Conflict Transformation Theory And Northeast Asian Security

The region of East Asia in general, and the Korean Peninsula conflict in particular, presents both a perfect opportunity and at the same time a challenge for applying conflict transformation theory (CTT) to this region for several reasons. The region of East Asia while becoming the most important region in the world from the economic, geopolitical, political and security aspects, is unfortunately yet abundant with variety of conflicts and instability, thus arousing a lot of concern and anxiety not only among the powers within the region, or those who are geographically not in the region but still penetrate it from the global level, and which role in the region can not be underestimated, such as the USA for example, but the whole international community in general. The application of CTT as an approach and theoretical framework for the analysis of the Korean Peninsula conflict has several important aspects:firstly, CTT has never been used to analyze this particular conflict and has been applied very seldom for analyzing conflicts in East Asia in general, it has been mostly applied to the conflicts in Europe and Africa; secondly, CTT is a Western theory and the Western and Eastern mentalities differ a lot, that is why it is interesting to find out whether this Western theory can be applied for analyzing the Northeast Asian conflict, and here the answer is rather positive than negative; thirdly, it is important to analyze how the Eastern practice and approaches of dealing with conflicts might contribute to and enrich Western CTT.