On July 29, Dr. Dong Jin Kim from Hanshin University gave a morning plenary session titled "Humanizing Peacebuilding: A Peace Studies Perspective on Nurturing Hope in Reconciliation" during the 12th Christian Forum for Reconciliation in Northeast Asia (NARI).
The forum, centered on the theme "Reconciliation Through Resilience: Learning from the Okinawa Context and Beyond," was attended by around 75 Christian leaders and peacebuilders from Northeast Asia and beyond in Okinawa, Japan, from July 28 to August 2. It serves as a platform to pursue the pastoral, theological, and peacebuilding work of healing in Northeast Asia, which is shaped by historical wounds and divided memory.
Dr. Kim, Kim Dae Jung Chair Professor of Peace Studies at Hanshin University and a researcher at Trinity College Dublin, began the lecture under the theme of "new creation" by referencing the "Orange Conflict," an illustration showing how conflict arises when two people argue over a single "orange"—a symbol for a limited resource or territory—especially when a barrier or border divides them.
"It's not a simple disagreement or a debate, but maybe it's looking like it's almost impossible to address this because a situation like this gives us a sense that it's either A or B."
As a peace studies academic with experience in Ireland and Korea, Dr. Kim highlights the importance of acknowledging local communities' agency and integrating diverse, non-Western perspectives into peace efforts.
He recalled that in the 1990s, then-United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali fully recognized peacebuilding as a power of the United Nations peacemaking operations: "Post-Conflict peace-building is an action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict…"
While peacebuilding requires consent of the parties, impartiality, and non-use of force except in self-defense and defense of the mandate, according to the United Nations, it didn't move strictly into their mission. Dr. Kim said that international peacebuilding architecture is sometimes criticized as external interventions conducted by Western states, universalist and top-down institutional prescriptions, and a focus on liberal state-building.
"So the peace studies community began to challenge the embraced notion of peacebuilding as a political term, prevalent nowadays to state building."
In his co-authored book titled Peace and Conflict in a Changing World: Key Issues in Peace Studies, Dr. Kim writes, "Peace Studies has highlighted the agency of people—constrained though it is in the oppressive structures and systems of conflict—to effect positive change. If peace is ultimately for people, then people should be involved in making it." Moreover, the aforementioned Western approach has marginalized the groups of "local, indigenous, spiritual, female, queer, traditional, and colonized."
Working in both South Korea and Northern Ireland, Dr. Kim and his colleagues examined to understand the nature of the society in Northern Ireland. For example, after the Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, was signed on April 10, 1998, the society was still divided: Catholics and Protestants went to separate schools, and they didn't feel like meeting one another.
"We thought that having a sign-up paper would address everything, but the reality was then so: how could we keep the movement going? How could we maintain our hope?" he asked.
He stressed that reconciliation requires ongoing, persistent effort among people. People are often defined by political and societal conditions rather than by their shared humanity. Sociologists challenge this by connecting lived realities to wider contexts, raising questions like: "Why am I called British or Irish? Why am I a Catholic or Protestant?" He added, "Why am I a South Korean when all of my grandparents were from North Korea?"
Such questioning fosters sociological imagination— the ability "to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals." Dr. Kim drew a parallel to theology, where prophetic imagination envisions realities that are "already here but not yet."
As beings created in God's image, he said, we share a common humanity and Christian fellowship in the realm of God. Mennonite peace studies scholar John Paul Lederach articulated this in secular terms: "the capacity to imagine and generate constructive responses and initiatives that, while rooted in the day-to-day challenges of violence, transcend and ultimately break the grips of those destructive patterns and cycles."
"Reconciliation happens at an interpersonal level," Dr. Kim explained. "We need forgiveness, and we recognize who is the perpetrator and who is the victim, but reconciliation might be in a society affected by projective conflict and might be achieving justice against structuralism."
Citing the divisions between North Koreans and South Koreans mainly due to the war, Dr. Kim hoped that the two people could be reconciled under both jurisdictions and could neutralize the narrative of oppression on both sides of the Korean Peninsula, which is an effort of "humanizing peacebuilding."
