On February 20, at 2:00 p.m., the fourth lecture in the doctoral dissertation lecture series organized by the Modernity and Development Team of the SNU Contemporary Korean Studies (서울대학교 현대한국종합연구단 ‘근대성과 발전사팀’) was held.

This seminar, held under the theme “The Cold War and Development in East Asia: Across Militarism, Science and Technology, and Local Society,” brought together recent doctoral dissertation research from various fields of modern Korean history—including militarism, science and technology, and local society—to present findings and discuss the issues they raise.

The fourth presentation was given by Dr. Kim Jihoon (김지훈) of the Institute for Global Korean Studies at Yonsei University Mirae Campus, under the title “The Origins and Formation of the South Korean Military’s National Defense Thought, 1945–63 (1945-63년 한국군 국방사상의 기원과 형성).” Focusing on the process by which the South Korean military’s ‘national defense thought’ took shape from immediately after Liberation to the early 1960s, it analyzed the occasions and logic of the military’s intervention in the state and society.

In the discussion that followed, held simultaneously in the in-person classroom and online, early-career researchers—including graduate students from the Department of Korean History at Seoul National University—led a lively question-and-answer session. As the presentation addressed the starting point of security discourse in Korean history, an in-depth discussion developed within the context of militarism.