Imagining national security through the body’s organisation: conscientious objectors in South Korea

Abstract

This article studies how reimagining the body’s organisation can also lead to reimagining national security in the context of conscientious objectors to military conscription in South Korea. Despite decades of persecution, they have ceaselessly opposed the almost sacred belief that the military is vital for securing lives. I discuss national security through the body’s organisation because both focus on which interests are vital or redundant. To expose a dominant mode of imagining security and provide an alternative, I read and juxtapose the state’s and the objectors’ texts while considering competing imageries of the organic organisation and the Body without Organs. The juxtaposition shows that while the South Korean state advances the state-centric and militaristic imagery of national security that moulds the individual into the subject of the state, conscientious objectors propose less state-centric and more dynamic national security that preserves human potential to become something else.