Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective
Principles of Unity
As a core member of the EKW Teaching Collective, I will abide by the ethos and objectives of the collective in bringing an end to the Korean War by pledging to do the following:
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Support the Korean people who have long fought for peace and self-determined unification and consider ending the Korean War a necessary step in decolonization, both in Korea and in the diaspora;
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Enact solidarity with the peoples of Asia, the Pacific, and North America who have been subjected to the ramifications of imperial militarization, placing them in weaponized relationship to other communities in the region, and who have long waged anti-militarism struggles against the projection of U.S. war power in and militarized expropriation of their homelands;
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Call on the United States to formally end the Korean War by abolishing its seven-decade policy of hostility, ending its sweeping sanctions that isolate North Korea and inflict widespread humanitarian catastrophe on its people, and replacing the 1953 Armistice with a permanent peace agreement;
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Demand that the United States stop all military exercises that deploy or introduce its war assets on the Korean peninsula and throughout the greater region, abolish its nuclear umbrella over South Korea, Asia, and the Pacific, and meet its own obligations to create a nuclear-free world;
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Initiate critical reflection on and collective action regarding the complicity of U.S. universities and research institutions within the military-industrial complex, the national security state, and other militarized counterrevolutionary structures, while underscoring our role as socially engaged scholars not just to analyze but also to transform the structural moorings of our own conditions of possibility; and
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Encourage students and scholars to engage in a research and teaching initiative, commenced Fall 2020, that emphasizes critical approaches to and collective inquiry about the Korean War, with a focus on the racial, sexual, colonial, and sub-imperial violence of U.S. war power as well as peoples’ struggles for decolonization.
