Description

During the Korean War, a particular figure of warfare took center stage at the armistice negotiations – the “prisoner of war.” Although scholars have often dismissed the POW controversy as a mere Cold War propaganda ploy mobilized by all sides involved, this talk will argue that the POW controversy revealed another significance to the Korean War as the debate brought the 1949 Geneva Conventions to a crisis. Claims to the legitimate interpretation and application of the “laws of war” were at stake – in essence, to define the prisoner was to define the war.
This talk will examine the stakes involved in the POW debate through more unexpected sites of analysis – practices of violence inside the POW camps, negotiations inside the interrogation rooms, and the production of a U.S. military bureaucratic archive around the POW. An analysis of how violence, interrogation, and bureaucracy formed the landscape on which the U.S. military attempted to form the figure of the POW is crucial to understand why on May 7, 1952, after “kidnapping” U.S. POW camp commander Brigadier General Francis Dodd, a group of thirty Korean prisoners of war made an initial request for 1,000 sheets of paper. The POW was an emphatically bureaucratic figure of war, and the POWs were asserting control over the bureaucratic procedures of defining the POW. As these POWs understood, the struggle over the legitimate forms of “war” on the global stage in the 1950s impacted what claims could be made on decolonization – the POWs themselves were making these claims alongside the delegates and military commanders, reconfiguring the landscape of violence, interrogation, and bureaucracy in their own attempts to intervene in the discourse of “war.”

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Monica Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Humanity Interrogated: Empire, Nation, and the Political Subject in the U.S.-controlled POW Camps of the Korean War, 1942-1960,” examines how POWs, military personnel, and government officials struggled to define the “prisoner of war” as a political subject during the early Cold War, as interrogation became the most relied-upon tool of the U.S. military for constructing, disciplining, and presenting the prisoner of war. She is currently a Graduate Student Fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at Michigan for 2010-2011.