The culture of the Cold War era is a product of 'psychological warfare'. Psychological warfare, “to win the hearts and minds,” through various media, including text, video, and music, governs virtually all areas of culture and society for the particip ...
The culture of the Cold War era is a product of 'psychological warfare'. Psychological warfare, “to win the hearts and minds,” through various media, including text, video, and music, governs virtually all areas of culture and society for the participants of both sides. In Korea, psychological warfare did not simply mean propaganda against communism, but was a program that reorganized all aspects of the so-called 'free camp' against 'communism'. This is why our research team tried to re-examine the cultural and social changes from liberation to the 1970s with the keyword 'psychological warfare'. In particular, we tried to construct an empirical foundation by excavating materials related to psychological warfare on the Korean Peninsula stored in overseas Cold War archives.
Although it was difficult to collect data due to the COVID-19 situation, our research team initially set the goals of 'transnational of psychological warfare and the formation of cultural and knowledge fields' and 'Korean cultural system, industry, and text seen through Cold War archives'. The research continued while maintaining two main themes. Before the COVID-19 situation became serious, data research was conducted for two weeks at Stanford University's Hoover Archive, and a total of 106 boxes, 341 folders, 18,436 files were photographed and collected. We held monthly seminars, held colloquiums inviting external experts at least twice a year, organized workshops to exchange and spread research results ('Development of Cold War Media and Psychological Warfare (2019 February),' 'War of Psychological Thought and Modern Korea There were also internal workshops for 'Culture Dynamics' (2020 January), ‘The locus of Cold War and its agents’ (2022 December)). As a result. we have published a total of 13 papers related to the research topic so far, and additional research results are expected to be published in 2022-23. It should also be noted that the research assistant who participated in this research team also published a thesis on a related topic, demonstrating the productivity of exchanges between senior researchers and the next generation of academics.
In addition, our research team attempted to establish a database for the Cold War research at a rudimentary level and expanded the cooperation with foreign researchers. For the DB, the collection name, classification name, box number, quantity, producer/organization, location are specified, and key words and content summary are made. Now we are working on the Mott Papers among the data collected in the first year.
In exchanges with overseas researchers, we actively sought to expand and deepen the relationship by holding joint seminars and planning workshops together with researchers of North America, Japan, Hong Kong. Such exchanges will be of great help in spreading the achievements of the Cold War culture research of Korean scholars and promoting mutual stimulation with global Cold War researchers.