AGS Professors Participate in International Peace Forum in South Korea

Professors Anton Koslov and Douglas Yates were invited to speak at the 13th Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity on Jeju Island in South Korea (June 26-28). This three-day event brought together 5,500 people from 70 countries to discuss this year’s theme: “Reengineering Peace for Asia”, with the objective of exploring new approaches to peace through innovative methods.

Launched in 2001, the Jeju Forum is a regional multilateral dialogue for promoting peace and prosperity in Asia. It is hosted by the Government of Jeju Special Self-Governing Province with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea.

The 2018 edition came on the heels of two inter-Korean summits in April and May and the first-ever summit between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader. Among the participants were the Secretary General of UNESCO Audrey Azoulay, the former Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki Moon, the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize laureate José Ramos-Horta, the former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who introduced NAFTA as well as the Organization Internationale de la Francophonie, and other peacebuilding and peacebuilding figures.

Professors Koslov and Yates spoke at a multinational panel of scholar activists about promoting healing through peacebuilding through multilateral talks involving six party-States: North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia. Yates focused on the potential role of the United States, while Professor Koslov focused on that of Russia.

The two AGS professors also travelled to Gangjeong Village, where a United States Naval Base has recently been constructed over the opposition of local activists, and participated in a grassroots peacebuilding exercise to transform this military base into a Peace Port that will launch several peace education cruises to surrounding ports of the six-party States.

Professor Yates met with Brian Mulroney and the two spoke briefly about the need for bold leadership to produce new international initiatives like NAFTA and La Francophonie.

UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay spoke about the World Heritage sites on Jeju Island. “One of the most innovative peacebuilding ideas coming out of Jeju,” said Professor Yates, “has been to use a traditional form of community building inspired by the famous Jeju Haenyeo women divers, who were included in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016. This form of community building, known at the bultoek, consists of forming a circle with the women around the fire on the beach at the end of the day to share concerns and settle disputes. This traditional conflict resolution model can be used to promote dialogue between Northeast Asian peoples in a spirit of equality and community, a beautiful symbol of Jeju’s ambitions to become the region’s “Peace Island,” taking advantage of its central location as a hub between the six party-States involved in peacemaking on the Korean peninsula.

The participation of AGS professors in this international forum is a continuation of a long-term collaboration with Jeju National University’s Peace Studies initiatives. Professor Yates has been presenting about conflict resolution at various conferences hosted by JNU every year for the past 12 years, and AGS Ph.D. candidate Olivier Sempiga joined him last summer to talk about peace-building in post-conflict Rwanda.

Next summer, Jeju National University Professor Ko Changoon will be leading a delegation to Paris to promote the registration of the tragic Jeju 4.3 massacre of 20,000 innocent civilians during the Korean War onto the UNESCO memory of the World registry. Professor Ko and his delegation should present a series of papers on the topic at AGS on June 23-25 2019. AGS is proud to promote this peace education exercise and looks forward to further collaboration with Professor Ko’s new Peace Academy at Jeju National University.