The Korean DMZ as an Impossible Space: Reflections on Peace Beyond Geopolitics

In this talk, Eleana Kim discusses the ecological, cultural, and political transformations that have contributed to the DMZ’s resignification from a scar of fratricidal war to a green belt representing biodiversity and peace.  How did this militarized buffer area, the product of an unresolved war,  become a frontier for alternative peace imaginaries in South Korea? Drawing upon ethnographic research in the border areas near the DMZ, this talk examines ecological encounters that hold promise for a different kind of politics at time of heightened military tensions on the peninsula.

Eleana Kim is a cultural anthropologist and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the DMZ (Duke UP, June 2022), and Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke UP, 2010), which won the James B. Palais Prize in Korean Studies from the Association of Asian Studies and the Social Science Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, both in 2012. She is the current president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.