Scaling DMZ International Peace Park and its Routing to Ecological Peace

• In Event: International History and Politics & Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), once a battlefield of a series of wars in the Korean peninsula, has been envisaged as an emblematic site for building peace, particularly paying attention to its exceptionally high level of biodiversity. This idea of transforming DMZ from the symbol of the Cold War into the symbol of peace is not entirely new, as first proposed in 1988. However, since 2013, it has shown apparent shifts to zoom in on ecological and cultural values of DMZ in rigorous collaborations with various fields of researchers that include scientists in their peacebuilding efforts.
Then, how and why has such an idea of reshaping the once-deeply wounded-place into an international eco-peace park become core strategies for creating better possibilities of melting frozen relationships between two Koreas? How has this ecological turn in rebuilding peace been engaged with or affected by complex political-economic relations? How have scientists and their producing knowledge relating to DMZ affected the governance of DMZ? And how has such changing governance (re)formed and been reformed by mobilities of humans and nonhumans in this border zones? In exploring answers to these questions, in line with the idea that ethnography entails an open-ended, non-linear method of data collection, this study adopts an interpretive approach with archival research and fieldworks. It enables researchers to pay attention to networks of complex connections, encounter unexpected insights, and situate themselves within pluriversal relationalities that appreciate tensions, ambiguities, and contradictory logics.
Drawing from critical mobility studies (Sheller 2016, 2018; Youatt 2020(b); Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster: Ticktin, Subramaniam, Hattam, Liu and Youatt 2018; McNevin 2019), infrastructure study in various fields (Ananda, Gupta and Appel 2018; Khalili 2018; Hattam 2016; Von Schnitzler 2016, political ecology and governmentality (Youatt 2020 (a)(b), 2015; Le Billon and Duffy 2018; Büscher 2013; Duffy 2006; Agrawal 2005), and assemblage thinking (Ong and Collier 2005; Barry 2013), this study suggests thinking of DMZ eco-tourism zone as a particular infrastructural space-timescape (Massey 2005) at the intersection of multiple nations and multiple modes of mobility and immobility that are produced by “routing” practices (Youatt 2020(b)).
Taking such an approach denotes my intention of being aware of and respecting multiple stories, histories, tactics, institutions, and bodies embodied in these spatially transnational zones. As DMZ has been the very locus of the battlefields of a series of wars for more than 60 years, long struggles and wish for ‘peace’, ‘prosperity’, or ‘freedom’ are emblematically inscribed as the essence of constituting nations. Though meanings of these aspirations are “decontextualized and recontextualized – that is, they can travel and translate” (Ong and Collier 2005), infrastructures are critical arena through which sociality, governance and politics, and institutions and aspirations are formed, reformed, and performed (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018, 3).
On the other hand, taking this approach indicates that this research pays attention to spatial and temporal logics embedded in institutional practices in producing DMZ as the international peace park. These practices would include state and non-state actors’ strategies, policy makers and researchers’ perspective that anticipate certain futures, remember particular pasts, and evaluate the present in ways that create patterns of mobility and immobility of humans and nonhumans and meanings of peace. To do so, this study aims to avoid the assumptions of progressive linear time and methodological nationalism and attends to DMZ as matrix of borders (Weizman 2007), rather than a linear line. By focusing on a set of assemblages of knowledge networks at multiple scales, this research examines how DMZ has become a legible and sensible place for the public in the first place. It attends to the practices and processes entailed in how specific routes of roads, railways, and tourist destinations have been imagined and established in their efforts of building ecologist peace in both material and semiotic ways. Throughout these discussions, this research delves into how ecologist turn in peacebuilding efforts has affected producing the meaning of nations.

Author

• Jiyoung Cho, The New School for Social Research