The Nordic countries' relations with the DPR Korea
Fifty years ago, the Nordic countries established diplomatic relations with the DPR Korea, with Finland simultaneously recognizing the Republic of Korea. In this webinar, we explore the Nordic countries’ relations with North Korea with a focus on Finland, Norway and Sweden. Particular attention will be paid to the time period of normalization, actors campaigning for recognition of the DPR Korea and the early years of bilateral relations.
Date: 24 November 2023 (Fri)
Time: 12:15-15:00 CET / 13:15-16:00 EET (NB different time zones)
Register here for Zoom Webinar. Meeting ID: 649 9957 3648; Passcode: 265725
Programme
Session I: 12:15-13:30 CET / 13:15-14:30 EET
Welcoming remarks
Vladimir Tikhonov (University of Oslo): North Korea in Norway: Relationship, Images, and Realities
Ulv Hanssen (Soka University) and Erik Isaksson (FU Berlin): Business, politics and global change: the roots of Sweden-DPRK normalization
Q&A and discussion
**30 minutes break**
Session II: 14:00-15:00 (CET) / 15:00- 16:00 (EET)
Sonja Häussler (Stockholm University): Swedish and Korean intellectuals' campaigning for the recognition of the DPRK
Sabine Burghart and Ville Sava (CEAS, University of Turku): Finland's neutrality policy, the (North) Korea question, and interests
Q&A and discussion
Final remarks
Speaker bios (in alphabetical order):
Burghart, Sabine, PhD, is a university lecturer and Academic Director of the Master’s Degree Programme in East Asian Studies at the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS), University of Turku. Her research interests concern South Korea’s foreign aid initiatives and the humanitarian arena and external actors in North Korea. Recent research collaboration included Goethe University Frankfurt/Korean Studies (AKS-2018-INC-2230006) and California State University, Sacramento (2019-2022). In 2021, she initiated the research project 50 years of Finland’s multi-layered relations with two antagonistic states – North and South Korea (2022 Faculty of Social Sciences grant). She spent more than five years of her professional career in Korea, and facilitated various capacity building projects and three EU-DPRK workshops in North Korea.
Häussler, Sonja is a Professor of Korean Language and Culture at Stockholm University. Previously, she has taught at a number of universities in Germany (Humboldt University, Free University, Ruhr University Bochum and Hamburg University) as well as ELTE University Budapest and the University of Vienna. Her main fields of research are Korean literature, intellectual history and the cultural policies of North and South Korea. One of her current projects looks into the microhistory of academic collaboration between scholars in Korean/East Asian studies in the Cold War period.
Hanssen, Ulv is an Associate Professor at Soka University’s Faculty of Law and an Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI). He holds a PhD in Japanese studies from the Graduate School of East Asian Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His primary field of research is Japanese foreign and security policy with a particular focus on Japan-DPRK relations. For the past two years, he has been involved in a research project at UI on the origins and development of Sweden-DPRK relations. He is the author of Temporal Identities and Security Policy in Postwar Japan (Routledge, 2020).
Isaksson,Erik is a PhD candidate at Freie Universität Berlin and an Associate Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. In 2023-2024 he is an Ernst Mach Fellow at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. His primary research interests revolve around questions of identity, status, narratives and hierarchy in international relations, with a particular focus on Japan and East Asia. In 2021-2023, he was involved in a project on the origin of Sweden-DPRK relations at UI.
Sava, Ville is a doctoral researcher at University of Turku’s Centre for East Asian Studies. His primary research interests are the contemporary history of East Asia and Japan in addition to questions related to politics of memory. His dissertation project focuses on the portrayal and memory of the Meiji period in modern Japan. Since 2021, he has also been involved in a research project on the history and development of relations between Finland and DPRK at the University of Turku.
Tikhonov, Vladimir is a professor of Korean and East Asian studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University. Previously, he taught at Kyunghee University (Seoul, 1997-2000). His research focuses on the history of modern ideas in Korea and currently on Korean Communist movement. He published Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: the Beginnings (Brill, 2010) as well as Modern Korea and its Others: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity (Routledge, 2015).He also recently co-authored Intellectuals In Between: Koreans in a Changing World, 1850 to 1945 (Peter Lang, 2022) and co-edited Buddhist Modernities - Re-inventing Tradition in the Globalizing Modern World (Routledge, 2017) and Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2017). His most recent book is The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023).