This project draws on Professor Roland Bleiker’s personal experience of working in the Korean DMZ to rethink security issues on the peninsula. Using his own photographs and engaging the politics of visuality, he identifies two obstacles to a resolution of the conflict: 1) a form of militarized masculinity that transcends ideological and political boundaries: 2) the inability to understand the conflict in neutral ways. This has ensuing implications for how North Korea is seen and approached politically.

Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland. His books include Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press 2008) and Visual Global Politics (Routledge 2018). In a past life he was Chief of Office of the Swiss Delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission in Panmunjom, Korea.

Bleiker grew up in Zürich, Switzerland, where he was educated and worked as a lawyer. He studied international relations in Paris, Toronto, Vancouver and Canberra. Bleiker worked for two years in a Swiss diplomatic mission in the Korean DMZ and held visiting affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

This seminar is being hosted by the Department of International Relations in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs.