London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Belonging in a House Divided: The Violence of the North Korean Resettlement Process

Belonging in a House Divided chronicles the everyday lives of resettled North Korean refugees in South Korea and their experiences of violence, postwar citizenship, and ethnic boundary making. Through extensive ethnographic research, Joowon Park documents the emergence of cultural differences and tensions between Koreans from the North and South, as well as new transnational kinship … [Read More]

The Future of the Korean Peninsula: Korea 2032 and Beyond

From the publisher’s website: This book considers both Koreas – North Korea and South Korea – to examine possible pathways for the years leading up to 2032 and beyond, thus offering a composite picture of Korea and its strategic relevance in Asia and the world at large. Through a combined South-North Olympic team and an … [Read More]

Kim Jong-un’s Strategy for Survival: A Method to Madness

From the publisher’s website: In Kim Jong-un’s Strategy for Survival, David W. Shin contends that Kim Jong-un’s consolidation of power at home and the leveraging of Beijing, Moscow, Seoul, and Washington, and others abroad show that he is not a madman and, like the two earlier Kims, has consistently been underestimated. Shin presents an alternative framework … [Read More]

A Team of Their Own: How an International Sisterhood Made Olympic History

The inspiring, unlikely story of the American, Canadian, South Korean and even North Korean women who joined together to form Korea’s first Olympic ice hockey team. Two weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics, South Korea’s women’s hockey team was forced into a predicament that no president, ambassador or general had been … [Read More]

Rationality in the North Korean Regime: Understanding the Kims’ Strategy of Provocation

From the publisher’s website: How and why are the Kims rational? There is no consensus about either the Kims’ rationality or how best to determine if they are rational actors. Rationality in the North Korean Regime offers a concise and finite method to assess rationality by examining over ten cases of provocations from the Korean War to … [Read More]

Conscience in Action: The Autobiography of Kim Dae-jung

From the publisher’s website: This book is an English translation of the authoritative autobiography by the late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. The 2000 Nobel Peace Prize winner, often called the Asian Nelson Mandela, is best known for his tolerant and innovative “Sunshine Policy” towards North Korea. Written in the five years between the end … [Read More]

Peace on a Knife’s Edge: The Inside Story of Roh Moo-hyun’s North Korea Policy

From the publisher’s website: Lee Jong-Seok served as vice-secretary of South Korea’s National Security Council and as its unification minister under the Roh Moo-Hyun administration (2003–08). After Roh’s tragic death in 2009, Lee resolved to present a record of the so-called participatory government’s achievements and failures in the realm of unification, foreign affairs, and national … [Read More]

The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea

The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for the global order, but this book argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. As Hyun Ok Park demonstrates, rather than territorial integration and family union, the capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration … [Read More]

DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border

From the publisher’s website: The Korean demilitarized zone might be among the most heavily guarded places on earth, but it also provides passage for thousands of defectors, spies, political emissaries, war prisoners, activists, tourists, and others testing the limits of Korean division. This book focuses on a diverse selection of inter-Korean border crossers and the … [Read More]

Contentious Activism and Inter-Korean Relations

From the publisher’s website: In South Korea, the contentious debate over relations with the North transcends traditional considerations of physical and economic security, and political activists play a critical role in shaping the discussion of these issues as they pursue the separate yet connected agendas of democracy, human rights, and unification. Providing international observers with … [Read More]

De-Bordering Korea: Tangible and Intangible Legacies of the Sunshine Policy

From the publisher’s website: As tensions remain on the Korean peninsula, this book looks back on the decade of improved inter-Korean relations and engagement between 1998 and 2008, now known as the ‘Sunshine Policy’ era. Moving beyond traditional economic and political perspectives, it explores how this decade of intensified cooperation both affected and reshaped existing … [Read More]

Peacemaker: Twenty Years of Inter-Korean Relations and the North Korean Nuclear Issue

From the publisher’s website: More than two decades after the cold war ended elsewhere, it continues undiminished on the Korean Peninsula. The division of the Korean nation into competing North and South Korean states and the destructive war that followed constitute one of the great, and still unresolved, tragedies of the twentieth century. Peacemaker is the memoir … [Read More]

Division System in Crisis

From the publisher’s website: Paik Nak-chung is one of Korea’s most incisive contemporary public intellectuals. By training a literary scholar, he is perhaps best known as an eloquent cultural and political critic. This volume represents the first book-length collection of his writings in English. Paik’s distinctive theme is the notion of a “division system” on the … [Read More]

Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine

For the first time, using original sources and his own reporting going back to 1972 when he met Kim Dae Jung at his home in Seoul, Donald Kirk explores the great untold story of modern Korean history. This book recounts the rise of Kim Dae Jung from an oppressed region of Korea, beginning with his … [Read More]

Korea’s Future and the Great Powers

From the publisher’s website: The eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula will send political and economic reverberations throughout Northeast Asia and will catalyze the struggle over a new regional order among the four great powers of the Pacific—Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. Korea’s Future and the Great Powers addresses the vital issues of how to … [Read More]

Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War

Despite the passage of over forty years since the official end of the civil war in Korea, the north and the south sections of the country remain technically at war. In Korea and its Futures , Roy Grinker argues that the continued conflict between North and South Korea, and the prospects for peace on the … [Read More]