“People like You and Me”: The Korean War, Humanitarian Aid, and Creating Compassion

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Paul S. Cha
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Elderly Women ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequence ◽  
Sufficient Condition ◽  
Humanitarian Relief ◽  
Humanitarian Crisis ◽  
The Korean War

Abstract During the 1950s a number of private and voluntary aid organizations (PVOs) in the United States mobilized to address the humanitarian crisis caused by the Korean War. However, the activities and roles PVOs played in both providing humanitarian relief in South Korea and shaping American perceptions of the country are poorly understood. This article examines the strategies PVOs employed in their campaigns to convince Americans to contribute aid. The existence of need was a necessary but not sufficient condition. As scholars of humanitarian aid have argued, potential donors might view images of suffering with pity and sympathy but then quickly turn away. Donors must feel a sense of solidarity to move beyond sympathy and act in compassion. This work demonstrates that PVOs tried to create narratives of commonality between Americans and South Koreans. However, a reliance on images of poverty—which were critical to raise money—conflicted with the message that South Koreans were, like Americans, independent and hardworking people. The aid groups’ strategic attempts to mitigate this dissonance by focusing on the supposedly weak (elderly, women, children, and amputees) had the unintended consequence of casting South Korea as an emasculated nation needing to be “saved.”

UNEXPLORED CONSEQUENCES OF VIOLENCE AGAINST CIVILIANS DURING THE KOREAN WAR

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Woo Chang Kang ◽  
Ji Yeon Hong
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Direct Exposure ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Negative Perceptions ◽  
Violence Against Civilians

AbstractIn this paper, we examine the extent to which wartime violence against civilians during the Korean War affects people's current attitudes toward South Korea and other involved countries. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach that compares the cohorts born before and after the war, we find that direct exposure to wartime violence induces negative perceptions regarding perpetrator countries. As many of the civilian massacres were committed by the South Korean armed forces, prewar cohorts living in violence-ridden areas during the war demonstrate significantly less pride in South Korea today. In contrast, postwar cohorts from those violent areas, who were exposed to intensive anti-communist campaigns and were incentivized to differentiate themselves from the victims, show significantly greater pride in South Korea, and greater hospitality toward the United States than toward North Korea, compared to prewar cohorts in the same areas and to the same cohorts born in non-violent areas.

Pyongyang will press its advantage at Trump summit

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Content Type ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Two Sides

Significance Eight months on, there is little progress on the key issues discussed at the Singapore summit: there has been no formal end to the Korean War, and the two sides are yet to agree on what ‘denuclearisation’ means in practice. Impacts As part of a deal in Hanoi, Trump may offer sanctions relief that allows inter-Korean initiatives to proceed. Seoul and Tokyo fear a deal that removes the threat to the United States but leaves Pyongyang’s regional capabilities intact. Serious deterioration of relations between Japan and South Korea strengthens Pyongyang’s position. If inter-Korean initiatives fail, the prospects rise of South Korean conservatives recapturing the legislature in next year's election.

The Korean War

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James I. Matray
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The U.S

On June 25, 1950, North Korea’s invasion of South Korea ignited a conventional war that had origins dating from at least the end of World War II. In April 1945, President Harry S. Truman abandoned a trusteeship plan for postwar Korea in favor of seeking unilateral U.S. occupation of the peninsula after an atomic attack forced Japan’s prompt surrender. Soviet entry into the Pacific war led to a last minute agreement dividing Korea at the 38th parallel into zones of occupation. Two Koreas emerged after Soviet-American negotiations failed to agree on a plan to end the division. Kim Il Sung in the north and Syngman Rhee in the south both were determined to reunite Korea, instigating major military clashes at the parallel in the summer of 1949. Moscow and Washington opposed their clients’ invasion plans until April 1950 when Kim persuaded Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that with mass support in South Korea, he would achieve a quick victory. At first, Truman hoped that South Korea could defend itself with more military equipment and U.S. air support. Commitment of U.S. ground forces came after General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. occupation commander in Japan, visited the front and advised that the South Koreans could not halt the advance. Overconfident U.S. soldiers would sustain defeat as well, retreating to the Pusan Perimeter, a rectangular area in the southeast corner of the peninsula. On September 15, MacArthur staged a risky amphibious landing at Inchon behind enemy lines that sent Communist forces fleeing back into North Korea. The People’s Republic of China viewed the U.S. offensive for reunification that followed as a threat to its security and prestige. In late November, Chinese “volunteers” attacked in mass. After a chaotic retreat, U.S. forces counterattacked in February 1951 and moved the line of battle just north of the parallel. After two Chinese offensives failed, negotiations to end the war began in July 1951, but stalemated in May 1952 over the issue of repatriation of prisoners of war. Peace came because of Stalin’s death in March 1953, rather than President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s veiled threat to stage nuclear strikes against China. Scholars have disagreed about many issues surrounding the Korean War, but the most important debate continues to center on whether the conflict had international or domestic origins. Initially, historians relied mainly on U.S. government publications to write accounts that ignored events prior to North Korea’s attack, endorsing an orthodox interpretation assigning blame to the Soviet Union and applauding the U.S. response. Declassification of U.S. government documents and presidential papers during the 1970s led to the publication of studies assigning considerable responsibility to the United States for helping to create a kind of war in Korea before June 1950. Moreover, left revisionist writers labeled the conflict a classic civil war. Release of Chinese and Soviet sources after 1989 established that Stalin and Chinese leader Mao Zedong approved the North Korean invasion, prompting right revisionist scholars to reassert key orthodox arguments. This essay describes how and why recent access to Communist documents has not settled the disagreements among historians about the causes, course, and consequences of the Korean War.

