According to South Korea, there is no North Korea. In fact, the government considers itself the only legitimate state on the peninsula, much alike North Korea’s view. Officially, the two countries on the Korean peninsula are at war, having been in a ceasefire for 70 years. For many reasons, the countries have failed to reconcile and build peace, and a 4km wide demilitarised buffer zone remains as a closed border between the nations, separating families and making cross-border passage impossible. North Korea infamously perpetuates serious human rights violations and nuclear weapon development, further emphasising the urgency in finding ways of building peace on the Korean peninsula. This study aimed to investigate how tourism at the Korean border could aid the Korean reconciliation and reunification process. Tourism has been recognized as a central force shaping our world through its ability to build intercultural understanding and connection in an increasingly globalised world. The study applied a method of qualitative content analysis, and an analytical framework was created drawing on previous work on conditions for a positive peace-tourism nexus. When gathering data on what tourism projects have been in effect at the Korean border and applying conditions for tourism to have a positive influence on the peace process, results differed. While earlier projects did not show signs of having a positive effect, current projects provided more reason to believe they could provide an important alternative approach to peace building which would be less reliant on intergovernmental relations and therefore more able to work as a contributor to peace.

This thesis evaluates the effects of compulsory military service in South Korea on the political behavior of men from a public policy standpoint. I take an institutional point of view on conscription, in that conscription forces the military to accept individuals with minimal screening. Given the distinct set of values embodied by the military, I hypothesize that the military would need a powerful, comprehensive, and fast program of indoctrination to re-socialize civilians into military uniform, trustable enough to be entrusted with a gun or a confidential document. Based on the existence of such a program and related academic literature, I go on to look at how a military attitude has political implications, especially for the security-environment of the Korean peninsula. Given the ideological nature of the inter-Korean conflict, the South Korean military was biased against the liberals, as liberals were most likely to generate policies supporting conciliatory and cooperative measures towards North Korea, like the removal of U.S. forces from South Korea and the repeal of the National Security Laws that outlaw discussion of communism. For an empirical evaluation, I pose the hypothesis that this political bias would manifest itself in the male public via the military’s indoctrinative program. With data from the Korean General Social Survey, the Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, and the South Korean General Election Panel Study, I have found that males respond acutely to specific security issues in favor or against according to the military’s point of view. However, the evidence for an overall bias on political parties generally was inconclusive. The uncertainty was mainly rooted in the fact that liberal parties have strategically avoided speaking out on specific policy issues during election.

This thesis examines the role of ENGOs in inter-Korean environmental cooperation and how together with experts, they rely on scientific knowledge to influence South Korea’s policies towards North Korea. More specifically, the empirical focus is on how ENGOs contribute to the reconciliation and peacebuilding process in the Korean Peninsula. In contrast to previous scholarship, this thesis approaches the topic through a constructivist lens. Thus, to explore What is the role of environmental non-governmental organisations in the peacebuilding process and reconciliation of inter-Korean relations?, this study applies Quantitative Content Analysis to selected NGO publications and on the whitepapers of the South Korean Ministry of Unification, and finds evidence of the complementary effects of environmental cooperation to humanitarian cooperation and a deepened cooperation of the South Korean government with NGOs on humanitarian and environmental issues. Moreover, the study demonstrates the significance of activities supporting reconciliation and international integration and cooperation in environmental cooperation that enable the spill-over effects to other areas and thus nullify the possible side effects, such as costs for the economy in the long run.

