The Chun Doo-Hwan Authoritarian Regime’s Securitisation of Water: The Case of the Peace Dam, South Korea

ABSTRACT

This article explores the securitisation of water aimed at avoiding a political crisis for the Chun Doo-Hwan regime in South Korea (1979–1988) using the case of the Peace Dam. The legitimacy of the Chun regime was vulnerable because of diverse factors such as internal and external crises inherited from the previous regime and Chun’s rise to power through a military coup and civilian massacres. In this political situation, the securitisation of nature could be an effective method of curbing potential resistance and ruling a people facing a complex crisis. The constructed threat of an attack by flooding by North Korea and the consequent alleged need for the Peace Dam were part of a scheme by Chun to maintain political power through the securitisation of water, specifically by establishing North Korea as an external enemy and unifying the South Korean people.

Key Words:

• securitisation
• water
• authoritarian regime
• Peace Dam
• Chun Doo-Hwan
• South Korea

Acknowledgements

This paper is a part of the research I conducted for my Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Geography at the University of Bonn. The author would like to thank Sang Hyun Ji, Seung-Ook Lee, Million Gebreyes, the editor Charles Warren and anonymous referees for their constructive comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a discussion of the broad securitisation debate, see Stritzel (2007) and Martin (2015).

2 Along with anti-communism, developmentalism was also an important ruling ideology under the Park regime (Park 2001, p. 64). However, with regard to the Peace Dam, this article primarily focuses on the effect of anti-communism as a ruling ideology.

3 As explained below, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), which crafted the Peace Dam plan, was the key organization for the enforcement of the National Security Law. In other words, the KCIA was the authoritarian regime’s guard dog.

4 Interestingly, North Korea supplied relief (e.g. 7000 tonnes of rice and 100,000 tonnes of cement) to South Korea. At that time, the Chun regime was concerned about whether North Korea would utilise its support to South Korea for political purposes. Eventually, however, the Chun regime accepted North Korea’s proposal because it wanted to create a peaceful atmosphere before the Asian Games in 1986 and the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games (Kyunghyang Daily 28 September 2009).

5 According to one professor who did not believe the government statements, at least three months are needed to input the basic data into a computer for calculation (Kyunghyang Daily 1993).

6 A state bureaucrat who gave a briefing on the Geumgangsan Dam said, ‘I am just an actor’, reflecting that the water policy was governed by the ANSP (MBC 2001).

7 At a National Assembly hearing on 31 December 1989, former President Chun said, ‘exaggerating the risk of the Geumgangsan Dam was absolutely not to stay in power’. Paradoxically, his statement reveals the close relationship between the securitisation of water and his regime’s political aim by juxtaposing ‘dam’ and ‘stay in power’, which would seem to be unrelated, in one sentence.

8 Construction of the Geumgangsan Dam was re-commenced in 1999 and was completed in 2004. The Ministry of Construction recognised that the main mission of the Geumgangsan Dam was to produce electricity (up to 810,000 kW) (Gangwon Ilbo 2004).

9 However, very recently, the Asian Development Bank began to pay attention to water security in Asia in the context of climate change (Asian Development Bank 2013; for a similar perspective, see Chellaney 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea [grant number NRF-2014S1A3A2044551]; and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [grant number GRK 1565].