Sino-Soviet Relations and the Origins of the Korean War: Stalin's Strategic Goals in the Far East

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shen Zhihua
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Far East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Kim Il Sung ◽  
Opportunity To Respond ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Strategic Goals ◽  
American Reaction

After initially insisting on the peaceful reunification of Korea, Josif Stalin suddenly decided in early 1950 to give North Korean leader Kim Il Sung permission to invade South Korea. Documents from the Russian archives and materials published in China help explain this abrupt shift in Stalin's position. They show that Stalin carefully assessed the likely American reaction and mistakenly concluded that North Korean forces would quickly seize South Korea, giving the United States no opportunity to respond. The documents also reveal that Stalin's attitude toward Korea was strongly influenced by Sino-Soviet relations in 1949–1950, particularly his desire to maintain Soviet privileges on Chinese territory and his concern that Beijing would challenge Moscow's leadership of the international Communist movement. Stalin believed that a North Korean invasion of the South would greatly strengthen the Soviet Union's leverage vis-a-vis China.

Forgetting the Bad Dreams of the Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-91
Author(s):  
Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Korea ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Nuclear Reactors ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Industry ◽  
Personal Goals ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Korean War

Eisenhower’s initiative provided rhetorical tools to others who pursued political or even personal goals in their own countries. The first major efforts to take “Atoms for Peace” seriously were in East Asia, particularly post-occupation Japan and also South Korea, freshly emerging from the Korean War. In both cases the United States would be confronted with its own empty promises, because these countries explicitly asked for American help to build nuclear reactors to power their economic resurgence. Instead, US officials stalled for time and wavered, unsure how—or if—they should genuinely encourage a peaceful nuclear industry outside the United States and Europe.

scholarly journals “The U.S.–rok Relationship into Full Bloom: From ‘Little Strategic Interest’ to Alliance Partner, 1947–1966”

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-140
Author(s):  
Jun Suk Hyun ◽  
William Stueck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Bloom ◽  
Strategic Partner ◽  
Alliance Partner ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Relationship

U.S. relations with South Korea had a rocky start during U.S. occupation when American planners rated the peninsula low on the list of U.S. strategic priorities. The psychology of the relationship improved in 1948, when the United States helped create the Republic of Korea (rok), and even more after June 1950, when U.S. military intervention prevented North Korea from conquering South Korea. With the July 1953 armistice in the Korean War, the United States reluctantly agreed to a bilateral alliance that eventually became the centerpiece of American defense strategy there. With concerns ongoing about Chinese expansion and Japanese reliability, staunchly anti-Communist South Korea became the most reliable U.S. strategic partner in East Asia. When Pak Chŏnghŭi emerged as a strong leader in the mid-1960s, the United States came to see the rok as a valuable strategic asset in countering Asian communism. With South Korea’s settlement with Japan and commitment of combat forces to Vietnam in 1965 and U.S. acceptance of a Status-of-Forces Agreement with the rok a year later, the bilateral alliance relationship reached a peak after two decades of challenges.

