Abstract
South Korea's contribution to international peace has been on various levels, including official activities and unofficial ones. Furthermore, while its contribution has often been focused on security on the Korean peninsula, the Republic of Korea (ROK) has also contributed to a wider security environment globally and regionally. One of the major instruments of regional East Asian unofficial diplomacy has been the Jeju Process. This article focuses on the contribution of this forum to the relative peace in East Asia by first looking at what kind of activity the Jeju Process represents, and whether East Asian initiatives in general have an impact on East Asian security; or is East Asian security simply determined by global politics? Secondly, it will look at what the regional security is built on and what the main challenges are to that security. Finally, it will then look at how the types of activities that the Jeju Process represents affect the security challenges in East Asia. This paper adopts a long-term perspective and defines the security patterns and the challenges as megatrends, rather than looking at each of the immediate concerns the region has.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on the author's presentation at the 5th Jeju Peace Forum, August 12, 2009. The author is grateful for comments on an earlier version of this article, provided by Amb. Prof. Chung-in Moon, Dr. Jong Kun Choi, Prof. Stein Tønnesson and by the Editor-in-Chief of KJDA, Prof. Tae-am Ohm, and by the anonymous referees of the journal. Furthermore, the author is grateful to the Swedish Central Bank's foundation, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the financing of his research for this article.
Notes
1. Timo Kivimäki, “ASEAN and the East Asian Peace,” paper prepared for the Annual Convention for the International Studies Association, San Diego, U.S.A., March 26–29, 2008; Timo Kivimäki, “East Asian Relative Peace—Does it Exist? What Is It?,” The Pacific Review 23, no. 4 (2010): 501–24. Isak Svensson, “East Asian Peacemaking? Some Empirical Observations on Patterns of Conflict Management and Termination Stipulations in Civil Wars,” Pacific Review (2008), paper prepared for the Annual Convention for the International Studies Association, San Diego, U.S.A., March 26–29, 2008; Stein Tønnesson, “What is it that Best Explains the East Asian Peace since 1979? A Call for a Research Agenda,” Asian Perspective 33, no. 1 (2009): 111–36; Isak Svensson and Mathilda Lingren, “From Bombs to Banners: Exploring the Patterns of Unarmed Insurrections in East Asia,” paper presented at the ICAS 6 Conference, Daejeon, August 7, 2009. The claim is based on data published in: Bethany Ann Lacina, Nils Petter Gleditsch and Bruce M. Russett, “The Declining Risk of Death in Battle,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2006): 673–80, http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Research-and-Publications/Publication/?oid=61198; Bethany Ann Lacina, “Explaining the Severity of Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 2 (2006): 276–89; Bethany Ann Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths,” European Journal of Population 21 (2005): 145–65. The data can be found at http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/Armed-Conflict/Battle-Deaths/. All calculations in this article related to battle deaths are based on these data (version 2). The study on the profile of the East Asian peace by Svensson and Lingren (as above) was based on data from Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” International Security 33, no. 1 (2008): 7–44.
2. The dimensions of relative peace in East Asia have been revealed in Kivimäki, “East Asian Relative Peace.” Statistical analysis reveals that over 95 percent of average annual battle deaths have disappeared from the region, compared to the period after World War II until 1997. One-sided violence, where one of the sides in the conflict is not militarily organized, i.e., terrorism or genocide, has also reduced since 1979 while the amount of non-state conflict, i.e., conflicts where the state is not one of the parties, increases. Perhaps surprisingly, Kivimäki also reveals that criminal violence has been on the decline, while repression, as measured by the availability of tough means against citizens, and by the lack of surveillance of governments in the use of such measures, has also been reduced, even if it is still at a relatively high level.
3. Donald Baker, “History of Wars in Northeast Asia—A Proposal for a Peace Treaty,” paper presented at the Jeju Peace Forum, August 11, 2009; John Merrill, Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1989).
4. Sung-Youn Ko and Soon-Seon Kim, Basic Research on Methods to Facilitate the Jeju Process and Accordant Strategies (Jeju Peace Institute, April 2008), 8–9 (in Korean). Translation from Korean by Tae-am Ohm.
