Healing an abnormalised body: bringing the agency of unseen people back to the inter-Korean border

Abstract

Conventional approaches to the ‘North Korea Problem’ underpin the interests of great powers and the Westphalian canon that buttresses the status quo of a divided Korea, normalising and perpetuating the abnormality of the Korean body. This article draws on a postcolonial approach to international relations and uses East Asian medicine (EAM)’s principles and epistemological underpinnings as an analytical framework to examine the effects of the inter-Korean border on Korea’s body politic and to assess the 2018 inter-Korean border crossings. I demonstrate how the inter-Korean border serves as a site that manifests a new possibility and how invisible ordinary people play an indispensable role in mending the abnormalised Korean body, defying the idea of Korea’s intractable conflict. Ultimately, this study rethinks state and non-state interactions, as well as their reciprocal and conflicting relations, in producing, perpetuating and mitigating artificial myths about inter-Korean border conflicts as a conceptual dialogue between state-centred and EAM-inspired approaches towards reconciliation processes. By drawing on the implications of escaping the Westphalian canonical nexus of power-knowledge-discourse, I suggest an alternative way of healing from inside out by de-abnormalising the inter-Korean border and (re)historicising the agency of unseen people in re-imagining the Korean body politic and world politics.