The Role of the Mongolian People’s Republic in the Korean War

2018 ◽  
pp. 97-130
Author(s):  
Denzenlkham Ulambayar
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Korean War ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of

Since the 1990s, when previously classified and top secret Russian archival documents on the Korean War became open and accessible, it has become clear for post-communist countries that Kim Il Sung, Stalin and Mao Zedong were the primary organizers of the war. It is now equally certain that tensions arising from Soviet and American struggle generated the origins of the Korean War, namely the Soviet Union’s occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula and the United States’ occupation of the southern half to the 38th parallel after 1945 as well as the emerging bipolar world order of international relations and Cold War. Newly available Russian archival documents produced much in the way of new energies and opportunities for international study and research into the Korean War.2 However, within this research few documents connected to Mongolia have so far been found, and little specific research has yet been done regarding why and how Mongolia participated in the Korean War. At the same time, it is becoming today more evident that both Soviet guidance and U.S. information reports (evaluated and unevaluated) regarding Mongolia were far different from the situation and developments of that period. New examples of this tendency are documents declassified in the early 2000s and released publicly from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in December 2016 which contain inaccurate information. The original, uncorrupted sources about why, how and to what degree the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) became a participant in the Korean War are in fact in documents held within the Mongolian Central Archives of Foreign Affairs. These archives contain multiple documents in relation to North Korea. Prior to the 1990s Mongolian scholars Dr. B. Lkhamsuren,3 Dr. B. Ligden,4 Dr. Sh. Sandag,5 junior scholar J. Sukhee,6 and A. A. Osipov7 mention briefly in their writings the history of relations between the MPR and the DPRK during the Korean War. Since the 1990s the Korean War has also briefly been touched upon in the writings of B. Lkhamsuren,8 D. Ulambayar (the author of this paper),9 Ts. Batbayar,10 J. Battur,11 K. Demberel,12 Balảzs Szalontai,13 Sergey Radchenko14 and Li Narangoa.15 There have also been significant collections of documents about the two countries and a collection of memoirs published in 200716 and 2008.17 The author intends within this paper to discuss particularly about why, how and to what degree Mongolia participated in the Korean War, the rumors and realities of the war and its consequences for the MPR’s membership in the United Nations. The MPR was the second socialist country following the Soviet Union (the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to recognize the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and establish diplomatic ties. That was part of the initial stage of socialist system formation comprising the Soviet Union, nations in Eastern Europe, the MPR, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the DPRK. Accordingly between the MPR and the DPRK fraternal friendship and a framework of cooperation based on the principles of proletarian and socialist internationalism had been developed.18 In light of and as part of this framework, The Korean War has left its deep traces in the history of the MPR’s external diplomatic environment and state sovereignty

The Struggle to Fight a Humane War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahr Conway-Lanz
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Boomerang Effect ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
War Victims

The Korean War demonstrated the serious problems that the United States had adhering to the new 1949 Geneva Conventions and the severely limited protections that these new treaties provided. The protections for war victims were undermined both by serious gaps in the treaties that failed to provide much safety from bombing to civilians and by US deviations from the agreements in the handling of refugees and prisoners of war. However, Americans did not discard the agreements in the wake of their troubled Korean War experiences. Instead, the war helped to legitimize and lay the foundation for the further internalization of the new laws through their formal implementation, the public controversy they generated, and a boomerang effect of atrocity accusations. Despite failing to provide much protection for Korean War victims, the treaties were part of a broader international consensus-building process that helped to spread humanitarian norms.

scholarly journals Analysis of Developmental Chronology of South Korean Compressed Growth as a Reference from Sustainable Development Perspectives

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1905
Author(s):  
Sea Jin Kim ◽  
Woo-Kyun Lee ◽  
Jun Young Ahn ◽  
Wona Lee ◽  
Soo Jeong Lee
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
National Development ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Developmental Indicators ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Perspectives

Global challenges including overpopulation, climate change, and income inequality have increased, and a demand for sustainability has emerged. Decision-making for sustainable development is multifaceted and interlinked, owing to the diverse interests of different stakeholders and political conflicts. Analysing a situation from all social, political, environmental, and economic perspectives is necessary to achieve balanced growth and facilitate sustainable development. South Korea was among the poorest countries following the Korean War; however, it has developed rapidly since 1955. This growth was not limited to economic development alone, and the chronology of South Korean development may serve as a reference for development in other countries. Here, we explore the compressed growth of South Korea using a narrative approach and time-series, comparative, and spatial analyses. Developmental indicators, along with the modern history of South Korea, are introduced to explain the reasons for compressed growth. The development of the mid-latitude region comprising 46 countries in this study, where nearly half of Earth’s population resides, was compared with that of South Korea; results show that the developmental chronology of South Korea can serve as a reference for national development in this region.

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