imperialist fixture rather than a flexible spatial construct. I begin with analysis of mass contemporary protests across the peninsula calling for the end of U.S. military presence and U.S.-Japanese military collaboration. In the face of the persistent militarism that has characterized post-Cold War U.S. empire, decades of anti-communist repression, and neoliberal policy, I argue that part of this struggle over “peace” is a struggle over the psychic terrains of imperialism and a reshaping of spaces of memory. This struggle and resistance take place in myriad forms: interviews with everyday Koreans whose lives are intersected by blatant militarism suggest that dispossession of land accompanies the dispossession of possibilities of multiscalar resistance, such as a reunified state. This paper argues for a more defined approach to not just geopolitics but to the assertion of spaces of resistance that blur the intimate and the international, and ultimately, a just world.
Concrete July: Forging peace in Korea from fragments of the past
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Paper Abstract