This doctoral thesis aims to provide a comprehensive and historical analysis of foreign policy behaviour of the principal states involved in nuclear talks on North Korea known as the Six-Party Talks (SPT). Despite the failure in achieving a primary objective of denuclearizing North Korea, the SPT were believed to provide interesting and informative cases to investigate dynamic interactions among states engaged in security talks with different motives and interests. For a holistic approach to foreign policy analysis, the thesis adopts a newly introduced theoretical framework called Interactionist Role Theory (IRT) which integrates the levels of analysis from individuals to international system by incorporating the concept of ‘roles’. Based on IRT, the thesis examines what drove the concerned states’ foreign policy shifts; what kinds of discrepancies the states experienced between or among competing roles (role conflicts); how successful their deliberate policy implementations were (role-makings); and what structural effects their foreign policy decisions had on the overall Six-Party Talks process. The thesis findings support the IRT premise that it is critical to understand a state’s perceived ideal roles to accurately identify the state’s motives for actions regarding particular foreign policy issues. The prevalence of inter-role conflicts at the time of states’ role-makings evinces that the SPT as social constraints did exert competing role expectations that challenged the member states’ role conceptions. Above all, the sequential analysis of the SPT process clearly shows the mutual influence between the member states (agents) and the SPT (social structure), which implies successful multilateral negotiations require reciprocal relations among participating states where all parties’ desired roles (role conceptions) are mutually verified and affirmed. The thesis is deemed to give insightful messages to conventional foreign policy readings that predominantly view the nuclear drama in the Northeast Asia region from a binary focus of US-DPRK mutual deterrence.

The purpose of this thesis is to explain how sports events, in which North and South Korea have in some way worked or competed together, have affected the relationship between the two nations. This is carried out through the investigation of specific events; the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, the competing of the joint table tennis- and football teams in 1991, the cooperation happening during the “sunshine policy”, from 1998 until 2008, as well as the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. The studied material consists mostly of news reports and scientific works.   The result shows that while cooperation in sports is possible between the two Koreas, they have occurred only under favourable political circumstances. It is also concluded that the sports events have in return affected the inter-Korean relationship, and this cooperation has also generated further discussions between the two Koreas, a so called “spillover effect”. / Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att förklara hur sportevenemang, i vilka Nord- och Sydkorea har på något sätt samarbetat eller tävlat gemensamt, har påverkat relationen mellan de två länderna. Det här genomförs genom en undersökning av specifika evenemang; 1988 års sommar-OS i Seoul, tävlingarna 1991 där de förenade pingis- och fotbollslagen deltog, samarbetet under ”Solskenspolitiken”, från 1998 till 2008, såväl som 2018 års vinter-OS i Pyeongchang. Underlaget består mestadels utav nyhetsreportage och vetenskapliga rapporter.    Resultatet visar att även om samarbete i sport är möjligt mellan de två länderna på den koreanska halvön, har dessa bara inträffat under gynnsamma politiska omständigheter. Det kommer även fram att sportevenemang i sin tur har påverkat den interkoreanska relationen och även genererat fortsatta diskussioner mellan Nord- och Sydkorea, en så kallad ”spridningseffekt".

This doctoral thesis aims to provide a comprehensive and historical analysis of foreign policy behaviour of the principal states involved in nuclear talks on North Korea known as the Six-Party Talks (SPT). Despite the failure in achieving a primary objective of denuclearizing North Korea, the SPT were believed to provide interesting and informative cases to investigate dynamic interactions among states engaged in security talks with different motives and interests. For a holistic approach to foreign policy analysis, the thesis adopts a newly introduced theoretical framework called Interactionist Role Theory (IRT) which integrates the levels of analysis from individuals to international system by incorporating the concept of ‘roles’. Based on IRT, the thesis examines what drove the concerned states’ foreign policy shifts; what kinds of discrepancies the states experienced between or among competing roles (role conflicts); how successful their deliberate policy implementations were (role-makings); and what structural effects their foreign policy decisions had on the overall Six-Party Talks process. The thesis findings support the IRT premise that it is critical to understand a state’s perceived ideal roles to accurately identify the state’s motives for actions regarding particular foreign policy issues. The prevalence of inter-role conflicts at the time of states’ role-makings evinces that the SPT as social constraints did exert competing role expectations that challenged the member states’ role conceptions. Above all, the sequential analysis of the SPT process clearly shows the mutual influence between the member states (agents) and the SPT (social structure), which implies successful multilateral negotiations require reciprocal relations among participating states where all parties’ desired roles (role conceptions) are mutually verified and affirmed. The thesis is deemed to give insightful messages to conventional foreign policy readings that predominantly view the nuclear drama in the Northeast Asia region from a binary focus of US-DPRK mutual deterrence. / The full text has been embargoed.