An apt reproduction of The Kim Family after the Korean War (1990) by the South Korean minjung artist Lim Ok-sang graces this book's cover, opening Heonik Kwon's soulful account of how families maintained their ties to envision reconciliation from a civil war that continues to haunt the Korean peninsula. True to his disciplinary home as a cultural anthropologist, Kwon presents a political theory that upends lay views of kinship as premodern, traditional, and apolitical (and therefore “natural”). He argues that kinship, during and after the Korean War, became a powerful form of political intervention that countered the vicious Manichean politics of Cold War polarization with an intimate sociality across generations that forged a community with the dead to create “a bond of commemoration” (p. 65) and reclaim the “rights of the soul” (p. 184). Here, kinship as it is understood in anthropological terms is not limited to biological kin, but is a political concept defined as “the human condition of having to mutually nurture each other and mutually participate in each other's lives” (p. 6), extending to the “fundamental right to stay related, both among the living and with those lost, without fearing the consequences of doing so” (p. 8).

With an ongoing civil war (albeit in a state of cease-fire with the 1953 armistice), however, family ties in Korea created a double bind toward reconciliation on the one hand, but a liability on the other in a system of guilt by association. Drawing on American anthropologist Lewis Morgan's view of kinship and political systems as coactive between societas and civitas (p. 11) and German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies's distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) (p. 61), Kwon advances a normative theory of politics to argue that kinship should be as much a part of modern politics as fraternity or friendship. Rather than a “heroic political friendship” that ignores the “tragic political life of human intimacy” (p. 183), Kwon advocates combining kinship and friendship toward an “amity of kinship” as a model for a “democratic society at peace,” attuned to the etymological roots of amity (ch'in in Sino-Korean) as both the mutuality of kin and the intimacy of friends (p. 12).

The book consists of six chapters, each one providing intimate examples of families caught between the ethics of kinship and the dictates of national allegiance. Starting with civilian massacres during the Korean War that blurred “impersonal political violence from those of intimate communal violence” (p. 24), chapters 1 and 2 show how intimate relations became instruments of war as entire families and communities were forced onto different “sides.” Chapters 3 and 4 then focus on family genealogies as symbols of communal solidarity and continuity that were turned into weapons against their very survival. Collective punishment became a highly effective form of social control that did not simply target individual bodies (pace Foucault), but specifically targeted communal welfare, “the rich web of relationships that makes the individual a moral person” (p. 110). Finally, chapters 5 and 6 advance various efforts at reconciliation in South Korea that insist on the independent moral force of kinship. These range from literary works and films to ritual practices such as shamanism (kut) and ancestral rites (chesa) that became the principal site of exercising the right to mourn and sustain historical memory in the absence of other recognized spaces of public grievance.

If the Korean civil war “was partly rooted in the colonial-era conflicts between the collaborators with colonial politics and the victims of these politics” (p. 33), as first argued by Bruce Cumings, then the incomplete decolonization remains at the heart of current polarization in Korea. One recent manifestation of this was the July 2020 death of General Paik Sun-yup and the controversy over where to bury him—at the national cemetery as a Korean War hero or elsewhere as national traitor who joined the Japanese imperial army during the colonial era. The book's examples of ritual commemorations do not fully address such questions of decolonization. Questions remain about how to reconcile with the North Korean view of the Korean War as a war of liberation from US occupation forces that had supplanted the Japanese colonial apparatus by working with former colonial collaborators like Paik. Kwon may be right that a zero-sum logic prevailed between “two ideologically opposing yet structurally identical forces” (p. 37), but there was at least one major difference throughout the Cold War. Unification was at the center of North Korean political discourse since the war, in which separated families were elevated (rather than isolated and shunned) as the very reason to strengthen state capacities to be able to reunite them. Whether this was mere rhetoric or not, this contrasted starkly with South Korea, where the mere mention of unification could land one in jail as subversive, and calls for unification would not enter mainstream discourse until the 1980s.

These questions notwithstanding, After the Korean War offers a moving example of what Anthony Giddens's “democratic family” might look like in concrete terms. In this fitting sequel to his 2010 The Other Cold War, Kwon assembles a wide array of sources, including Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports, memoirs and autobiographical novels, museum sites, films, and research by South Korean scholars Yun Taik-lim, Kim Seong-nae, Kim Dong-choon, and Gwon Gwi-sook. The most poignant stories come from his own ethnography of an Andong village, identified only as Flying Heron—no doubt to protect their intimate histories, which are still regarded with hostility in the polarized politics of a divided country. Written lucidly from a global perspective, Kwon situates Korea alongside other examples of civil wars in Greece, Vietnam, and Indonesia as part of Reinhart Koselleck's view of the Cold War as a “world civil war” (p. 57). Inciting courage to overcome the tragic legacies of civil war, After the Korean War is a welcome addition to anyone interested in the intractable question of how communities deal with the aftermath of horrific violence and enmity through the arduous process of reconciliation.