North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Dan Gudgeon: How South Korea’s language on North Korea shapes peace narrative

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

In this episode, we speak with Dan Gudgeon, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, about how peace narratives shape inter-Korean relations. Drawing from his research on South Korea’s Sunshine Policy era, Dan explains how national identity and “ontological security” influence public and political willingness to engage in peace building.  He then discusses whether […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private dash feed. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jaco Zwetslu. This episode was recorded via StreamYard on January 17th, 2025. And joining me via StreamYard all the way over in Europe is Dr. Dan Gudgeon, who is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna. Dan attained his PhD from the University of North Korean Studies and previously worked for

the Korea Sharing Movement, an inter-Korean corporation NGO in Seoul. He recently published a paper in the Journal of International Relations and Development called How Peace Narratives Avoid or Invoke Ontological Insecurity South Korean Language Games about Building Peace with North Korea. And we're going to talk about that and about his time at the KSM, and also about building peace between North and South Korea in general. Dan, welcome on the show. Hi, Jaco. Thanks for having me. I've always enjoyed listening to the podcast, so it's great to be here.

Thank you. Let's start with a big picture question. How do narratives about identity shape the successes or failures of peace processes? So identity narratives are pivotal for everybody because they help us draw a coherent link from the past through the present and into the future. And in peace processes that's particularly important because they provide the framework through which groups understand their history, the way they justify their actions and how they envision the future. So in peace and conflict, this can either reinforce divisions and conflict through the entrenched narratives of righteousness and blame,

or contrarily, they can create pathways for reconciliation by reframing identities to include mutual recognition, shared goals, and a vision of coexistence. Now, in the title of your recent paper, there's a phrase there, ontological security, which may be new to a lot of us, it was to me. Can you explain in simple terms, ontological security, which may be new to a lot of us, it was to me. Can you explain in simple terms what ontological security means and why it's so important in peace building? Yeah, so, ontological security is about feeling stable

in your relationships, in knowing who you are, where you came from and where you are going, so that you know how to go on automatically when everyday or extraordinary situations arise. So in in situations of intractable conflict, that conflictual relationship can become part of your national identity. So we often define ourselves in distinction to one group or another. And we, we celebrate our own

group's chosen glories and mourn our own chosen traumas. So ontological security kind of anchors who we are as a group and provide guidelines for how we should engage with others. So in peace building, changing that story can create anxiety because it challenges how people see themselves, how they see their history and how they envision their future. Now, your paper focuses on South Korea's efforts to build peace with North Korea, particularly during the Sunshine Policy era, which is 10 years from 1998 to 2008.

Why do you think South Korea's peace efforts under the Sunshine Policy eventually faulted? I mean, it's a good question. I think the biggest challenge would be that the Sunshine Policy was a functionalist policy, and functionalism encapsulates elements of reciprocity. So in South Korea, the Sunshine Policy framed that reciprocity as North Korean change. So when this didn't happen, or when it was slower than expected, I think the Sunshine Policy faced increasing resistance domestically, and then

ultimately that boiled over with the North's nuclear test, because part of the Sunshine policies narrative was that engagement would encourage North Korea to issue nuclear weapons. And that narrative then could not survive the contradiction therein with the nuclear test. Now, coming back to the idea of narratives, can you give some specific examples of South Korean narratives that either helped or hindered peacebuilding with North Korea? Yeah, it depends how you define successful. So I think in conflict and peacebuilding, a narrative can be regarded successful if it is accepted by the majority of the population and it provides meaning to the majority of the population. So if you think about in a conflict, in a conflictual situation, narratives can also be successful in that when kind of existential questions come to the fore, during conflict during war, groups have to develop mechanisms to

cope with the extreme stress that exists and to reduce the ambiguity of the situation. So in South Korea that anti-communist narrative was constructed to answer questions about responsibility, justify extreme situations that were going on, comprehensively bracket out these questions about the perspective chaos of the sacrifices that people were engaging in these kind of mercilessness of engaging in war, and also any doubts about in-group legitimacy. So in that respect, we can see that narrative as being incredibly successful for providing meaning for the South Korean population.

But to kind of contrast that with a direct answer to your question, the narratives that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s vis-a-vis North Korea or vis-a-vis the conflict and then that Kim Dae-jung ended up embracing as president, they actually facilitated, they created a space to kind of transcend that binary of the narrative that was so important in providing meaning during the Korean War. So it took obviously several decades after the Korean War for that to be able to emerge, So it took obviously several decades after the Korean War for that to be able to emerge, but in that space it kind of transcended this good and evil dichotomy between the South and the North, whereby the North could, North Koreans could be humanized and envisioning some sort of a shared future together became possible. So it was because of the existence of the conflictual narrative that the emergence of that peaceful narrative was so significant. Yeah, and you've in the paper, you kind of distill down some

of the things that you've already mentioned into four key components for building successful peace narratives, right? You've just mentioned humanizing the other, and there's also challenging challenging the existing narratives of conflict, recognizing the adversary as a legitimate subject. And I want to hear a bit more about that. And also envisioning a shared future. Have I got the four of them right?

Yeah, indeed. Very good. So tell us what does it mean to recognize the adversary as a legitimate subject? Yeah, so there's, we can think of it as a thin recognition and thick recognition. So thin recognition would be to kind of acknowledge that somebody else exists, acknowledge their legal status as it were. And this kind of has to exist, this thin recognition has to exist to be able for talks to begin. Yeah, the villain needs to be de-villainized as it were. Because when they are illegitimate, when they are not recognized, even with thin recognition, that's kind of symbolic, and it's it's excluding the other, and they're kind of unable to participate as an equal. And that kind of shapes your understanding of the conflict. So kind of thin

recognition is the minimum required for engagement for talks, and then thick recognition would be more for talks and then thick recognition would be more acknowledging the qualities or the distinctiveness, the uniqueness of the other group and kind of acknowledging them as they present themselves. What would that look like in practice here on the Korean Peninsula and how could that that thick recognition be achieved between the two Koreas?

So I think it was achieved to some extent with the basic agreement where they acknowledged each other's systems. They acknowledged that they operated according to different systems. But it needs to be recognition is not a one-off occurrence. It needs to be repeated consistently for it to continue to allow and facilitate engagement and cooperation. So just to go back there from the basic agreement that you mentioned there, that's is that the 1991 inter-Korean basic agreement that was, I think, signed between, well, at least it was when Norteu and Kim Il-sung were the leaders of respective Koreas? Yeah, so the first paragraph or the first point in that agreement states that they will

acknowledge system difference. So that would be kind of one instance of thick recognition. But then when obviously, as the 90s progressed, and I think South Korea kind of assumed that North Korea would collapse after Kim Il-sung's death, it was apparent that that thick recognition was pretty quickly withdrawn from the South Korean side. On the North Korean side, you could argue that thick recognition was more kind of concretely substantiated with the 2000 inter-Korean agreement because that was obviously the leader, the supreme leader of North Korea signed that agreement so in that they are all powerful, and that agreement has more weight, as it were in North Korea. And the first part of that agreement, kind of saying that the two

Koreas will push towards unification together without outside actors was their conditional kind of recognition of the South Korean government. So you could argue that was when North Korea extended recognition from not just the people in South Korea, but to include the South Korean government. for access to the full episode. Head to nknews.org slash join for more information. If you're already a subscriber to NK News, you can listen to full episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast Feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private dash feed.