From Mass Disasters to State Violence: Genetic Identification of Victims and the Politics of Memory in South Korea, 1988–2002

Abstract

This paper examines how genetic profiling came to interact with mass disaster management and memory politics in South Korea from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. It pays particular attention to the parallel emergence of Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) governance and the politicization of modern and contemporary Korean history, including not only Japanese colonialism and Korean War crimes but also the South Korean state-led massacres, the Jeju Uprising of 1947-1954 and the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. I argue that genetic profiling, which had only recently been integrated into DVI governance, entered the human rights field when the concept of victim identification in South Korea was reconfigured to include victims of war crimes and state violence in the late 1990s. Beginning in the late 1990s, forensic scientists who had introduced and used genetic profiling for DVI activities became involved in identifying these newly integrated types of victims and became part of local reconciliation projects in the early 2000s. In this way, genetic profiling became intertwined with human rights activities, contributing to transitional justice and reconciliation. However, it also resulted in the geneticization of both disaster victims and state violence identification processes.