[Citizen College] Civil War, and Since Then

On July 13, 2018, the 13th lecture of “Citizen College: Citizens Between Life and Knowledge” was held by Seongbuk Village Citizenship Education Center and the Korea University Peace and Democracy Institute(PDI). The 13th speaker was Professor Jai-Kwan Jung of Korea University.

The topic of the lecture was “Civil War, and Since Then”. Professor took a look at the concept of the civil war and its reasons through specific examples. Civilization means the armed struggle between a government and a rebel in a sovereign state. Since the end of the Cold War, most aspects of war have been in the form of civil war. In economic terms, civil war is caused by conflicts in the process of economic development or relative deprivation due to income inequality. On the political side, civil war, on the other hand, is a means to alleviate political discontent accumulated by political discrimination or repression by the state. A typical example of civil war is the Bosnian civil war that occurred from 1992 to 1995. The Bosnian civil war was a major war in which more than 250,000 people were killed and more than 80% of the national economy was destroyed. Through extensive active interventions in the international community, including the United Nations, NATO, the EU, the United States and the United Kingdom, the Dayton Peace Treaty was signed and the civil war ended, but the division in Bosnia became more extreme. These cases have implications for re-evaluating international peacekeeping activities and postwar reconstruction activities. (Summary: Moon-Hyung Lee)