2025 Cyril Foster Lecture - Interview with Christine Ahn
Join us for our 2025 Cyril Foster Lecture – Oxford’s annual distinguished lecture in the field of International Relations.
Title: How to End Wars: Pragmatic Approaches to Peacebuilding
Speakers: Christine Ahn, Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies and Founder, Women Cross DMZ and Lt Gen (Ret) Dan Leaf, US Air Force.
Date: Thursday 8 May
Venue: Oxford Examination School.
Time: 17:00
The 2025 Cyril Foster Lecture brings together two leading, internationally renowned speakers on peace activism and peacekeeping.
Christine Ahn is a Fellow from the Institute for Policy Studies and Founder, Women Cross DMZ. Christine is a Korean-American peace activist who serves as the Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, an organization of women advocating for an end to the Korean War. In 2015, she led 30 international women peacemakers across the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) from North Korea to South Korea. She is also the 2020 winner of The US Peace Prize for her work for peace on the Korean peninsula and her advocacy for women's leadership in peace-building efforts.
Ahead of her visit to Oxford in May, we spoke with Christine and asked her to explain a little more about this year’s Cyril Foster lecture:
Christine: This year – 2025 – marks the 80th anniversary of Korea’s division by Cold War powers. In 1945, two U.S. officers from the Truman administration tore a page from The National Geographic and drew a line across the 38th parallel – and that is literally how Korea was divided, without any input from a single Korean who had just survived 35 years of brutal Japanese colonization. As a Korean American, knowing this tragic history and the grave costs of this still unresolved Korean War, a decade ago, I led 30 women peacemakers, including Nobel Peace Laureates, across the Demilitarized Zone for peace. The theme – Making Peace with North Korea – is about empowering more people to take action for peace, especially women, because we cannot simply rely on those who hold political power, because they have failed to do so for more than three generations.
Your extensive experience as a peace activist and Founder/Co-Director of Women Cross DMZ, similarly, must provide deep insights in international peace building - how has your experience impacted what we know and still don’t know about lasting peace across this region?
It’s been an incredible and difficult journey. I’ve faced personal attacks for taking a stand for peace, like being banned twice from entering South Korea by right-wing governments and now by my own U.S. government from traveling to North Korea due a ban on all Americans. I am deeply concerned about the closing democratic space for peacebuilding, especially now as we need more than ever is people to people engagement. But I’ve also witnessed enormous resilience, especially the ability of the human spirit, driven by love, empathy and compassion, to prevail. In my more than 20 years of working for peace on the Korean Peninsula, I’ve learned that there are powerful interests who want to maintain forever war and seek to personally profit from more militarization. I’ve also learned that despite tremendous efforts from the two Koreas to reconcile and normalize relations, the United States and the West has been a major obstacle towards ending the Korean War. Given the multiple crises of rising authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy, amidst the global crisis of climate change, the time is now to redefine what makes us secure and democratize peacebuilding for a more abundant future for all.
What can we learn about the convening power of women’s leadership in peace building?
There are amazing organizations that amplify the power or women’s leadership in peacebuilding, from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) to the Nobel Women’s Initiative, to the UN Women. And Women Cross DMZ, with WILPF, Nobel women, and South Korean women’s peace organizations, has made the case for women’s leadership in peacebuilding through our campaign, Korea Peace Now! Women Mobilizing for Peace in Korea. I recently helped co-author the report Women’s Rights Under the Division System in Korea to shed light on the urgent impact of the unresolved war on women’s lives, from human rights violations, lasting trauma, the presence of U.S. military bases, and the challenges women face in the context of geopolitical tensions.
Although it is very specific to the US context, I helped start the Feminist Peace Initiative, a partnership with MADRE and Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, which is galvanizing social movements to transform U.S. foreign policy away from forever wars. Retired Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), the lone voice who opposed granting President George W. Bush authorization to invade Afghanistan post 9/11, has long argued that the way to change U.S. foreign policy was to mobilize a grassroots constituency to put pressure on Washington. In other words, there needs to be a social movement from the ground up, and to build that political will, several feminist organizations are releasing in March 2025 the Feminist Peace Playbook: A Guide to Transforming U.S. Policymaking Away from Militarism. I look forward to sharing sharp feminist insights from these two reports with the Oxford community!
