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In 2005, the government of the Republic of Korea established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an effort to address the silences embedded within Korean society for the past sixty years. The commission became a project that would eventually encompass anti-Japanese movements from the colonial period to the mass violence from 1945 through the Korean War and the authoritarian regimes. Professor Dong-choon Kim, a former commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, will give his reflections upon the work achieved and limitations encountered by the commission during his tenure, and the consequences of the Commission’s work on the current socio-political landscape. What kind of legal and social limitations surrounded the beginning of the commission? Was this commission able to break the structuralized silences within Korean society? What kind of “truth” was the commission able to attain? And what kind of obstacles has the commission had to overcome in order to continue its work?

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Dong-Choon Kim is Associate Professor of Sociology at Sung Kong Hoe University in Seoul, Korea, and formerly served as a Standing Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea.

Professor Kim received his PhD in Sociology from Seoul National University in 1993. The main areas of Professor Kim’s research have been historical sociology of Korean politics, working class formation, and the Korean War. As an activist, Professor Kim has been at the center of progressive academic movements since the 1980s. Since 1999 he has been writing about Korean War Massacres and working with victims’ families. In 2004, Hankyoreh, South Korea’s progressive newspaper, nominated him as one of “100 people who will lead Korean society.” He was also awarded the 20th DanJe Prize in 2005 for his academic achievements and activism.

His books include Social Movements in 1960s Korea (1991), A Study of Korea’s Working Class (1995), Shadow of Modernity (2000), War and Society (2000), Engine of America-Market and War (2004). War and Society has been translated into German, Japanese, and English (The English language title is The Unending Korean War.)

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Based on his long personal experience of Northeast Asia, as well as his unusual position as Ambassador to two of world’s most different societies, Ted Lipman will reflect on where North and South Korea are today, their differences and similarities, and what their future holds. He will be speaking at the Munk Center fresh from his most recent trip to Pyongyang, and will share his impressions of the current state of affairs there, as well as the changes he’s observed over the years. He will also comment on the growing partnership between Canada and South Korea (both of which are hosting G20 Summits this year), and Canada’s role in international efforts to achieve peace and security on the Korean peninsula.

Ambassador Lipman has had an eye on the Korean peninsula since his days as a student at Peking University in the 1970s, where North Koreans numbered among his classmates. Much later, in 1999-2001, he was one of Canada’s senior diplomats in Beijing responsible for negotiating the opening of Canada’s official relations with the DPRK. He also served as Consul General in Shanghai, Head of Mission in Taipei, Director General for East Asia in the Canadian foreign ministry, and visiting scholar at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, before taking up his current post in 2007 as Canada’s Ambassador to both North and South Korea.

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The Korean War is probably the least understood war of the twentieth century. Scholars of the war cannot even agree upon the war’s origins. Was it a local war whose origins lay in the nationalist ambitions Kim Il Sung? A civil war between two radically opposing visions of political order for the peninsula? Or was it an international war whose origins lay with Stalin and communisms’ design for world domination? Different historians’ account of the war’s origins is like, in the words of the historian Robert Beisner, “walking through a revolving door.” The purpose of this talk is to not to interject new arguments into these already crowded disputes about origins and endings, but rather to investigate the inadequately explored “middle,” that is, the war as an on-going conflict. Specifically, we will examine how this “unfinished” war, and changing memories of it, has influenced regional and world events to the present day.

Sheila Miyoshi Jager is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of “Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism” and (with Rana Mitter) “Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the Post-Cold War in Asia”. In 2006-8 she was a Visiting Professor of National Security Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College where she worked on issues relating to historical memory and national security. She is currently finishing up a book about the Korean War.