This slim book combines six chapters and a conclusion in 124 pages. It intends to promote a new way of thinking about Korean security problems that “goes beyond conventional realist and state-centric approaches” (p. 1). The idea is not to offer new empirical insights but instead to focus “on underlying trends and conceptual challenges” (p. xlvi) in order to identify “broad patterns of conflict and possibilities for peace” (p. xlvi). The ethical aim is to promote dialogue based on an understanding that “the other's sense of identity and politics may be inherently incommensurable with one's own” (pp. xlii–xliii). In the case of this book, the incommensurable “others” are the two Koreas–North and South. The author's contention is that efforts toward peace have been periodically tried and always failed in the past because there has not been a sufficient acceptance of difference between North and South. Roland Bleiker is keen to stress that such an approach does not lead to political relativism but that it, in fact, makes for improved debates, such as over the ability to make more informed political choices between different political projects. Toward the end of the book he argues, for instance, that “[t]olerating different coexisting narratives does not prevent making judgments about their content or desirability” (p. 114).

The book is commendable in its efforts to support a solution to contemporary Korean conflicts through dialogue and reconciliation. Most policy analysts of whatever political hue—from either North Korea or the United States—have arrived at the conclusion that as difficult and tense as Korean security politics are, war as an instrument of foreign policy would likely involve huge loss of life, social dislocation, and economic devastation throughout the Korean peninsula. The problems in this book are not in its objectives. Rather, they lie in the execution of the research project. These problems are manifested in the undeveloped theoretical, conceptual, and methodological apparatus that underpins the book, as well as the underresearched empirical foundations and the contradictory ethical implications of the thesis.

The dominant state-centric approach to the study of security in the international relations discipline is intimated rather than examined, which has the unfortunate consequence that only readers familiar with the sometimes arcane professional debates might know precisely what is being criticized by the new approach espoused. Perhaps this is not important, given that the book is aimed for a specialized audience who might be expected to be familiar with some of the core professional debates. Much more important is the failure to provide an exposition and an interrogation of the alternative theoretical foundations in which the book locates itself. The author makes frequent but cursory mention of what can be described loosely as poststructural or critical scholarship in sociology, philosophy, history, and literature, and which clearly animates his thinking. Allan Bloom, William Connolly, Mikhail Bakhtin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Kearney, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ricoeur, and Hayden White are all mentioned, among others, with Ricoeur receiving one of the most extended treatments at four sentences (pp. 112–13).

The effect of not providing a systematic evaluation of the theoretical foundations, in a book that is self-professedly not concerned with providing new empirical insights (“I seek not new facts and data but new perspectives” [p. x]), is to make it difficult to judge the helpfulness of the conceptual discussion that constitutes much of the essay. Concepts such as “difference,” “identity,” “other,” “dialogue,” “dialogical agreement,” and “interactive security” are used, but absent an explicitly drawn analytical framework, they become either reified or left to be interpreted through the “old” analytical framework the book wishes to transcend. Difference, for instance, seems to be analyzed through a conventional positivist “levels of analysis” framework that methodologically separates individual and state (p. 61), although another problem with the way this concept is used is the confusing elision between the two levels of analysis throughout the work. This methodological slippage leads to ethical concerns because it is sometimes difficult to discern whether claims are being made that difference between individuals with their disparate perceptions of history, multifaceted identities, and diverse life chances should on the whole be tolerated (in my view, this is an ethically unproblematic question and the answer is yes) or that different political regimes should be tolerated (in my view, the answer is much less ethically clear).

Bleiker's intention not to produce “new facts” does not excuse him from the responsibility of ascertaining what the “old facts” might be—both in the theoretical and empirical literature. Roy Richard Grinker's seminal work on cultural difference between North and South Koreans is cited (Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War, 1998)—though not rigorously evaluated—but excluded from the analysis are standard studies of “Koreanness” (see e.g., Hyung-Il Pai and Timothy R. Tangherlini, eds., Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity, 1999). Also unmentioned is contemporary work of South Korean scholars attempting to recover more nuanced versions of Korean history, which has hitherto been dominated by nationalist historiography

More attention to the empirical record would call into question the claim that ideological frames provide two fundamentally antagonistic North and South Korean identities that somehow define the breadth and content of the security debate on the peninsula. One troubling empirical omission, for instance, is reference to the generational polarization in contemporary South Korean society—which has been endlessly analyzed and widely understood as shaping predispositions to “hard” or “soft” security policy on the peninsula. In North Korea, there is also little evidence that people's individual identities are shaped primarily by ideological concerns and much evidence (from the resident humanitarian organizations) that their primary goal is personal and family survival.

The underlying assumption of Divided Korea, that a core identity antagonism can be a source of both conflict and potential reconciliation, is unpersuasive. It is surely the mutability and diversity of Korean identities, North and South, that provide fruitful grounds for conceptual and empirical research. In policy terms, it is perhaps by accepting mutability that one can also claim the right to reject that which is ethically and politically unacceptable. At the same time, policymakers can search for commonalities across diversity—on which could be built, one hopes, lasting peace and reconciliation among all Koreans.