Contested Cooperation: The US-South Korea Ecological Survey in the Demilitarized Zone, 1963-1968

This paper explores the planning, execution, and failure of the US-Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) newly initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar organizations in developing countries along the line of the developmental turn of the U.S. foreign assistance. The U.S. conservationists closely working with the NAS used this scheme to introduce nature conservation practices and the discipline of ecology to developing countries. In this context, by way of the NAS’s Pacific Science Board, Helmut K. Buechner (1918–1975), director of the Office of Ecology at the Smithsonian Institution, together with Yung Sun Kang (1917–1999) of Seoul National University, initiated the preliminary cooperative project at the DMZ in 1965. Korean and U.S. scientists soon began to realize that their collaboration was marked by dissonance. The different understandings between them over the nature of their cooperative relationship provoked a nationalist backlash from the Korean side, strengthened financial controls from the Smithsonian side, and finally led to the failure of the project. The paper will reveal that the conflict between two sides revolving around the notion of cooperation was deeply linked to the broader political debate on the role of leading Korean scientists as “knowledge brokers” among the U.S. aid authorities, American scientists, and Koreans themselves in this period. In doing so, it illuminates the contested nature of Cold War US-Korea scientific collaboration which hid behind consensual American hegemony.