Following his prizewinning studies of the Vietnam War, renowned anthropologist Heonik Kwon presents this ground-breaking study of the Korean War's enduring legacies seen through the realm of intimate human experience. Kwon boldly reclaims kinship as a vital category in historical and political enquiry and probes the grey zone between the modern and the traditional (and between the civil and the social) in the lived reality of Korea's civil war and the Cold War more broadly. With captivating historical detail and innovative conceptual frames, Kwon's moving, creative analysis provides fresh insights into the Korean conflict, civil war and reconciliation, history and memory and critical political theory.

Winner, 2022 James B. Palais Prize, Association for Asian Studies

'This extraordinary book gives us - finally - the language to touch the heart of the Korean War’s fundamental, enduring violence. With kinship in focus as the essential terrain of the political, Kwon completely transforms how we understand mass violence at the intersection between the intimate, the state, and the global. After the Korean War is a work of exquisite and stunning brilliance.'

Monica Kim - New York University

'Grounded in deep historical research and intimate ethnography, After the Korean War offers a timely reflection on little understood aspects of the global cold war through the enduring consequences of the Korean War. A must read in the current climate of renewed Sino-American power plays and their collateral impact in the region and beyond.'

Nayoung Aimee Kwon - Duke University, North Carolina

‘After the Korean War puts to rest talk about how the Cold War is over and behind us. As Heonik Kwon powerfully shows in tracing the global civil war in Korea, it is the way the intimate violence of war as experienced by families has been remembered - or not remembered - that continues to entrap us. Only by respecting 'the rights of the dead to be remembered', as he eloquently argues, can we truly move beyond the legacies of the Cold War to establish the friendships and solidarities needed today.’

Andre Schmid - University of Toronto

‘Heonik Kwon’s intimate history of the Korean War and its myriad aftermaths offers one of the most humane accounts to date of what, in a previous study, he called ‘The Other Cold War’.’

Todd Henry Source: European Journal of Korean Studies

‘… After the Korean War stands as one of the most innovative treatments of the Korean War to appear in recent years … It is Kwon’s capacity to look at the Korean War in a way that also sheds light on some of the other horrors of the modern era that makes his work such a compelling and valuable contribution.’

Gregg A. Brazinsky Source: Acta Koreana