Reframing Korea’s Cold War: Environmentalism, Migration, and Knowledge-Exchange across Borders
Yejun Kweon, Cheehyung Harrison Kim, Jaehyung Kim, Man Joong Kim, James Podgorski, Junghyun Nam
This panel explores the transformation of the Korean peninsula from the Korean War to the late twentieth century, foregrounding migration, rural reconstruction, knowledge exchange, and environmental activism. Moving beyond state-centered and security-driven narratives, it highlights how everyday actors and transnational networks reshaped the Korean society and environment across and beyond Cold War geopolitics. The panel reinterprets the peninsula not as a static site of ideological confrontation, but as a dynamic hub of circulation, exchange, and contestation.
Jaehyung Kim reveals the porous character of the North Korea–China frontier during the Korean War, showing how refugee movements and smuggling networks endured despite militarization. James Podgorski situates South Korea’s postwar Community Development programs within Korean–American collaborations, demonstrating how rural modernization served as a key arena for advancing liberal developmental visions. Man Joong Kim traces the circulation of urbanism through U.S. academic networks, illustrating how cities such as Gwangju were reframed within transnational circuits of expertise and dissent. Yejun Kweon examines environmental activism in the two Koreas, arguing that housewives’ domestic labor functioned as a care-based ecological infrastructure linking grassroots anti-pollution campaigns in the South with women-led conservation practices embedded in North Korea’s socialist mobilization.
Collectively, the panel’s significance lies in its transnational framework linking wartime mobility, intellectual exchange, and ecological politics. Methodologically, the panel centers invisible and understudied actors, demonstrating how global Cold War structures were localized, negotiated, and reshaped in the daily lives of people. In doing so, it transcends the view of the peninsula as a geopolitically isolated island, instead integrating it into broader continental and global networks. It contributes to Korean studies, Cold War history, and environmental history by framing mobility, knowledge circulation, and care-based social reproduction as the key forces that bridged the peninsula with the world.