South Korean relations with North Korea

This chapter examines the historic trends of inter-Korean relations, focusing especially from democratisation onward. Drawing upon inter-systemic conflict theory, neorealism/neoliberalism, and identity politics/collective memory, this chapter argues that the Korean peninsula’s division led to a systemic conflict in which the two Koreas struggled for dominance as the Korean people’s true representative. While North Korean identity has largely remained fixed under the Kim regime, South Korean identity was split into the True Korea and One Korea identities, eventually forming the right and left sides of the political spectrum upon democratisation and colouring South Korean administrations’ relationships with North Korea.