The International Committee for Joint Nomination (ICJN) is pleased to extend our heartfelt invitation to you to an international conference below. The ICJN is an international civil society network established in 2015 by 14 organizations from 8 countries — Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Timor-Leste, and the Netherlands — united in their shared mission to nominate the archives related to the Japanese military “comfort women” for inscription to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
Since the 1990s, the member organizations of the ICJN have worked together with survivors of the Japanese military sexual slavery system to uncover historical truths, preserve their testimonies, and restore their dignity and human rights. The voices and records of the survivors have become more than mere memories of the past — they serve as invaluable legacies that remind the international community of its collective responsibility to advance human rights, peace, and historical justice.
This event to share our long journey and reflections with esteemed colleagues such as yourself. We would be deeply grateful and honored if you could kindly join us despite your busy schedule. This gathering will include a small exhibition and video screening, together with an academic conference.
We sincerely hope that this occasion will provide a space to listen to the voices of the survivors, to reflect once again on the meaning of memory and responsibility, and to foster solidarity and dialogue toward a shared future.
International Committee for Joint Nomination of Documents on the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register
- Date & Time Saturday, 25 October 2025
- 12:30-13:00 Exhibition and Video Screening: Voices of the “Comfort Women”
- 13:00-16:00 International Academic Conference: “Memory and Responsibility in History, and the Role of the International Community”
- Venue FitzHugh Auditorium, Exeter College
- Organizer International Committee for Joint Nomination (ICJN)
- In cooperation with Oxford University Korea Society
Purpose of the Conference
This conference, titled “Memory and Responsibility in History, and the Role of the International Community”, was organized to reflect anew on the memories and records of wartime sexual violence, including the issue of the Japanese military “comfort women,” as a shared task of humanity, and to seek ways for international dissemination and institutional responses.
Over the past decades, survivors’ testimonies and archival records have become more than memories of the past: they are invaluable assets that remind the international community of its responsibility to advance human rights, peace, and historical justice. Yet the Memory of the World (MoW) nomination process at UNESCO has been stalled in institutional deadlock since 2016. This is a concern and a serious challenge for the global community on the issue of how to preserve the historical memories.
This event aims to critically examine such structural bottlenecks and the limitations of international responses, while deepening academic and policy discussions on how to preserve and amplify victims’ voices. Through dialogue with European scholars and experts, the event seeks to expand an issue rooted in Asia into a global agenda of memory and responsibility, and to strengthen networks across academia, media, and civil society.
We hope that through these discussions, we can reaffirm that preserving the memory of wartime sexual violence is not merely about confronting the past, but a pressing challenge for peace and human rights today. By seeking ways to improve UNESCO’s mechanisms and charting new paths of international cooperation, this gathering strives to ensure that survivors’ voices will no longer remain in silence.
Programme (tentative)
About the participants
Keynote Speaker
Heisoo Shin
Heisoo Shin has worked for more than forty years in the field of human rights. especially women’s rights. In the 1990s, she led legislative movements in Korea on sexual and domestic violence, and brought the issue of Japan’s military sexual slavery to the UN, advocating against wartime violence against women at the Vienna and Beijing World Conferences. She has served on the UN CEDAW Committee. the UN CESCR Committee, and as Commissioner of Korea, National Human Rights Commission, while also teaching at various universities until 2020. She participated in drafting and monitoring Korea’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. Currently, she chairs the Korea Center for UN Human Rights Policy and is working with international civil society to inscribe ‘comfort women’ documents as UNESCO documentary heritage.
Speakers
Mina Watanabe
Mina Watanabe has been active in the field of women’s rights from the 1990’s, and was actively involved in “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery” held in Tokyo in 2000. She was one of the leading members to establish the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in order to keep the spirit of the Women’s Tribunal alive and and pass on the records and memories related to Japan’s military sexual slavery system. She has been internationally campaigning for the rights of the “comfort women” survivors and written alternative reports for as well as lobbied at the UN human rights institutions.
Jinsung Jeon
Jinsung Jeon has dedicated twenty-five years to the Korean National Commission for UNESCO and is currently Director of the Korea UNESCO Research Institute. He has served in leadership roles including Director of the Culture Division, International Relations Division, and Resource Mobilization & Public Relations Centre, and worked as a Programme Specialist at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (2011-2014). Since 2016, he has also lectured at Sungkyunkwan University as an adjunct professor. He received an M.A. in Arts Management and Cultural Policy from City University of London, and a Diploma in Arts Administration front Birkbeck, University of London. He has authored numerous policy papers, including Research on Objection to the Inscription of UNESCO Memory of the World Records (2023).
Panelists
Chris Deacon
Chris Deacon is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of London. He holds a PhD and MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, an MA in Korean Studies and East Asian Politics from SOAS, and a BA in Japanese Studies from Cambridge. Chris’s research examines the conflictual international politics of memory and identity, with a particular focus on the so-called ‘history problem’ in Japan-South Korea relations. His work in this area has been published in esteemed journals such as International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology and The Pacific Review. Before his academic career, Chris also worked as an international commercial lawyer in London, Brussels and Tokyo.
Seunghoon Chae
Seunghoon Chae is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics at the University of Leeds and received his DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the dymanics of political violence in wartime and authoritarian regimes, with particular attention to how civilians experience and perpetrate violence. Drawing on the Korean War, he has examined how memories of collaboration and fear of retribution fueled civilian-on-civilian violence, offering offering insights into broader patterns of wartime atrocities. He has also studied the strategic logic of state violence in North Korea, using rare data on human rights abuses. His work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Peace Research and Conflict Management and Peace Science, contributing to global discussions on war, memory, and human rights.
