Sea port cities' network for coexistence    

Welcome to our institute. I'm the director of Institute of International Maritime Affairs. 

Firstly, allow me to introduce dur Institute.

Institute of International Maritime Affairs was founded in May 2000 having the intention of stimulating the research works of humanities and social sciences with relation to the ocean and developing the interdisciplinary

activities with other research fields, as well as setting up the educational-industrial-governmental-academic complex and helping to make the policies for region developments. Since then, our institute has  accomplished systematically various researches on international maritime affairs, such as the sea port cities' cultures, the problems relating to harbors and shipping and maritime territorial disputes. 

Above all, our institute was  selected to the Humanities Korea Program of Korean Research Foundation in November 2008. As a result, it has been financed by the national treasury KRW 800 million and the school confrontation funds KRW 400 million every year, and will be financed KRW 12 billion during the next ten years.

Thank to these funds, we have consolidated our infrastructure in human and material greatly. Indebted to HK project. We wish to make a universal dispatch point of new studies(Cultural Interaction Studies of Sea Port Cities)

of our institute.

Cultural Interaction Studies of Sea Port Cities is correspondent to an urgent task of 21st century humanities which must go beyond the existing nation-states' borders and the divisive national consciousness. Though, our studies are distinguished from other research trends of humanities in that they premise the ocean as the space for 'communication and reciprocal vitalization, not the place of 'barriers and ruptures'.

More than 40 researchers of our institute, Including HK professors, HK research professors, research scholars, and research assistants, make the sea port cities with their research field and concentrate on the interdisciplinary reconstruction and research of the interchanges of people, information, and materials between the sea port cities; their transnational territoriality; their cultural hybridity and miscellaneity; and their relationships by means of the cooperative researches crossing various fields, such as history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, public administration, sociology, and architecture.  

We have disseminated our findings through the regional connection activities that publicize and popularize our sources and informations; the subsequent generation cultivation activities in order to assure the durability and consistency of our researches; and the academic interchange activities that facilitate the network with other key institutions at home and abroad, hold the academic conferences, and publish an academic journal. Besides these activities, we have accomplished the research relating to the marine policies and the international logistics, and as well as, After all, the practical outcomes of our research will be not only corresponded to the urgent tasks of humanities, but also connected with the task that construct a network between Korean sea port cities and build up the inter-sea-port city, cooperative complex transcending the nation-states' border, such as super broad area between Busan and Fukuoka in the opening of the South Coast Age.

We, researchers of the Institute of International Maritime Affairs, hope to diffuse openly our research activities and finfings from the Institute and share them with you. Thank you.