Korea Seminar Series – On the Fault Line Between Ancient Divisions and Post-WWII Ideology: the Korean War

The war confined to the Korean peninsula from 1950-53 was as brutal as it was localized, leaving millions of combatants and civilians dead and wounded and two-thirds of the peninsula devastated. This intensity arose from a violent confluence of factors: the emergence of the Cold War, the economic and political dislocations of the colonial period in Korea magnified by the contingencies of the Pacific War, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and massive geopolitical miscalculations by various international actors. The war also drew on tensions deriving from ancient regional divisions stretching back to the fourth century, exacerbated by the legacy of a host of rebellions that arose across the peninsula in the nineteenth century.