Seeds Will Grow

Cross-posting this post on the Catholic Institute for Northeast Asia (CINAP)’s website, written by Kenneth Boggess, about the 2024 Catholic Korea Peace Forum (source)

Like many of the attendees of CINAP’s events, I do not have a background in peace studies. My fellow participants in the Catholic Korea Peace Forum came from all sorts of careers: activism, nursing, national security, law, ministry, academia, and beyond.

While CINAP does engage professional activists and nonprofit organizers, I was particularly touched by the programming’s focus on takeaways and finding ways to incorporate peace into our worldviews and individual lives. Not everybody is a professional activist, and CINAP’s organizers took care to remind us that our solidarity as people engaged all throughout society can be just as meaningful as on-the-ground justice work.

CINAP’s Catholic Korea Peace Forum offered me an opportunity that my academic studies would not have otherwise included. For those of us who study International Relations in the U.S., our coursework often denies us ample opportunity to see the human effects of high-level policy. Our professors tend to focus on security and conflict studies, abstracting the fundamental human experience into distant, zero-sum games targeting benefits for U.S. key players.

Our field work in Cheorwon, the JSA, and elsewhere around South Korea offered moving opportunities to see how everyday people feel the real effects of government policy, especially as the thought of continued conflict still looms over the Korean peninsula.

I am truly honored to have partaken in CINAP’s programming to see how the Korean people and those in solidarity work towards creating peace and unity. I am equally as honored to carry that experience with me as I return to my life in the U.S. in the legal field — in a realm nominally separate from peace activism, but still realistically intertwined.

Click here to watch a 9 minute video on Catholic Korea Peace Forum 2024.