Conflict Resolution in North Korea - Research Paper Example

Since its inception in 1948, the regime in North Korea has continued to display behavior that runs counter to international norms and North Korea presents a global threat through its propensity to proliferate nuclear weapons technology. This nation had launched a bloody and expensive civil war against South Korea in the year 1950, which was later to embroil both China and the United States of America. Today, the Korean Peninsula remained fractured when the war in Korea ended in 1953 after an armistice and many regard North Korea as having maintained a posture that continues to threaten regional and global peace and security.

The international community has tried to grapple with the Korean problem for nearly sixty years, but success has remained elusive. The Korean Peninsula, surrounded by larger and more powerful states, has witnessed the competition between Russia, China, and Japan for influence for hundreds of years. Researchers suggest that there have been more than 900 invasions of Korea in the past 2000 years. In the late nineteenth and twentieth century, United States of America, Britain, and France joined the competition for influence in Korea.

Japan had maintained an occupation of Korea from 1910 – 1945 and the division of Korea is a legacy of the Second World War when forces from United States of America and the Soviet Union continued to maintain control in their respective sections after the end of hostilities. Both of the occupying powers were to pass on their respective ideological and philosophical beliefs to the administrations that they established on a divided Korean Peninsula. The Korean Peninsula shares a 650 – mile border to the North with China along the Yalu and Tuman rivers and a 10 – mile border with Russia along the extreme northwest.

The 150- mile long and 2.5-mile wide ‘demilitarized zone’ (DMZ) that separates the North and South Koreas which came into existence after the armistice agreement in 1953 is far from demilitarized, despite having become one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries in Asia.