Cornell University Press Between Mountains: Lives of Refuge During the Korean War

Between Mountains recovers the largely unheard stories of civilians who fled, survived, and remade their lives during the Korean War. The Korean War displaced nearly half of South Korea's population, with over nine million people identifying themselves as evacuees by 1952. Yet the conflict's dominant accounts focus predominantly on its geopolitical importance, sidelining the people who lived through it. Drawing on rarely used archival materials and oral histories gathered across a decade, Janice C. H. Kim argues that placing civilians at the center fundamentally alters our understanding of the war―its periodization, its human costs, and its lasting social consequences. Kim traces the main waves of flight and the failures of civil assistance that left millions navigating famine, disease, and black markets on their own. She shows that displacement ultimately reshaped postwar South Korean society itself: accelerating urbanization, entrenching anticommunism, and forging a new moral economy in which traditional bonds gave way to the cutthroat individualism of survival. Rich with deeply humane stories, Between Mountains offers a vital social history of a war that to many remains unending.