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Introduction: Two Koreas, Two Identities The 1953 armistice halted the Korean War’s open conflict but cemented the peninsula’s division into two rival states. In the decades since, North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and South Korea (the Republic of Korea) have each pursued aggressive nation-building projects to shore up their legitimacy. These efforts were rooted in starkly different political ideologies – the North’s doctrine of Juche (self-reliance) versus the South’s early ethos of anti-communist nationalism – and were carried out through comprehensive propaganda, education programs, media control, monument-building, and state rituals. This article explores how each regime constructed…