He cited three examples. First, in 1988 the National Council of Churches in Korea issued a statement for humanizing peacebuilding in the peninsula: "We confess that the Christians of the south especially have sinned by turning the anti-communist ideology into a virtual religious idol and have thus not been content to treat just the communist regime in the north as the enemy but have further damned our northern compatriots and others whose ideologies differ from our own (John 13:14-15; 4:20-21). This is not only a violation of the commandments but is also a sin of indifference toward our neighbors who have suffered and continue to suffer under the national division; it is, moreover, a sin of failure to ameliorate their suffering through the love of Christ (John 13:17)."
Second, in 2018, Women Making Peace similarly voiced, "In the situation of the Korean division, even if women work hard, it is difficult to deconstruct the priority status of men. When there is high defense spending, women's welfare is ignored. Therefore, women began to highlight the need for arms reduction, to initiate anti-war movements, and to monitor the import of military weapons…The Korean division strengthens militarism and patriarchy, and it maintains the military and patriarchal culture in society. Therefore, women came to the conclusion that they should resist not only patriarchy but also militarism and its culture."
The third example is from the Okedongmu Children in Korea, with whom he once worked. "Okedongmu" means "putting their arms around their shoulders" in Korean, signaling an expression of full understanding and affection. Through nutritional, medical, and educational support for North Korean children in the 1990s, when North Korea was struck by severe hunger, the organization aided the children with intellectual disabilities and their mothers. "We could finally help our children to see eye to eye, to wrap arms around one another," he recalled.
In 1996, Okedongmu Children in Korea launched the "Hi, Friends!" campaign to help South Korean students draw a self-portrait. When he was young at school, Dr. Kim was asked to draw a North Korean brother or sister with a red face and "two horns." There was a national drawing competition about that. The slogan said, "We hate Communists!" But the self-portraits carrying simple messages such as "I want to play soccer and want to play with you one day" were sent to North Korea.
In the early 21st century, the Korean Peninsula experienced a brief period of peace. However, according to the National Security Law, South Korean citizens were not allowed to visit North Korea, nor even to contact fellow Koreans in the North. But special committees enabled cooperation, including the building of a children's hospital in North Korea by the organization during the period of the "Sunshine Policy."
His last visit to North Korea was in 2008 to Pyongyang for the opening ceremony of one of the children's hospital wings, jointly established by the Seoul National University Hospital and Pyongyang Medical University. "Finally, those children who drew their portraits were able to meet in person."
However, the relationships between South Korea and North Korea deteriorated after 2010, which led to the ban of all communications except a small amount of humanitarian aid. "Those children who met with one another have been separated again."
Struggling with the separation, Dr. Kim came up with a new idea when recognizing the similar scenarios in Northern Ireland: connecting separated young people from both contexts to share personally. They ask questions like why the divisions created by adults must burden the next generation.
"If you step into other people's lives and another story that you're in hope, sometimes it creates a reflective space. That's what I call the reciprocal empowerment. In each other's stories, we could enjoy our imagination." Dr. Kim explained. "I think this forum and the meaning of new creation lies in how God helps us to be in each other's story, and in the story of Jesus, we have our imagination."
Later, the interaction between young people in Northern Ireland and South Korea was developed into a project called "Drawing Hope Together," which exhibits the portraits of young people from South Korea, North Korea, and Northern Ireland. The younger generation from Belfast asked many questions while attending the exhibition.
Meanwhile, it expanded in cooperation with the Mennonite Central Committee and the American Friends Service Committee to gather self-portraits of young people who gave their voices in the midst of separation and complexity created by the older generation.
Dr. Kim concluded the lecture with the quote from John Paul Lederach's book Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies: "The challenge of digging deep into protracted conflict does not sit primarily with the complexity of issues, the long history of conflict, or the callous hardness of leadership, it requires a belief that change is possible."
"Something can be done," He urged. "Because we are all created by God with the image of God, this is an inevitable process. The remaining part for us is to participate in, to recognize it and help others to recognize it, of seeking a way forward, beyond the conflict, that begins to emerge and solidify."
