The production of a geopolitical imaginary in the East Asian Cold War: The case of the Five West Sea Islands of South Korea

Like other islands of the Cold War frontier in East Asia, such as Okinawa, Jinmen, and Matsu, the Five West Sea Islands (FWI) of South Korea have been a highly contested frontier of both domestic and inter‐Korean politics. This study views the FWI as a geopolitical imaginary that was constructed during the Cold War and has been sustained throughout the post‐Cold War era. Specifically, we focus on how the South Korean government has constructed the islands in the Yellow Sea into a powerful geopolitical imaginary and linked them with the inter‐Korean border conflicts around the Northern Limit Line (NLL), from the mid‐1970s onwards. We hope that this study will deepen our understanding of how particular geopolitical imaginaries are produced and consolidated. Furthermore, it should help us better grasp how the Cold War order has been sustained, both discursively and materially, in inter‐Korean and East Asian geopolitics. In this paper, we focus on how the South Korean government has constructed the Five West Sea Islands in the Yellow Sea into a powerful geopolitical imaginary and linked them with the inter‐Korean border conflicts around the Northern Limit Line, from the mid‐1970s onwards.