Fireside Peace Chats: The Zainichi Korean community, the division, and peace movement
- Date
- Monday 10 March 2025
- Time
- Address
- The Hague Humanity Hub
Fluwelen Burgwal 58
2511 CJ The Hague
This Fireside Peace Chats edition takes place with Kyungmook Kim, a professor of peace studies and activist within Japanese civil society.
The Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule for 36 years, from 1910 to 1945. During this time, more than two million Koreans lived in Japan, and approximately 700,000 of them remained there after the colonial period ended. After Korea gained its independence, the Peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel, leading to a division among the ethnic Korean minority into pro-North and pro-South factions. In this edition of Fireside Peace Chats, we will talk about the complex situation of Zainichi Koreans, examining their experiences in the diaspora and the topic of Korean unification.
Kyungmook Kim is professor of Global Asian Studies/Peace Studies at the School of Culture, Media and Society, Waseda University, Japan. He worked as a programme officer at a Tokyo headquartered international NGO, Japan International Volunteer Centre (1999–2002). He has been affiliated to Waseda University since 2016, after teaching peace studies for 11 years at Chukyo University, Japan. He has published several books in Korean and in Japanese.
Moderator
Maja Vodopivec of Leiden University College
Programme
17:15-17:30: Guest Walk-ins
17:30-18:45: Discussion
18:45-19:30: Informal drinks & Networking
More about Fireside Peace Chats
The Fireside Peace Chats series is an event series consisting of informal, intimate chats with peacebuilders who have either lived in for an extended period of time or are from conflict-affected environments. Fireside Peace Chats are a joint initiative of Leiden University College The Hague (LUC), Knowledge Platform for Security and Rule of the Law (KPSRL), and The Hague Humanity Hub (THHH), with an aim to open a space where practice, research and policy in peacebuilding come together in an informal way, through experience of people on the ground. This initiative aims to contribute to a locally informed paradigm shift in liberal peacebuilding.