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2020, MPIWG Feature Story
The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a 250-kilometer long and four-kilometer wide buffer zone, was created after the armistice of the Korean War in 1953. One of the most globally recognized militarized landscapes, it is also a site where the incidental convergence of defense activity and environmental protection has taken place. Since its establishment the DMZ has remained terra nullius, only open to non-humans, apart from occasional local military crashes. As the recent designation of the DMZ as a UNESCO biosphere reserve illustrates, this product of Cold War conflict is now widely recognized as a haven for endangered animals and plants. In his research, Postdoctoral Fellow Jaehwan Hyun examines how environmentalism, science, and geopolitics became intertwined by the military-supported fieldworks during the Cold War, enabling a new ecological vision for the DMZ. tivity with natural history surveying to identify national fauna and flora that represented the unique nature of the nation. Under a materialistic and symbolic regime competition with North Korea, local scientists continued the mountaineering-tradition practices through collaborative US-South Korea fieldwork at the DMZ, despite the definition of the project as an "ecological survey." They searched for national animals and plants, such as tigers and pine trees that were supposed to have been threatened by Japanese colonialism, in the bushes of the DMZ. Neither the financial supporter-the US military-nor the US scientific collaborators were interested in such work, and they sometimes quarreled with the local scientists, blaming the Korean side for being ignorant of ecology and "primitive" naturalists. However, they soon conceded that the South Korean fieldworkers should be allowed to pursue their work: only Koreans could work in the long-term base, and only they possessed local knowledge about the field. Finally, the Korean scientists incorporated the results of field surveys into a government propagandist book, which described the DMZ as a showcase of "the restoration of the Korean nature (Kŭmsugangsan)." This therefore turned environmental cooperation into a means of nation-building. The Ambivalent Legacy of Military Ecology The DMZ has recently been under the spotlight for the "greening" of security diplomacy by local government and outside observers. The South Korean President Moon Jae-In pledged to transform the DMZ into a "peace(ful) and cooperating district" at the United Nations General Assembly in Sep-tember 2019. His proposal is another articulation of the DMZ diplomacy that his predecessors have promoted since the early 1990s: environmental cooperation and research and ecotourism within the zone are its main tactics for bringing North Korea to the table. Current environmental diplomacy counts on a particular version of the environmental conception of the DMZ that was created by military ecologists. Yet the other side of their scientific activities during the Cold War remains under-recognized. Jaehwan Hyun' s project tells us the ambivalent legacy of military ecology: while claiming natural protection of and research on the borderland, for instance, US ecologists advised its military to use Agent Orange to clear plants and trees. This project seeks to further illuminate this ambivalent nature of military environmentalism, and the place of science in the Cold War formation of militarized landscapes. More research topics are available at: www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/researchtopics T +49 30 22 667 0 RESEARCH TOPICS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jaehwan Hyun is a Postdoctoral Fellow based in Department III (Arti-facts, Action, Knowledge), directed by Dagmar Schäfer. His current research project focuses on how global environmental concerns and related scientific collaborations were entangled with the postcolonial nation-building of South Korea and Japan during the Cold War period.
Drawing on research in the borderlands of South Korea near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, this essay analyzes the heterogeneous life of landmines in postconflict militarized ecologies. Humanitarian narratives typically frame mines as deadly remnants of war, which aligns with postcolonial critiques viewing them as traces of imperial power and ongoing violence. Given that landmines and other unexploded ordnance can remain live for up to a hundred years, I suggest that mines and minefields become infrastructural when their distributed agency is redistributed over time, bringing into view nonhuman agencies and affordances that might otherwise go undetected in humanitarian or postcolonial critiques. I offer the framework of rogue infrastructure to capture the volatile materiality of mines and their multiple natural, cultural, technical, and political entanglements with the humans who exist alongside them. Keywords: landmines; infrastructure; militarized ecologies; Korea
Environmental Management
Cranes, Crops and Conservation: Understanding Human Perceptions of Biodiversity Conservation in South Korea’s Civilian Control Zone2011 •
This paper investigates the balloon-and-leaflet campaign, an exercise in psychological warfare once practiced by North and South Korean military forces but recently taken over in the South, by non-government, mainly evangelical Protestant organizations. I consider this privatization of psychological warfare emblematic of both the enduring and changing cold war cultures and power struggles found in the context of the national division that has engendered multifaceted politico-ideological partitions within South Korea and beyond. While other Cold War studies have focused mainly on state actors, by considering privatization, this paper sheds light on the ways in which state power is made invisible in the maneuvers of loyalty politics, while civilian religious powers take up the symbolic struggle to envision a reunified nation-state on the Korean peninsula.
