This article examines the ambiguous relationship between economic pain and security gain in United Nations sanctions on North Korea. Sanctions are designed to induce compliance by inflicting economic hardship on a target regime. However, our case study raises concerns about the assumption that greater economic pain leads to greater security gains. Using policy analysis, expert interviews, and nightlight satellite data, our study highlights ongoing restrictions on international aid and distorted resource allocation, where Pyongyang enjoys disproportionate access to resources at the expense of marginalized regions. Drawing on John Burton’s conflict theory, sanctions can become conflated with the goal of international security, leading to prolonged humanitarian suffering without clear strategic gains. This article calls for a critical reassessment of UN sanctions, advocating for their use as a modifiable tool rather than a self-perpetuating measure.

This article proposes a trans-local turn in peacebuilding in frontier societies. Drawing on René Girard’s concept of ‘mimetic desire’, the article conceptualises how a crisis of ontological insecurity cannot be addressed by rational approaches to institutionalising a process to resolve incompatibilities between conflict parties, but requires de-escalation of the mimetic rivalry between the parties. Empirically, the article focuses on intractable conflicts in Northern Ireland and Korea, and the trans-local peacebuilding interactions between the two. This article demonstrates how relationships of unresolved mimetic rivalry have intensified ontological insecurity in both cases, and how the reflexivity based on peacebuilding stories from other frontier societies appears to increase hope for change by transcending the endemic sense of ontological insecurity.

This article examines the utility of the Triple (Humanitarian, Development, Peace) Nexus in linking aid cooperation to peacebuilding by conducting a case study on the Korean peninsula. Since the 1990s, humanitarian and development cooperation in North Korea has raised hopes that such cooperation could contribute to peacebuilding on the Korean Peninsula. However, these aid efforts have been marked by significant fluctuations due to heightened tensions. This study employs a qualitative methodology, including problem-centred expert interviews with former/current officials from the UN, and European aid agencies, and the US and South Korean aid agencies. The findings suggest that aid actors have different strategic advantages and disadvantages in operationalizing the Triple Nexus, according to their positionalities. We argue that for the Triple Nexus to represent more than a mere rebranding of efforts to connect aid and peacebuilding, it requires the understanding of strategic advantages and disadvantages of actors with different positionalities.

The structural dynamics of the Korean conflict has evolved not only with the inter-Korean rivalry, but also the geopolitics of great power rivalries. The conflict structure was reinforced going through the Korean War and the Cold War. There have been several South Korean initiatives to build peace with North Korea in the post-Cold War era, however the peace process fluctuated due to the escalation of the US-North Korean conflict over the nuclear and missile development of North Korea, and the dispute over North Korea policy in the South Korean society. Building on the sociological understanding of ‘duality of structure’ and the biological insight of ‘niche construction’, this article demonstrates the South Korean potential, as a democratic state, to construct a niche space for its citizens’ peacebuilding with North Korea under the ongoing Korean conflict structure, as well as its limitations in protecting the space before scaling out the disruption of the conflict structure, when governments do not have a clear sense of agency about their policy due to the lack of consensus among its citizens.

One of the capacities of civil society in peace processes is the promotion of peace-oriented attitudes among citizens through peace education. This article investigates how civil society peace education may be enhanced through collaboration with counterparts in another conflict arena. The article begins by discussing the potential and pitfalls of the comparison of peace/conflict contexts. The empirical findings are based on interviews and focus groups with peace educators in Northern Ireland and South Korea who have engaged in dialogue and partnerships with each other, and they indicate perceived benefits and impact of both the comparative learning to the personnel and the partnership to the organisations. The discussion sets out an ideal model of the peace educative impacts of comparative learning and encounter. Overall, the findings show how local-to-local engagements between peace processes can support the civil society contribution to peacebuilding.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed increasing global inequality in responding to the issues of health. How do we resolve the tension between normative concerns for global responsibility and strategic concerns for national interest in facilitating health aid to vulnerable populations in low-income countries in the COVID-19 era? This article presents global health diplomacy as a conceptual framework that could overcome the dichotomy of humanitarianism and international politics, using health aid to North Korea during COVID-19 as a case-study. Health is a critical component of human dignity and can be a normative motivation for cooperation beyond sovereign borders. However, health is also an important element of national interest and can be a strategic motivation for transnational cooperation. The overlap between the moral and rational spaces in global health diplomacy demonstrates how COVID-19 assistance to North Korea’s vulnerable population is in the enlightened self-interest of donors to prevent resurgences of new COVID-19 variants. Moreover, this framework imbues all parties, including aid recipients such as North Korea, with the global cooperative responsibility to address health. In this sense, global health diplomacy can reframe the tensions between humanitarianism and politics, morality and rationality, and cosmopolitanism and nationalism, from antithetical to complementary.

