WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

I examine the South Korean conservative media’s campaign against inter-Korean reconciliation in the post-Cold War era. Traceable to the destruction of flight Korean Air Flight 858 by North Korean agents in 1987, these efforts gathered momentum via the revelations of prison camps in North Korea in the early 1990s. I argue that the links between the South Korean and French media have been a significant—yet underexplored—force in the dissemination of such anti-North Korean discourse since the end of the Cold War. Confronting the cliché that the “Cold War persists on the Korean Peninsula,” moreover, I draw out the implications of this argument for understanding the persistence of anticommunism in South Korea: South Korean anticommunism is not just a “relic” of the Cold War but an important lens through which to view the post-Cold War world.

This paper reinterprets South Korea's relationship with its dispersed populations through the evolving roles of a "sending," "absent," and ultimately "returning" state. From the late 1950s, the South Korean government attempted to address the unresolved status of Koreans stranded on Sakhalin--petitioning Japan, appealing indirectly to the Soviet Union, and submitting requests to the ICRC. Yet Cold War geopolitics, Soviet resistance, and Japan's reluctance rendered meaningful repatriation impossible. After 1992, Korean Chinese migration expanded dramatically, prompting major reforms to the Nationality Act, the Overseas Korean Act, and stratified visa categories such as F-4 and H-2. In the same period, the institutionalized repatriation of elderly Sakhalin Korean families became possible. Taken together, these cases reveal how repatriation politics shaped South Korea’s transition from Cold War absence to proactive migration statehood.

This paper traces the history of space discourse in South Korea from the signing of the Outer Space Treaty, the first concrete step to formally document the principle that space is the common concern of humanity, to the present. By reviewing newspaper columns, expert commentaries and government records – including the Defense White Paper, Space Development Initiative, Space White Paper and press statements – it examines the evolution of how South Koreans understood space and how the country positioned itself amidst the growing importance of space and the nation’s growth in economic strength and international standing. It aims to show that space (even though it is inherently global and should have concerned South Korea) did not become an issue until economic and technological advancements allowed South Korea to truly understand the pertinence, significance and certain extent urgency of space to both the nation’s security and well-being of ordinary people.

The Korea Foundation is known worldwide to scholars researching the Korean Peninsula for funding Korean Studies and cultural exchanges. Yet while the Korea Foundation supports a vast array of research financially, it has seldom been the subject of research itself. This paper, by contrast, seeks to understand its establishment and early operations in the 1990s by utilizing documents from the South Korean Diplomatic Archives. Such an inquiry is important because the authoritarian governments before South Korea’s democratization in 1987 used government bureaucracy to promote a positive image of their own rule abroad. Was the early work of the Korea Foundation a benign effort to curate interest in Korea or intended to foster support for conservative, hawkish positions on North Korea? Answering these and similar questions not only regarding South Korea but countries around the globe are crucial when it comes to contemplating foreign interference in elections and policymaking.