Humanity Interrogated: Empire, Nation, and the Political Subject in U.S. and UN-controlled POW Camps of the Korean War, 1942-1960.

Abstract

During the Korean War, a particular figure of warfare took center stage at the armistice negotiations – the “prisoner of war.” This once-marginal actor of war became the site of such controversy that the signing of the ceasefire was effectively delayed for eighteen months. At stake was who would lay legitimate claim to determining the correct interpretation and application of the moral humanitarian principles embedded in the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. My dissertation argues that the POW controversy reveals how the Korean War pushed to the fore an international struggle over the “laws of war” during formal decolonization. After 1945, what did it mean to engage in “war,” when so many conflicts began to bear the monikers of “police action,” “intervention,” and “occupation”? In response to this question, “Humanity Interrogated” examines a familiar narrative – the rise of the nation-state system in the mid-twentieth century – through more unexpected readings of the different constructions of sovereignty in intimate encounters, whether in U.S. military interrogation rooms, moments of POW capture, or closed armistice meetings at Panmunjom.

Drawn from previously unstudied POW trial and investigation records and newly conducted oral history interviews with former prisoners of war and interrogators, “Humanity Interrogated” is at once a microhistorical study of encounters through interrogation, a history of multi-national and state policy-making over the POW, and an international story of how the Korean War heralded an era of reconfiguring warfare in front of decolonization, following two generations of people on both sides of the Pacific as they created and navigated multiple shifting systems of warfare, racial formations, and interrogation from World War II through the Korean War. The dissertation opens with Japanese American internment and the U.S. occupation of Korea, follows a thousand Japanese Americans to Korea as the U.S. drafted them as interrogators for the Korean War, and then traces the journeys of the Korean prisoners of war as they were subsequently shipped by the United Nations to India, Brazil, and Argentina in the year leading up to the 1954 Geneva Conference on Korea and Indochina.