The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War

A groundbreaking look at how the interrogation rooms of the Korean War set the stage for a new kind of battle—not over land but over human subjects
Traditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American and Soviet officials in 1945 dividing the Korean peninsula. But The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War presents an entirely new narrative, shifting the perspective from the boundaries of the battlefield to inside the interrogation room. Upending conventional notions of what we think of as geographies of military conflict, Monica Kim demonstrates how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the US wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.
Kim looks at how, during the armistice negotiations, the United States and their…