WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

South and North Korea are states born out of the Cold War and their division was solidified by the Korean War. The realities of the global Cold War limited South Korea’s interactions with some peoples and shaped its understanding of friends and foes. Yet while most of the world rejoiced at the proposition of the “end of history” following the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, South Korea has struggled to move on. Nearly seventy-five years after the Korean War began, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was still using the existence of “pro-North Korean” communists as justification for declaring martial law on December 3, 2024. Papers in this panel use the lens of the Cold War and its (supposed) end to shed light on various aspects of South Korea’s relations with and understandings of the world as well as itself. In many respects, the end of the Cold War opened space for South Korea to expand its horizons in terms of its ambitions and connections with countries previously obscured by the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. In other ways, consciously and unconsciously, the people and policymakers of South Korea struggled to move beyond the Cold War frame because of the North Korean threat or a reluctance to discard privileges the supposed North Korean threat provided them.