ABSTRACT
It has been fifty-five years since the conclusion of the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement (KAA), but a peace regime on the Korean peninsula replacing the KAA with a peace treaty has not yet been achieved. For the last fifty-five years, the Korean peninsula has technically been at war, although the June 15, 2000 joint declaration established a framework for de facto peaceful coexistence. The Republic of Korea (the ROK, or South Korea) and the Democratic Republic of Korea (the DPRK, or North Korea) have attempted to build a peace regime on the Korean peninsula. But their conflicting approaches to a peace mechanism are major obstacles to the Korean peace regime-building process. The DPRK has insisted on concluding a peace treaty between the United States and itself to replace the KAA since 1974, while the ROK has equally insisted on a peace treaty between the two Koreas. These two approaches to peace regime-building are diametrically opposed and non-negotiable. The Korean peace regime-building may be defined as the process by which the two Korean states at the inter-Korean level, and the two Koreas and concerned powers (the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia) at the international level cooperate to establish a peace regime on the Korean peninsula through inter-Korean confidence-building measures, international cooperation, and the replacement of the KAA with a Korean peninsula peace treaty. The process will provide essential conditions for building a Korean peninsula peace regime and for eventually achieving peaceful unification of the Korean peninsula. A peace regime can be institutionalized by implementing the inter-Korean basic agreement (1991) through inter-Korean cooperation, and by concluding a Korean peninsula peace treaty at a Korean peace forum involving the U.S., China, and the two Koreas.
