Many of us were shocked by the news of the Russian advance against Ukraine and have unilaterally blamed Russia for it. Rather than such a reaction, we should carefully consider the growing presence of NATO in Eastern Europe after the Cold War and the internal disorder of Ukraine ascribed to the so-called Maidan revolution. However, we are indeed aware that the war as a means of politics has become obsolete. Using Nietzsche’s words, one could say, “the god of war is dead.” The development of military technology in the 20^th century, especially the monstrous invention of weapons of mass destruction, has made it nearly impossible for mankind to resort to war in its entirety. This does not imply that we have achieved world peace; on the contrary, it means that we are now fighting with the shadow of the dead god of war. In her posthumous work Introduction to Politics, Arendt made a thought-provoking observation about the change in the nature of war. According to her, modern warfare is characterized by the concept of “war of annihilation.” From this perspective of total war, the goal of war is no longer a peace treaty between warring governments, but the total political or even physical destruction of the enemy. In the modern world after the Cold War, where the dominance of the American forces is literally global, we realize that the ideal of the victor annihilating the loser remains alive.

The main topic of discussion at the 2019 meeting of the Japan Association for Asian Studies (JAAS) was the issue of the movement of “wartime laborers” from the Korean peninsula to Japan proper. Professor Kiyoshi Aoki and Professor Hideki Okuzono gave presentations on this topic, with Professor Tetsuya Yamada, Professor Mie Oba, and the author posing questions and offering comments to the presenters. This paper summarizes the author’s comments and questions at that JAAS meeting, which focused on the importance of considering the connections, commonalities, and differences that exist in how history problems are handled across East Asia.

First, China, Korea, and Vietnam were divided during the Cold War, and each one came to rely on the use of history in order to provide it with some form of legitimacy. History problems in this region were often related to how competing factions in these divided polities sought to justify their rule based on the past. On the Korean Peninsula and across the Taiwan Strait, this historical legitimacy was often connected to resistance activities carried out against Japanese aggression and colonial occupation. However, though both Koreas have continued to assert their relative “historical legitimacy” on this basis through the present day, the Republic of China government on Taiwan began shifting its source of “historical legitimacy” from being based on the creation of a unified China to the creation of an autonomous/independent Taiwan in the 1990s.

Second, the cases of South Korea-Japan and Taiwan-Japan relations share the fact that the dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the manner in which Korea and Taiwan were subsequently decolonized had a significant impact on the construction of their history problems. In both cases, authoritarian governments negotiated with Japan to conclude peace treaties. Their broader populaces, however, were not allowed to play a significant role in such negotiations. This led to the emergence of critiques of these treaties after their democratization, with the appearance of subsequent calls to revisit the postwar settlements that their authoritarian regimes had reached.

Third, democratization in South Korea and the expansion of freedoms in China led to the emergence of new developments in how history problems were handled, with a shift toward a greater focus on individual claims for reparations against Japanese entities. The governments of neighboring countries had abandoned their ability to seek state reparations from Japan as part of the peace treaties they signed in the decades following the end of the war. However, individuals were able to seek private compensation through the Japanese judicial system from the 1980s through the 2000s, which played an important role in the resolution of a number of history problems. In Taiwan, democratization led to “Taiwanization,” creating a historical identity that included aspects of history problems that were different from South Korea’s case. Beginning around 2005, however, the Japanese Supreme Court changed its interpretation of the segment of the 1972 Sino-Japanese Joint Declaration that dealt with reparations, ultimately ruling that private citizens did not have the right to seek compensation from Japanese companies on an individual basis. This marked a significant shift in the role that Japan’s legal system played in resolving history problems.

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2011年に南スーダンは分離独立を果たしたが、そのわずか2年後、サルバ・キール大統領率いるSPLM/Aと、リアク・マシャール前副大統領率いるSPLM/A-IOとの戦闘が勃発した。この際、和平調停の役割を担ったのがIGADだった。和平協議は和平合意文書へのキールらの署名という形で結実したが、1年を待たずに両軍による戦闘行為が勃発し、合意文書は死文化した。

　本稿では、合意文書の締結を巡り周辺国に生じた力学を整理し、合意締結後南スーダンで勃発した武力衝突に対する国際的要因を検証することを通じて、紛争解決に対する地域機構加盟国の関与のあり方を考察する。