Two high-profile social movements against the construction of military bases in Jeju, Korea, and Okinawa, Japan, represent a contest between anti-militarist ecological security and traditional military security. By analysing the emergence and resonance of the two iconic nonhuman movement symbols - Gureombi, a unique lava rock formation, and the dugong, an endangered marine mammal, Dr Claudia Junghyun KIM of CityU’s Department of Asian and International Studies discusses the contest between traditional and ecological security, and its implications for the debates in International Relations over what constitutes security and who deserves protection. The details are presented in the article Dugong v. Rumsfeld: social movements and the construction of ecological security, published in the European Journal of International Relations.
The Jeju movement happened when Gangjeong village on the southern coast of Jeju was designated as the construction site of a new naval base. The opposition to the base received little attention at first, until Gureombi became the movement symbol. The movement actors emphasised its ecological values, the threat it faced, and its status as an indispensable part of local life. The advocacy soon spread to national and transnational communities. The activists even challenged the environmental surveys conducted by the authority, forcing it to devote more efforts to address the environmental concerns than explain the needs of the base for military security. When the authority finally moved to demolish the rock with explosives in March 2012, activists likened the blast with the Jeju uprising in 1948 and equated the rock with the people killed in the historical event. Even after the opening of the naval base, activists have kept organising annual commemoration.
The Okinawa movement was launched to oppose the construction of a new US Marine installation in northern Okinawa. It required sea reclamation, a process which activists called a “death sentence” for the critically endangered dugongs. In addition to ecological discourse, the activists also stressed the dugongs’ ties to local communities. Like the activists in Jeju, those in Okinawa related the fight for dugongs to World War II and called their action “the new Battle of Okinawa”. In 2003, an international activist network took the issue to a US court. The lawsuit recounted the narrative of the dugong as a symbol of the ecosystem and the universal need for environmental preservation. The legal battles have been going back and forth and still unresolved, yet the dugong’s status as an ecological symbol attests to activist agency in bringing them into public debates and inducing changes in the behaviour of the allies.
In both Jeju and Okinawa, there were movement foes who questioned the ecological and cultural values of these nonhuman beings and their legitimacy as security subjects worthy of protection. While the activists have not been able to stop the base construction in both cases, they nonetheless elevated the movement from local to national and even transnational levels. Keywords search show that news coverage and public debates on the Gureombi rock and the dugongs began only after they were adopted as the symbols in the two movements. While the rock has already been demolished and all dugongs may have been gone, their symbolic significance persists till the present time.
To a large extent, these events represent a contest between ecological and traditional military security. Movement actors have deliberately constructed nonhuman beings as evocative symbols of the beautiful, yet vulnerable, ecosystem facing extinction. They made them a part of the storyline that presented military bases and military-enabled security as a threat to the ecosystem. By analysing the emergence and resonance of the lava rock and the endangered mammal as anti-militarist ecological symbols, this paper establishes the movement actors as effective practitioners of ecological security and provides empirical evidence on how nonhuman security is practised. It responds to the urgent call to consider how humans and nonhumans co-constitute the world. It also shows that nonhuman security practices are still human-centric, which may reinforce the human/nonhuman binary that is not agreeable to some ecological security scholars. However, raising issue salience among potential audience (the human) is seen by movement actors as a necessary tactic for broader resonance.
Achievements and publication
Kim, C. J. (2020). Dugong v. Rumsfeld: social movements and the construction of ecological security. European Journal of International Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120950013
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