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No Country for Blue Helmets: South Korean National Identity on the Screen in ‘Descendants of the Sun’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Patrick Flamm
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Summary

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This paper provides a contextualized reading of the South Korean 2016 hit drama ‘Descendants of the Sun’, the most prominent pop cultural manifestation of the Republic of Korea’s rising status as a global middle power. Through linking the fictional peacekeeping mission to a confidently nationalist conception of South Korean identity, the drama normalizes troop deployments by circumventing traditional narratives for legitimation. This argument rests on observations concerning the omission of any historical and UN context for the deployment, the Othering of the United States as main antagonist, and the unchallenged sense of righteousness and morality displayed by the main protagonists in an otherwise passive local setting.

Keywords

South KoreaKorean wavenational identitypeacekeepingmilitary
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 16 , Issue 11 , June 2018 , e3
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2018

References

Notes

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25 Cf. Theodore Ziolkowski, Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2012), 3.

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38 Kim, Kim Eun-Sook’s dramas, don’t you like them?.

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40 Campbell, Changing South Korea, 128.