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Transnational militarism and ethnic nationalism: South Korean involvements in the Vietnam and Iraq wars

ABSTRACT Using South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam and Iraq Wars as case studies, we explore transnational militarism as a salient (often neglected) force of globalization that has shaped the construction and modification of national identity. Building on the theoretical framework of ‘militarized modernity’ and insights from critical studies of militarism, we examine the effect of two features of transnational militarism on the construction of South Korea’s sense of a national ‘we’: discursive representation of national interest in participating in these wars and actual and imagined encounters with ‘Others’ mediated by transnational militarism. We argue that while the Vietnam War participation was instrumental to the construction of the anticommunist, capitalist, and militarized nation in the context of the Cold War, the Iraq War participation a generation later contributed to the emergence of a cosmopolitan nationalism that challenged the views from the Cold War era. We identify South Korea’s citizen-led democratization as a major contributing factor for different modes of engagements with transnational wars, in association with shifting geopolitics.