5. The “Sammu Spirit” means the absence of thieves, beggars, and segregating and securitizing gates.
6. Heonik Kwon, “Healing the Wounds of War: New Ancestral Shrines in Korea,” Asia–Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (June 15, 2009), http://www.japanfocus.org/-Heonik-Kwon/3172.
7. For a presentation on this feature in East Asian security thinking, see Timo Kivimäki, “Asia and European International Relations,” Asia Europe Journal 5 (2007): 303–15.
8. For a presentation on this feature in East Asian security thinking, see Timo Kivimäki, “Asia and European International Relations,” Asia Europe Journal 5 (2007): 303–15.
9. The data has been published in Lacina et al., “The Declining Risk of Death in Battle”; Lacina, “Explaining the Severity of Civil War”; and Lacina and Gleditsch, “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat.” These data can be found at http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/Armed-Conflict/Battle-Deaths/.
10. Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, February 24, 1976. The text is available at ASEAN Secretariat pages, http://www.aseansec.org/1217.htm.
11. Uppsala University's Conflict Termination Dataset, published in Johan Kreutz, “How and when Armed Conflicts End: Introducing the UCDP Conflict Termination Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 2 (2010): 243–50; Human Security Brief 2007. The data are available at http://www.pcr.uu.se/publications/UCDP_pub/UCDP%20Conflict%20termination%20v%202.1%201946-2007.xls.
12. For this development, see, for example, Dic Lo, “China after East Asian Developmentalism,” Historical Materialism 8, no. 1 (2001): 253–64. For analysis that associates developmentalism with East Asia in a more global investigation, see Mark Robinson and Gordon White, eds, The Democratic Developmental State: Politics and Institutional Design (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998). For analysis that argues for the link between East Asian developmentalism and success in conflict prevention, see Benjamin Goldsmith, “A Liberal Peace in Asia?” Journal of Peace Research 44, no. 1 (2007): 5–27.
13. William Ury, The Power of Positive No (New York: Bantam Books, 2007).
14. See for example, Louis Kriesberg, International Conflict Resolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); and Herbert C. Kelman, “The Problem-Solving Workshop in Conflict Resolution,” in Communication in International Politics, ed. R. L. Merritt (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 168–204.
15. Rudolph J. Rummel, “Democracies are Less Warlike than Other Regimes,” European Journal of International Relations 1, no. 4 (1995): 457–79.
16. See for example, Vipin Narang and Rebecca M. Nelson, “Who Are These Belligerent Democratizers? Reassessing the Impact of Democratization on War,” International Organization 63 (Spring 2009): 357–79; Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Pathways to War in Democratic Transitions,” International Organization 63 (Spring 2009): 381–90. They claim though, that an incomplete democratization could create conflict risks.
17. Jon Pevehouse and Bruce Russett, “Democratic International Governmental Organizations Promote Peace,” International Organization 60 (Fall 2006): 969–1000.
18. Timo Kivimäki, “Long Peace of ASEAN,” Journal of Peace Research 1 (2001).
19. Kivimäki, “East Asian Relative Peace.”
20. Joakim Kreutz, “The Nexus of Democracy, Conflict, and the Targeting of Civilians,” in States in Armed Conflict, ed. Lotta Harbom (Uppsala: Universitetstryckeriet, 2005); Kristine Eck and Lisa Hultman, “Violence against Civilians in War,” Journal of Peace Research 44, no. 2 (1977): 623–34; Human Security Brief, 2006, http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/data_and_publications/datasets.htm. Data on one-sided conflict since 1989 in this article systematically refer to these sources.
21. On this, see, for example, Alice D. Ba, “Regionalism's Multiple Negotiations: ASEAN in East Asia,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22, no. 3 (September 2009).
22. Sastrohandoyo Wiryono, “Indonesia and Southeast Asian Territorial Peace Processes,” Asia Europe Journal 6, no. 1 (August 2008): 15–30.