Where Are the Transnational Korean Adoptees? A Decolonial Feminist Contribution to (Korean) IR

초록

This paper offers a decolonial feminist contribution to (Korean) International Relations (IR) by asking the question: Where Are the Transnational Korean Adoptees? It seeks to challenge IR's central concern with national borders and states by taking a people-centered approach "from the margins." In this study, I center the disappeared as subjects of IR inquiry, specifically transnational Korean adoptees, as a way to counter the colonial logic of erasure in Westphalian IR. Theoretically, it builds on and expands decolonial approaches to (Korean) IR by redirecting Cynthia Enloe's feminist IR inquiry, "Where are the women?" to "Where are the transnational adoptees?" Methodologically, it employs the practice of "active remembering" of those who have been disappeared in global politics. The paper's empirical contribution is a detailed engagement with transnational adoption in Korea during the 1960s-80s. I discuss how the practice sustained the hierarchical global order as a national border-making practice by systematically removing children deemed an 'undesirable population.' The study highlights how this process both physically and epistemically erased transnational Korean adoptees from South Korean society and in the international, while reinforcing colonial hierarchies. Through this empirical engagement, the paper explores possibilities for theorizing the global order differently, by centering people rather than states, and from Korea and the disappeared subjects of Westphalian IR. The paper demonstrates how decolonial feminist theorizing from Korea, not as a case but as an entry point to global politics, allows for critical reimagining of our inquiries and ways of knowing in the discipline of IR.

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