최근 한국전쟁 연구동향

An Analysis of the Recent Studies on the Korean War

This paper attempts to explore major studies about the Korean War during the period from 2005 to 2010. This research was encouraged by the fact that the Korean War has passed sixty years since its outbreak. It is worth to understand major perspectives of the Korean War in recent five years, because these aspects shape points of view to look at war of the current Korean society. Firstly, this paper focuses on studies about causes of the Korean War. Jeong, Byungjun, and Allan R. Millette dealt with the origins of the Korean War in their recent works. Jeong argues that the war has characteristic of an international war though the war followed the style of chronic border line conflict that happened since 1948. Millette adopted the concept of people’s war to explain the development of the Korean War by contending the Korean War as a civil war.. Secondly, this paper tries to identify thematic areas of the Korean War. Since the end of the Cold War domestic and foreign researchers began to approach to the war with various aspects: genocide, gender, unknown participants, influence to other countries, and literature. With this expansion of research topics, scholars succeeded in analyzing the Korean War in comprehensive ways. Thirdly, this study takes notice of the development of researches on individual and community group memories for the war. This movement focuses on war experiences of people and small communities like families rather than official records. This phenomenon can be understood as narrowing down of scope that deals with the Korean War from countries or nations to persons or villages. Generally, researchers use this method to deal with genocide in villages and individual ordeals during the war. Finally, this paper suggests future direction of studies of the Korean War. The war should be studied in various perspectives that reflect general thematic ideas of history. At the same time, more researches should be conducted based on aspects of military history to enhance the understanding of the Korean War as military history.