Nam Center Colloquium Series | De/militarized Ecologies: Making Peace with Nature Along the Korean DMZ

With the discovery of rare and endangered species in areas around the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and inspired by the paradoxical flourishing of nonhuman nature in the context of unending war, a wide network of scientists, bureaucrats, journalists, natural scientists, citizen ecologists, and others have become captured by a utopian vision in which nature, peace, and life constitute a tightly-wound bundle of naturalized associations. Especially since the late 1990s, in the context of increasingly dire planetary futures presented by global climate change and mass extinction, as well as with the deteriorating prospects of national reunification or reconciliation between the two Koreas, the DMZ’s nature has offered the conceptual ground for mainstream and marginal imaginaries of peace in South Korea and beyond. While it would be easy to dismiss these hopeful discourses as naive and romanticizing, this paper seeks to take them seriously as empirically-grounded logics in which the existence of biodiversity of the DMZ offers alternatives to geopolitics as usual. How is the DMZ’s nature temporally operationalized as transhistorical and universal, connecting a pre-division, yet national, space to a “context yet to come” of a post-division Korea? What imaginative possibilities does it offer beyond state-centric and nationalist frameworks for unification?

Eleana Kim is associate professor of anthropology at UC Irvine and author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke UP, 2010). Her research on the ecologies of the Korean DMZ has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the ACLS, and related articles may be found in Cultural Anthropology, Social Research, and the forthcoming edited volume, How Nature Works (SAR Press).