Peace Review

Moving Beyond the Structural Division: Everyday Peace on the Korean Peninsula

1. Overview

We propose a special issue of Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice on the theme of “Everyday Peace on the Korean Peninsula.” The issue examines how the prolonged division of the Korean Peninsula operates not only as a geopolitical fact separating two states, but as a structural condition of violence that both South and North Koreans encounter in the texture of everyday life. In the continued absence of a political settlement between the two Korean states, the issue turns to the civic, local, and everyday practices through which Koreans on both sides of the border — and in the diaspora — resist, endure, and work to overcome division. We believe this theme speaks directly to Peace Review’s mission of examining the social-justice dimensions of peace, and that it is especially timely given the stalled state of inter-Korean and multilateral diplomacy.

2. Rationale and Background

The division that cuts across the Korean Peninsula has long been analyzed as a source of interstate confrontation — system competition, an arms race, and a self-reinforcing security dilemma between Seoul and Pyongyang. Scholarship on Korea’s so-called “division system” (분단체제, bundan-cheje) — most influentially developed by the literary critic and public intellectual Paik Nak-chung (Paik, 2011) — has argued that this framing is too narrow. On this view, division is not simply a border between two sovereign states but a self-reproducing structure spanning the entire peninsula, in which political and economic interests on both sides derive part of their legitimacy from ongoing confrontation with the other. The consolidation of this division system, we argue, has become a root condition through which ordinary Koreans on both sides experience the violence that division breeds as a matter of daily life.

The mutually exclusive coexistence of state violence exercised by the two Korean systems, together with decades of accumulated mistrust and hostility between their populations, has rendered the everyday habitus of life on the peninsula profoundly precarious. The longer division persists, the more this “habitus of division” takes on a force of its own — generating militarized culture, state violence, gender-based violence, and ecological harm. In other words, tension and competition between the two Korean states has drawn the lives of ordinary citizens into a field of violence at a concrete, everyday level, well beyond the register of high politics.

A structural resolution of division may yet advance through political agreement between the two Korean states and other directly concerned parties — but peace research should not rely on that prospect alone. We take the view that civic-level, everyday practices of resistance, education, and solidarity oriented toward overcoming division (탈분단, tal-bundan / “de-division”) deserve renewed scholarly attention precisely because a macro-level breakthrough remains absent. This premise resonates with Roger Mac Ginty’s influential concept of “everyday peace” (Mac Ginty, 2014; 2021), which similarly insists that peace is produced not only through elite treaties and top-down settlements, but through the routine, small-scale practices of ordinary people living amid — and often in spite of — unresolved conflict. Bringing these two literatures into conversation, this special issue asks what “everyday peace” looks like specifically under conditions of peninsular division: a setting of prolonged, institutionalized separation rather than active armed conflict, but one in which division’s violence is nonetheless lived daily.

This special issue therefore seeks to illuminate, concretely, what everyday peace — built by citizens striving toward de-division — looks like at a time when the division of the Korean Peninsula persists and political agreement remains absent. It seeks to capture voices of peace that exist behind, and remain obscured by, the politics of division, together with the solidarity activities that citizens themselves have generated.

3. Aims and Scope

This special issue seeks to interrogate the multiple layers of lived experience produced by structural division on the Korean Peninsula — a condition that has shaped individual identities and attitudes toward violence and segregation, while also fostering social and political practices of exclusion and discrimination against those cast as an “outgroup.” Rather than treating division primarily as an interstate or diplomatic problem, contributions are invited to examine it as a lived, everyday condition, and to document the practices through which citizens on both sides of the border — and in the diaspora — build peace in spite of it.

4. Key Questions for Contributors

We invite contributions that engage with questions such as:

1. What are the everyday struggles of those victimized by structural division yet rendered invisible or unrecognized, and how do they cultivate peace in their daily lives?
2. What forms of civic resistance, solidarity, and education have emerged in response to the militarism generated by structural division?
3. How has structural division accelerated gender-based violence and ecological harm within South Korean (and, where documentable, North Korean) society?
4. What everyday practices of de-division (탈분단) can be identified among citizens, activists, artists, and educators on the peninsula and in the Korean diaspora?
5. In the absence of macro-level political resolution, what civic-level strategies sustain the possibility of peace and solidarity across the division line?

5. Disciplinary Scope

We welcome submissions from scholars and practitioners in political science, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, religious studies, Korean studies, cultural studies, and education, as well as from practitioners and civil-society actors engaged in peacebuilding and reconciliation work on the peninsula.

6. Fit with Peace Review’s Mission

Peace Review’s commitment to examining the social-justice dimensions of peace — and its openness to accessible, essay-length contributions that reach beyond a narrowly specialized readership — makes it a natural home for this theme. The everyday-peace framework foregrounds precisely the perspectives Peace Review has long sought to elevate: those of ordinary people, local communities, and civil society, rather than only of states and elites.