2018, Vol.1, No.2

Journal of Human Rights Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.67

pISSN : 2635-4632 / eISSN : 2765-6748
https://journal.kci.go.kr/jhrs

The purpose of this study is to discuss the meaning of the right to access for buildings environment, which is the most important for the social activities and participation of persons with disabilities, Accessibility has to be ensured for the full social activities and participation of persons with disabilities, so the disabled groups have long resisted and demanded the ensuring of the accessibility for persons with disabilities. In response to the ask of disabled group, the Korean government has promoted the convenience facilities policy in 1981 with the enactment of the Welfare Act for Disabled Persons. In accordance with the Act on the Promotion of the Convenience of Persons with Disabilities, Elderly and Pregnant Women, And conducts a survey on convenience facilities every five years. As of 2013, 60.2% of facilities are suitable, but the rate of people with disabilities is very different. The reason is that accessibility is not ensured only by convenience facilities, and the other is that the accessibility of movie theaters and tourist attractions in real life is very low. In order to improve this, the policy paradigm should be changed from convenience facilities to ensuring accessibility. It is necessary to integrate convenience law such as Act on Guarantee of Promotion of Convenience and Act on Guarantee of Promotion of transportation, including reasonable accommodation and universal design.

Recently expectations are rising high regarding the possibility of ending the armistice regime with North Korea, and the establishment of peace as a consequence of three summits between North and South Korea, and one summit between North Korea and the US. Based on a feminist IR perspective this article explores the effects of these recent changes on the Korean peninsula including the promotion of peace and human rights. Drawing on gender analysis the feminist IR perspective represents an epistemological turn that proposes a new conceptual approach to security and peace. This approach criticizes the state concept that pursues state security against an external threat based on the idea of the Hobbesian anarchy reflecting masculinity only. Alternatively, the feminist IR perspective asserts that it is necessary to overcome internal-external state dichotomy for guaranteeing security, and remove the causes of structural violence that suppress personal security within the state. In that sense, this alternative perspective extends the concept of security toward ‘human security’, which problematizes human insecurity due to structural violence. Against this backdrop, this article addresses issues occurring between North and South Korea in general, and regarding women’s security issues in particular arguing that structural violence stems from the effects of the division on the Korean peninsula. The analysis examines the meaning of recent changes in 2018 regarding peace and human rights, and based on a feminist IR perspective reflects about what has to be done to achieve a proper peace regime by providing insights on how to overcome division and induce co-existential peace. The key argument draws on the concept of identity, and highlights the problem of involved actors’ perception of ego and alter. Consequently, for instituting a peace regime it is necessary that North and South Korea do not objectify each other but must perceive each other in co-existence, and cooperate for jointly removing the source of the structural violence. In this way, the feminist IR perspective provides a meaningful approach that enables to recognize the problem of human security due to structural violence, while particularly emphasizing women’s security.

The liberal order was the political foundation upon which the international human rights regime emerged, which was first codified with the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Without denying its importance in advancing the most basic and fundamental tenets for the protection of individuals from the arbitrary power of the state, this essay however aims to critically examine the limits to the theory and practice of human rights in the liberal order. In doing so, it underscores the productive praxes of human rights in South Korea that offer examples of grass-roots theorization and practices that gesture toward personhood, going beyond the bare minimum of human existence framed in terms of human rights. I first trace a brief history of the development of the international human rights regime in connection to the Cold War that essentially compromised it from the beginning, then use the work of political theorist Wendy Brown to deconstruct liberalism as the faulty political foundation upon which the principles of human rights stand, before concluding with suggestions for what might come after human rights through examples taken from South Korea.