DMZ minefields trusting peace South Korea North Korea

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas is one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world. In April 2018, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met at the military demarcation line, a moment widely framed as unprecedented. Journalists crowded the Southern edge of the border with advanced microphones in hopes of picking up the leaders’ private conversation from afar. What their equipment recorded, however, was not human speech, but an extended chorus of birdsong. The sound of native birds became a reminder that nonhuman life persisted–even flourished–in the border zone despite, and due to, decades of militarization.
Beneath this landscape of diplomatic gestures and ecological spectacle lies a widely estimated but never conclusively confirmed reality—that approximately one million landmines remain buried under the DMZ. Drawing on Darcie DeAngelo’s (2024) How to Love a Rat and situating it in the Korean context, I ask how trust is negotiated in landscapes where peace is suspended, and violence remains latent.

Trusting the Ground

DeAngelo’s ethnographic study of Cambodian minefields–the material legacy of decades of internal and regional armed conflict–shows how haphazardly placed landmines continue to restrict everyday movement even after peace was declared. As she writes, “[l]andmines touch you in that they push you around, move you, even when you don’t touch them” (DeAngelo 2024: 63). Buried in soil, entangled with moisture, temperature, erosion, and time, landmines exert force without direct activation. Hence, landmines’ latent power lies not only in denotation but in the persistent possibility of explosion that disciplines bodies, behaviors, life, and death.

It is within such uncertainty that trust becomes unavoidable. Trust is often invoked as a moral or political ideal; something to be restored after conflict and secured through treaties. Yet in postwar environments laden with latent violence, trust cannot be postponed until certainty arrives. Korea offers an articulation of this condition—although the Korean War has never formally ended, everyday life proceeds as if it had. To trust, in this sense, is not to believe that danger is absent, but to act as if the world can still be inhabited despite its instability.
In this sense, landmines are not the legacy of war but what Stoler (2008) calls "imperial debris" — a condition in which violence is neither fully visible nor fully over but embedded in material and social life. In her terms, the DMZ is a formation in which the promise of peace operates as a promissory note of deferral rather than resolution (193). Trust, then, is not merely a psychological or political disposition; it is a materially mediated relation shaped by what the ground can do.

Trusting Peace

Minefields in Cambodia keep violence hidden under “bucolic beauty” (DeAngelo 2024: 19)—under trees, next to a pond—as they are strategically placed in relaxing spots where soldiers would be tempted to rest. DeAngelo notes that this led to landmines being “in places that inspire peacefulness,” and that peacefulness becomes “not a feeling to be trusted.” In this way, landmines undermine affective trust by disrupting the sensory cues people rely as guides for safety.

When landmines detonate in the present, they force a retrospective reevaluation of past moments of peace. When a South Korean civilian was injured due to a North Korean landmine in 2021, the blast reached backward, retroactively unsettling the meaning of the 2018 peace summit. As DeAngelo writes, “[w]hen you could not trust the ground you walked on, you could also not trust the past” (2024: 21). Here, peace is made something reversible, contingent, and uncertain. In other words, trust must be recalibrated in a world where material denotations continuously contradict symbolic gestures towards peace.

Trusting the Enemy State

In Henig’s (2012) ethnography of mined Bosnian landscapes, villagers repeatedly express skepticism toward official signages of danger, saying that “[e]verything is pure guesswork.” This is not only mistrust of the state, but the recognition that no authority–map, report, warning sign, or press release–can guarantee safe ground.

This distrust is shared amongst the enemies, as are vulnerabilities. Landmines haunt both sides, as they are largely unmapped and migrate from their original locations. Much like the Cambodian and Thai soldiers who used landmines against each other while also sometimes warning each other about them, demining has been a joint effort between the two Koreas in times of peace. As Kim (2016) demonstrates in her ethnography of the Korean DMZ, landmines produce a condition of shared vulnerability that exceeds political antagonism. Drawing from Larkin’s (2013) definition of infrastructure as “matter that enables the movement of other matter,” Kim terms landmines as “rogue infrastructure,” as matter that does not take sides but only responds to pressure and timing. In this way, landmines blur distinctions between victor and victim, enemy and ally, not through reconciliation but through shared exposure.