This article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on sport’s peacebuilding capacity by comparing the role of sport in two peace processes, Northern Ireland and Korea. Uniquely, the analysis is guided by the concept of strategic peacebuilding which goes beyond the much-criticised liberal peacebuilding ‘toolkit’ and emphasises the importance of coordinated action at all levels and by many types of actor. The empirical sections examine the peacebuilding roles of sport at state level – in relation to elite sport, symbolism and diplomacy – and at grassroots level, particularly people-to-people projects. The article shows how and why sport has been able to play certain peacebuilding roles in each case, as well as the constraints on sport placed by structural characteristics of the peace processes. The article argues that the sporting domain can make interdependent peacebuilding inputs at each peacebuilding level, and thus has a distinct potential as a dimension of strategic peacebuilding.

This article explores lesson sharing between local civil society peacebuilders in the Korean and Northern Ireland peace processes. It presents reciprocal empowerment, a concept primarily utilized in women’s empowerment literature, as a useful conceptual framework to be developed for examining interactions between local civil society peacebuilders who have mutual self-interest to overcome obstacles in top-down peace processes. Recently, historical similarities and concurrences in the peace processes have been increasing the lesson sharing visits between Korean and Northern Irish peacebuilders. Based on the in-depth empirical research on these visits, this article argues that comparative consultations between peace processes would not only generate useful lessons for each context, but also empower local peacebuilders, civil society in particular, provided the comparisons and interactions are reciprocal, not unidirectional or hierarchical. In this sense, this article contributes to the conceptual and practical discussions of every day, emancipatory peacebuilding.

Informed by the resource mobilisation theory, this article conducts a case study on Christianity in Korea, in order to explore the nexus between religion and social movements, and how this nexus could contribute to peace, rather than violence. Given its geopolitical dimensions, involving nuclear weapons and the legacy of the Cold War, the role of religion in the Korean conflict has been under-researched. Nonetheless, Christianity has influenced the Korean conflict, with its association with anticommunism, as well as with peace movements. This article argues that Christian ecumenical organisations in the context of the Korean conflict utilised their social resources for peace and reconciliation, when they rediscovered the just peace tradition in Christianity. This article contributes to theoretical and practical discussions surrounding religion, war, and peace, by conceptualising just peace in the Christian tradition, and by adding empirical substance to the nexus between ecumenism and social movement for just peace.

This article explores the challenges and contributions of women in building and sustaining peace in protracted conflicts by conducting a comparative case study on Northern Ireland and Korea. Similarities in the histories of the conflicts and the concurrences in the peace processes have been attracting policy makers and researchers to share lessons between the Northern Ireland and Korean peace processes. However, the peacebuilding role of women and their transversal perspective have not yet received significant attention compared to the high-level agreements, signed predominantly by male politicians. This article identifies the similarities in the peacebuilding activities of women in Northern Ireland and Korea, in terms of their recognition of the interconnection between identity politics and patriarchy, building relationships across the divide through transversal dialogue, and initiating nonviolent peace movements against the militarism of their societies.

In both Northern Ireland and Korea, the euphoria following significant breakthroughs towards peace in the late 1990s and early 2000s turned into deep frustration when confronted by continuous stalemates in implementing the agreements. This article explores the two peace processes by examining and comparing the breakthroughs and breakdowns of both, in order to identify potential lessons that can be shared for a sustainable peace process. It also examines the differences between the two peace processes in addressing major challenges: disarmament; relationships between hard-line parties; cross-community initiatives. The comparative case study finds that the commitment of high-level leadership in both conflict parties to keeping negotiation channels open for dialogue and to allowing space for civic engagement is crucial in a sustainable peace process.

The expectations for the role of civil society are growing due to an abysmal record of high-level political leadership in reaching an agreement and a sustainable peace process. How much impact can civil society have and what roles can it take in the peace process? This case study of South Korean civil society shows how the civil society was able to bridge the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the Korean conflict with the support of a global civil society, and created a hospitable public atmosphere for the peace process in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the space for the civil society to make a contribution in the Korean peace process required the interdependency of the roles of high-level and civil-society leadership in the interplay between the international and domestic political environments. The peacebuilding role of South Korean civil society demonstrates that the horizontal capacity of civil society alone cannot guarantee a breakthrough and sustainability in a peace process, but if it is coordinated with the vertical capacity, civil-society peacebuilding can be a useful platform for sustainable peacebuilding.