This paper examines the planning, execution, and closure of the US–Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar organizations in developing countries along the line of the developmental turn of U.S. foreign assistance. Working closely with the NAS, U.S. conservationists used this scheme to introduce nature conservation practices and the discipline of ecosystem ecology to developing countries. In this context, by way of the NAS’s Pacific Science Board, two countries’ biologists initiated the preliminary cooperative project in the DMZ in 1966. Korean and U.S. scientists soon began to realize that their collaboration was marked by dissonance. The U.S. side attributed the cooperation failure to Korean culture while the Korean side criticized the unequal structure of their cooperation. Joining the global historiography of Cold War scientific collaboration, this paper pays particular attention to the intermediaries of the collaborative project and their rivalry. It argues that political struggles revolving around the position of go-betweens – as what I call knowledge brokers – on the recipient side provoked contestation between American and Korean scientists. The contention between the two sides played out in the collaboration coming to an end, albeit partially. Throughout this analysis, this study suggests paying more serious attention to the politics of scientific exchange among actors on the recipient side as an outset from which to analyze the heterogeneity of the Korean side without losing sight of their active role in the building process of American hegemony.
...More
Book
Krige, John;
(2006)
American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB000772271/)
Essay Review
Loughlin, Kelly;
(2003)
The Theatre of Scientific Authority
(/isis/citation/CBB000340817/)
Article
Petersen, Nikolaj;
(2013)
The Politics of US Military Research in Greenland in the Early Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB001212894/)
Article
Roberts, Peder;
(2013)
Intelligence and Internationalism: The Cold War Career of Anton Bruun
(/isis/citation/CBB001212892/)
Article
Heymann, Matthias;
Martin-Nielsen, Janet;
(2013)
Introduction: Perspectives on Cold War Science in Small European States
(/isis/citation/CBB001212891/)
Chapter
Kunkel, Sönke;
(2011)
Amerikanischer Wissenstransfer im Nigeria der frühen 1960er Jahre
(/isis/citation/CBB001211844/)
Article
Brian Simbirski;
(2016)
Cybernetic Muse: Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951–1958
(/isis/citation/CBB311347711/)
Article
Oreskes, Naomi;
(2010)
Science, Technology and Free Enterprise
(/isis/citation/CBB001021960/)
Article
Krige, John;
(2010)
Building the Arsenal of Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB001021959/)
Article
Thompson, Nicholas;
(2011)
Nuclear War and Nuclear Fear in the 1970s and 1980s
(/isis/citation/CBB001231373/)
Article
Wang, Jessica;
(2006)
American Scientists and Cold War Politics: Current and Future Research Directions
(/isis/citation/CBB000671294/)
Article
Ellis, Erik;
(2007)
What Is Marine Biology? Defining a Science in the United States in the Mid-20th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000931561/)
Book
Weiner, Sharon K.;
(2011)
Our Own Worst Enemy? Institutional Interests and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Expertise
(/isis/citation/CBB001221236/)
Essay Review
Olwell, Russell;
(2010)
Two Views of Cassandra: Lawrence Badash, A Nuclear Winter's Tale; John Mueller, Atomic Obsession
(/isis/citation/CBB001566396/)
Book
Greene, Benjamin P.;
(2007)
Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1945--1963
(/isis/citation/CBB000741904/)
Book
Melanie Armstrong;
(2017)
Germ Wars: The Politics of Microbes and America's Landscape of Fear
(/isis/citation/CBB693385819/)
Book
Moore, Kelly;
(2008)
Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945--1975
(/isis/citation/CBB000830500/)
Book
Badash, Lawrence;
(2009)
A Nuclear Winter's Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s
(/isis/citation/CBB001020378/)
Book
Colin B. Burke;
(2018)
America's Information Wars: The Untold Story of Information Systems in America's Conflicts and Politics from World War II to the Internet Age
(/isis/citation/CBB542994156/)
Book
Kenneth W. Ford;
(2015)
Building the H Bomb: A Personal History
(/isis/citation/CBB710562127/)
Be the first to comment!