In 1953, the Korean peninsula was sliced in half by a Demilitarized Zone (the DMZ) where today an astounding array of animal and plant life flourishes among a million landmines. Two aspects of this situation fascinate me: the accidental nature of this area’s ecological salvation and the difficulties historians face as we try to represent this accidental quality. While making meaning out of the chaos of human history has always been difficult, the addition of physical forces, vast amounts of time, and the activities of non-human species magnify the complexity of our disciplinary enterprise, stretching it perhaps beyond recognition.
S/N Korean Humanities
Spatializing Imagined Moments of Korean Unification: Arboreal and Topographic Charisma on April 27, 20182019 •
Territory and landscape are vitally important to both nations currently on the Korean peninsula. Historically both Koreas have contested and imagined the others territory as their own. However, both Koreas have both been forced to consider what the landscape of the other might look like at the moment of or following unification. Occasionally both Koreas have joined together to enact and imagine such moments of unification. This paper in particular considers arboreal elements of geography and topography reproduced at moments of intersection between the two Koreas, and how they are historically framed, imagined and grounded and embodied in real materiality, so they are not just imagined places in the future, but places of imagination in the present. Specifically, this paper focuses on a ceremonial tree planting ceremony on the April 27, 2018 between Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in at the April 2019 Inter-Korean Summit held at Panmunjom in the Joint Security Area. Using the work of Denis Cosgrove, Nak-chung Paik, Gilles Deleuze, Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung, the paper places the ceremony and other symbolic elements that day within a wider historical-geographical and transnational frame of the place of trees and topographic features at moments in which both practices of political authority and unification are performed and enacted in Korean history.
Zoological Studies
Return of the pythons: first formal records, with a special note on recovery of the Burmese python in the demilitarized Kinmen islands2013 •
In a studio apartment in New York City’s Chinatown, a naked Asian man swims in a vat of MSG. He then crawls, walks, and runs on the Bonneville Salt Flats in the western Utah desert. Completely covered in salt, the man then quietly sits in the middle of a mountain forest in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the Korean peninsula. A wild elk comes along and licks the salt from his body. After the animal walks away, the man leaps into the air, landing in a vat of MSG. The cycle begins again. These are the three scenes that comprise the 1993 video Salt Transfer Cycle by Korean American installation artist Michael Joo. Using recent scholarship on Asian American studies, performance studies, racial mel- ancholia, and animal studies, as well as the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, I suggest that in its form and substance(s), Salt Transfer Cycle critiques a national politics of developmental recovery and imagines otherwise a geohistorical performance of cyclical exchange.
Tourism Geographies
Motivations for War-related Tourism: A Case of DMZ Visitors in Korea2010 •
Studies in the Humanities 44.1-2 & 45.1-2 (2019): 182-200
Dog and Thief: Two Modes of Abject Agency Crossing over East Asian Capital Networks in Global Korean CinemaTokyo University of the Arts
A study on Landscape paintings; Landscapes as Utopia2019 •
Feminist Media Studies
(Re)mapping the Yanggongju and the Camptown in Shin Sang-ok's Hellflower2020 •
2011 •
Ecological Economics
Valuation of ecotourism resources using a contingent valuation method: The case of the Korean DMZ2007 •
Cambridge: Red Dagger Press
Propaganda and Persuasion on the Korean Border: The Politics of Dark and War Tourism in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea2014 •
Journal of Intercultural Studies
Observations on the Border Politics of Cyprus and the Koreas: National Reflexes to a Globalised World2010 •
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Environmental Planning and Cooperative Behavior: Catalyzing Sustainable Consensus2003 •
2019 •
2014 •
2018 •
Journal of Veterinary Science
Microbial pathogens in ticks, rodents and a shrew in northern Gyeonggi-do near the DMZ, Korea2008 •
2016 •
European Journal of International Security
Visual Autoethnography and International Security: Insights from the Korean DMZ2019 •
FISIP UIN Jakarta
Pernyataan Penyesalan oleh Korea Utara terhadap Korea Selatan terkait Kasus Ranjau Darat di DMZ (2015)2017 •
Transnational Asia: An Online Interdisciplinary Journal
Diaspora and Unification: The Changing Landscape on the Korean Peninsula and A Diasporic Community's Response-With the Focus on Korean Americans in the Greater Houston Area (Dr. Sonia Ryang-CO-AUTHOR)2019 •