Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation

Extract

Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation. By Roland Bleiker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 224p. $27.95.

This slim book combines six chapters and a conclusion in 124 pages. It intends to promote a new way of thinking about Korean security problems that “goes beyond conventional realist and state-centric approaches” (p. 1). The idea is not to offer new empirical insights but instead to focus “on underlying trends and conceptual challenges” (p. xlvi) in order to identify “broad patterns of conflict and possibilities for peace” (p. xlvi). The ethical aim is to promote dialogue based on an understanding that “the other's sense of identity and politics may be inherently incommensurable with one's own” (pp. xlii–xliii). In the case of this book, the incommensurable “others” are the two Koreas–North and South. The author's contention is that efforts toward peace have been periodically tried and always failed in the past because there has not been a sufficient acceptance of difference between North and South. Roland Bleiker is keen to stress that such an approach does not lead to political relativism but that it, in fact, makes for improved debates, such as over the ability to make more informed political choices between different political projects. Toward the end of the book he argues, for instance, that “[t]olerating different coexisting narratives does not prevent making judgments about their content or desirability” (p. 114).