IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ctwqxx/v45y2024i6p1070-1087.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Healing an abnormalised body: bringing the agency of unseen people back to the inter-Korean border

Author

Listed:
  • Jooyoun Lee

Abstract

Conventional approaches to the ‘North Korea Problem’ underpin the interests of great powers and the Westphalian canon that buttresses the status quo of a divided Korea, normalising and perpetuating the abnormality of the Korean body. This article draws on a postcolonial approach to international relations and uses East Asian medicine (EAM)’s principles and epistemological underpinnings as an analytical framework to examine the effects of the inter-Korean border on Korea’s body politic and to assess the 2018 inter-Korean border crossings. I demonstrate how the inter-Korean border serves as a site that manifests a new possibility and how invisible ordinary people play an indispensable role in mending the abnormalised Korean body, defying the idea of Korea’s intractable conflict. Ultimately, this study rethinks state and non-state interactions, as well as their reciprocal and conflicting relations, in producing, perpetuating and mitigating artificial myths about inter-Korean border conflicts as a conceptual dialogue between state-centred and EAM-inspired approaches towards reconciliation processes. By drawing on the implications of escaping the Westphalian canonical nexus of power-knowledge-discourse, I suggest an alternative way of healing from inside out by de-abnormalising the inter-Korean border and (re)historicising the agency of unseen people in re-imagining the Korean body politic and world politics.

Suggested Citation

  • Jooyoun Lee, 2024. "Healing an abnormalised body: bringing the agency of unseen people back to the inter-Korean border," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(6), pages 1070-1087, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:45:y:2024:i:6:p:1070-1087
    DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2021.1928488
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2021.1928488
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01436597.2021.1928488?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:45:y:2024:i:6:p:1070-1087. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ctwq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.