Publications
"Taekwondo and Peace Studies: A Reconceptualization of the Conflict between Taekwondo’s Governing Bodies"
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Manage No DI00000811 Country Republic of Korea Author John A. Johnson, PhD Published Year 2020 Language English Copyright 
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| Description | Taekwondo’s Martial Art and Combat Sport Battle How taekwondo became a beloved global martial art and Olympic combat sport is a fascinatingly complex story. While it encompasses numerous people, we may better understand it by focusing on two of taekwondo’s organizing bodies and their international relations efforts. On one side we have the International Taekwon-Do Federation (ITF), which was headed by a Republic of Korea (ROK; South Korea) army general who fought ardently for the unification of his divided homeland and wished to preserve its history and culture by propagating it via the martial art he named. Opposite the ITF is the organization now known as World Taekwondo (WT), which was responsible for much of the sport’s global popularity and for propelling it to Olympic status. These groups’ differing pedagogies and philosophies have caused practitioners to perform taekwondo distinctively depending on their affiliation, and today we can distinguish the two major styles with little difficulty. The two organizations and their leaders opposed each other for a myriad of reasons, which led to decades of bitter rivalry. Both organizations saw taekwondo as a means by which Korea could rise from the ashes of Japanese occupation and a brutal civil war to forge a new national identity (Johnson, 2018). Both sides loved taekwondo but argued and fought against each other for decades. Now considered the old guard, both have passed on taekwondo’s future to a new generation of leaders who sit on either side of the Korean border. This chapter conceptualizes the ITF–WT conflict anew within a peace studies perspective. For this multidisciplinary, qualitative study, an extensive literature review of ITF and WT styles of taekwondo, both academic and lay, was undertaken to understand the nature of the conflict. Literature for the academic field of peace studies were also reviewed, and the United States Institute of Peace’s (USIP) Cycle of Conflict (USIP, n.d.) was used to | ||
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