An exceptional island: The Jeju Massacre and the abuses of sovereignty – An analysis of South Korea's bloodiest civilian massacre through the lens of Giorgio Agamben's state of exception

This paper analyses the 1947–1954 Jeju Massacre in the Republic of Korea (ROK) through the theoretical lens of Giorgio Agamben's work on sovereignty and the state of exception. In the context of an emerging Cold War, the ROK was undergoing ideological division, and these ruptures materialised at the local scale during civil unrest in response to police brutality under the United States Army Military Government in Korea, initially, and then the ROK. The resulting conflict led to widespread human casualties and environmental devastation as the landscape was (bio)politicised as part of a counterinsurgency that conflated people and place as it enforced sovereign power. Through a martial law declaration in 1948, the newly independent ROK proclaimed Jeju's uplands hostile and an ideological threat to the fledgling anti-communist state. As villagers were condemned by their geography, the landscape was confronted as an ideological threat and subjected to a scorched-earth campaign to cleanse impure elements from sovereign territory. Driven to cave and woodland refugia, villagers sheltered from state forces, paramilitaries, and armed rebels as the landscape was razed during a state of exception that led to an estimated 30,000 deaths. Despite almost eight decades since the tragedy, the Jeju Massacre continues to shape ROK politics and shed light on the human and non-human impacts of states of exception during geopolitical conflict.