냉전기 한국 지정학의 지식 생산:1969년 임덕순과 차윤의 지정학 논쟁

This paper examines the geopolitics debate between Lim Duck-soon and Cha Yun in 1969. During the mid-Cold War period, South Korea was confronted with changes, most notably the consolidation of the Sino-Soviet split and the reorientation of US strategy in East Asia. Based on their contrasting understandings of the Korean Peninsula’s geographical location, Lim and Cha interpreted these changes in the global affairs and debated questions concerning the Korea’s survival and development. This paper regards their debate as the moment of the Korean geopolitical tradition that emerged in relation to broader currents of Western geopolitical traditions, analysing how the two scholars, under the historical conditions of the Cold War and the inter-Korean division, mobilised Western geopolitical concepts alongside geopolitical imaginaries of the peninsula to construct their own geopolitical thoughts. The paper argues that Korean geopolitical tradition should be understood as a process of knowledge production in which diverse intellectual resources were translated and articulated, rather than as a simple diffusion of Western geopolitics or an internalisation of colonial knowledge, but remains cautious that this process embodied a contraversy that a critical awareness of geopolitics’ imperial origins coexisted with a willingness to embrace it as indispensable knowledge under the realities of the Cold War and the inter-Korean division.