Life Force Atrocities during the Korean War and their Aftermath: Repression, Resistance and the Construction of Solidarities of Bereavement

Description

During the Korean civil war, thousands of real and imagined “leftists” were massacred by the emerging South Korean state. In the wake of South Korea’s long process of post-authoritarian transitional justice, the nature of many of these atrocities has to come to light, in turn leading to increased interest from South Korean and international scholars. This talk builds upon this research by focusing on the role that the family structure played in determining the targets and methods of the perpetrators. Drawing on Elisa Von Joeden-Forgey’s concept of “life force atrocities,” I discuss the ways in which counter-insurgency forces incorporated the decimation the family unit as part of the broader process of anti-leftist liquidation. This pattern was continued into the post-war years, as survivors and families of accused “leftists” were denied the right to properly mourn and placed under the “guilt by association system”. I argue that this process of systematic persecution gave rise to novel forms of communal identities, anchored around the notion of the collective bereaved family. This, in turn, led to unique forms of political resistance in the 1960-1961 period.

Dr Wright is currently the Korea Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2016. He is currently working on completing his manuscript “Civil War, Politicide, and the Politics of Memory in South Korea, 1948-1961”. His work has been published in Cross Currents, The Asia Pacific Journal, and by Routledge.