Multispecies Trust

Landmines structure the DMZ as a space of uneven risk, where access, safety, and vulnerability are distributed across species and political subjects. While many animals that traverse this terrain are too small or quick to trigger landmines, deer, elk, and wild boars often fall victim, and these animal injuries and deaths remain largely undocumented. At the same time, these same landmines lay the conditions for these animals to flourish by deterring human entry. The DMZ thus emerges as a paradoxical ecology where lethal infrastructure produces refuge and violence together.

Elsewhere, landmines give rise to multispecies collaboration. Landmine detection in Cambodia involves Gambian Pouched Rats trained to sniff out explosives. Moving lightly across minefields where humans cannot safely tread, they become living sensors for deminers, entrusted with decisions that carry human life and death. DeAngelo calls this a "choreography" — a delicate dance between rat and deminer, pre-designed yet sometimes improvised. A rat in a harness walks across the minefield and scratches twice when it detects TNT; the deminer records this and presses a clicker that the rat associates with food reward. As DeAngelo notes, the smell of TNT “sends happiness and pleasure through her [the rat’s] body,” suggesting that detection is not experienced as a threat but as a reward (DeAngelo 2024: 2). Training here is not a one-directional exercise of control, but a practice of becoming-with, much like Haraway’s (2008) study of how dogs take pleasure in training not because they are coerced, but because training establishes a shared world of cues, rewards, and responsibilities.

Yet this multispecies trust does not arise solely in the minefield. As DeAngelo notes, rats require "humans (as well as bombs) to become landmine-detection technologies" (2024: 7) — their entire existence reorganized through selective breeding, experimentation, and care. Trust here is engineered through the co-production of animal life, human expertise, and explosive matter, and even in moments of collaboration, it remains uneven, a pragmatic strategy where "hierarchy becomes part of the relationality between humans and rats" (133).

Towards a Relational Trust

While describing how spirituality in Cambodia makes “everyone at once perpetrator and victim” (DeAngelo 2024: 105), DeAngelo recounts an interaction with a Buddhist Venerable on reincarnation: “When you light a candle with another candle that is lit,” he asked, “is it the same flame? That is samsara” (106-107). Reincarnation here is not a persistence of essence but a relational process — the two flames neither identical nor fully separate, what persists is relation without unity.

This leads me to de la Cadena’s (2010) pluriversal politics, in which mountains, earth-beings, and landscapes are not metaphors but real political actors within Indigenous Andean worlds. This is brought into dispute with modern states–over land rights, mining, and development–and cannot be resolved with negotiation alone. Within this ontological tension, she suggests that certain realities are best understood as “more than one, yet less than two” (347). Not a single shared world, but also not fully separate, incommensurable worlds. Rather, they are distinct yet entangled worlds. Much like Barad’s (2014) notion of intra-action, what matters analytically is that worlds do not preexist their relations; hence, difference is not a matter of separation but of partial connection.

Thinking with this relational logic, perhaps Korea is also more than one, yet less than two. North and South Korea are not completely severed entities, nor are they a single, continuous state. Like the two flames, they are co-constituted through a shared historical ignition—war—yet have emerged differently through its aftermath. Landmines help us think about this condition materially: as rogue infrastructure, they intra-act across political borders, ecological systems, and temporal registers, binding the two Koreas into a shared field of vulnerability. In postwar ecologies littered with landmines, trust does not take the form of certainty. Instead, it emerges as a provisional practice of inhabiting partial connection—trusting the ground, the state, the enemy, the rat—even when those connections are uneven, fragile, and incomplete. Perhaps to live in such a world is to learn how to continue amid conditions that refuse closure.

I am grateful to my mentor and colleagues in Dr. Nikhil Anand’s course Advanced Readings in Environment and Society for the generative discussions that shaped this piece.````

Works Cited

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
De La Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “INDIGENOUS COSMOPOLITICS IN THE ANDES: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01061.x.
DeAngelo, Darcie. 2024. How to Love a Rat: Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia. 1st ed. Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century Series, v. 17. University of California Press.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet. Posthumanities 3. University of Minnesota Press.
Henig, David. 2012. “Iron in the Soil: Living with Military Waste in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Anthropology Today 28 (1): 21–23.
Kim, Eleana J. 2016. “Toward an Anthropology of Landmines: Rogue Infrastructure and Military Waste in the Korean DMZ.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (2): 162–87. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.2.02.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–43.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. “IMPERIAL DEBRIS: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00007.x.