Geonyoung Kim
Geonyoung Kim is a PhD candidate in Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines the role of museums in the practice of reconciliation, focusing on representations of the Korean War in South Korean museums. Using these exhibitions as case studies, she explores how present societies negotiate their relationship with the conflicting past. Methodologically, she employs visual analysis – textual, image, and object analysis – to study narrative construction and visual communication. Before her PhD, she worked as a field archaeologist in South Korea.
Natalya Benkhaled-Vince
Natalya Benkhaled-Vince is Sanderson Tutorial Fellow and Associate Professor in Modern History at the University of Oxford. A historian of empire, decolonization and post-colonial memory, her work highlights how ordinary people shape and remember seismic political change. She has conducted extensive oral history research, including on women veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, West African soldiers, and cases of wartime sexual violence in Algeria and Indonesia. Her books include Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria 1954-2012 (2015), awarded the Women’s History Network Book Prize, and The Algerian War, the Algerian Revolution (2020). Through international collaborations and public-facing projects such as Generation Independence, she explores how contested memories of wartime sexual violence continue to shape debates on history, reconciliation and human rights.
Yuna Han
Yuna Han is a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford, affiliated with University College. Her research focuses on the politics of international law, especially international criminal law and human rights accountability. She has worked on projects examining the prosecution of international crimes, universal jurisdiction in contexcts of mass migration, and the role of defence lawyers in international criminal trials as a ‘community of practice’. Her publications have appeared in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Ethics and International Affairs, and Global Studies Quarterly.
Panelists
Samuel Ritholtz
Samuel Ritholtz is a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford, in association with St Hilda’s College. His research examines the politics of identity, stigma, and brutality in wartime, with particular focus on marginalized groups and the memory of violence. His current book project investigates collective violence against LGBTIQ+ people during the Columbian civil war, situating these dynamics within broader processes of wartime transformation. He is co-editor of Queer Conflict Research (Bristol University Press, 2024) and co-author of the forthcoming Toward a Queer Theory of Refuge (University of California Press). He has also worked with the United Nations and human rights organizations in Washington DC and Buenos Aires.
William Ross Jones
Dr. William Ross Jones is the USC Shoah Foundation’s Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Antisemitism Studies 2025-2026. They completed their DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2024 and are currently completing their monograph under contract with Oxford University Press. A historian of the Holocaust, gender, and sexuality, William’s research focuses on male Experiences of sexual(ized) violence during the Holocaust and the relationships between masculinity, memory and testimony when recounting the past. William’s research has been published widely, and in 2025 they were awarded the Royal Historical Society’s Early Career Artie Prize for an article published in the Journal of Holocaust Research. William is also a published translator, a former Fulbright Scholar to Germany, and a former research fellow at the Mandel Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Moderators
Nayoung Lee
Nayoung Lee is Professor of Sociology at Chung-Ang University and Chair of the Board of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. Her research spans post/ colonialism, gendered nationalism, sexuality, and transnational women’s movements. She has published extensively in Korean, English and Japanese on the Japanese military ‘comfort women’, U.S military bases, prostitution, women’s oral history and migration. Her international works include The Korean Women’s Movement of Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’: Navigating between Nationalism and Feminism (2014) and Un/forgettable Histories of US Camptown Prostitution in South Korea (2017).
Theresa Yeh
Theresa Der-Lan Yeh is Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and research fellow of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the National Taiwan University. She currently serves on the Gender Equality Committee of the Executive Yuan and that of the Examination Yuan, as well as the Gender Task Forces of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Technology. and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her engagement with international NGO’s / NPO’s includes Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF), International Council of Women (ICW), and the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF).
Akihisa Matsuno
Akihisa Matsuno is a Professor Emeritus at Osaka University specialized in International Politics and Conflict Studies. His research covers cases including East Timor, West Papua, Palestine and Western Sahara, with a thematic focus on self-determination, peace negotiations, and post-conflict peacebuilding. He has also examined conflicts in Northern Ireland and the insurgency in southern Thailand. In addition, he has conducted pioneering research on “politicide”, or the destruction of political groups outside the scope of the Genocide Convention, analysing mass killings in Indonesia after the September 30th Affair, as well as in Cambodia, Argentina, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Through these studies, his work seeks to clarify the mechanisms by which such mass killings occur and to contribute to the development of preventative norms.
Overall Moderator
Chanhee Lee
Chanhee Lee is a PhD student in Korean Studies whose research examines the records and emotional expressions of the first generation of Koreans who encountered modem society. Her work challenges dominant historiography that overemphasises macro-narratives of modernisation, seeking instead to restore the immediacy and diversity of Korean experiences of modernity. She began her studies at Sungkyunkwan University, focusing on Hyanghwain – the Chinese and Japanese immigrants to Choson Korea – and completed her MA at SOAS. She has contributed to public historical outreach through media interviews, podcasts, and academic conferences. Since 2022, she has served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and works with the Asian Peace and History Institute on the decolonisation of history textbooks.
Conference Organiser
Hyein Han
Hyein Han is a Research Fellow at the Asia Peace and History Institute and serves as the General Coordinator of the International Committee for Joint Nomination (ICJN), which has been working to inscribe the archives related to Japan’s military ‘comfort women’ in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. She earned her PhD in Modern Japanese History from Hokkaido University, where she studied Japanese imperialism, colonial governance, and the politics of memory and history education in East Asia. Her main research interests include postwar responsibility, historical justice, memory politics, and postcolonial historiography. Recently, her work has focused on the international politics of memory and the management of historical conflicts in the glocal era, particularly examining the institutional limitations of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme and civil society’s responses to them.