Christine Ahn is the founder and international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure women’s leadership in peacebuilding. In 2015, on the 70th anniversary of Korea’s division by Cold War powers, she led 30 international women peacemakers across the De-Militarized Zone, the world’s most fortified border, from North Korea to South Korea. They walked with 10,000 Korean women on both sides of the DMZ and held peace symposia in Pyongyang and Seoul to discuss the urgent need for women to advance a peace treaty to formally end the 64-year old Korean War. The work of Women Cross DMZ has been widely featured, including its letters to President Trump and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon urging peace.
Christine is also co-founder of the Korea Policy Institute, Global Campaign to Save Jeju Island, the National Campaign to End the Korean War, and the Korea Peace Network. She has appeared on major television networks including Aljazeera, Anderson Cooper’s 360, BBC, Democracy Now!, NBC Today Show, and NPR. Ahn’s op-eds have appeared five times in The New York Times, as well as in The San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, and The Nation. She is a regular columnist at the Institute for Policy Studies’ Foreign Policy In Focus, and a frequent commentator on Democracy Now!
Christine has addressed the United Nations, U.S. Congress, and ROK National Human Rights Commission, and she has organized peace and humanitarian aid delegations to both North and South Korea. She has delivered keynote addresses at major universities including Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, Pomona College, Wellesley College, and the University of Toronto.
She has worked with leading U.S-based human rights and social justice organizations, including The Global Fund for Women, the Oakland Institute, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, the Women of Color Resource Center, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, and the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development. She co-produced Fashion Resistance to Militarism, a popular education show on the dominance of militarism in our lives. Christine has a Master’s degree in foreign policy from Georgetown University and a certificate in ecological horticulture from University of California, Santa Cruz. She was inducted into the OMB Watch Public Interest Hall of Fame and recognized for her peace activism by the Agape and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundations.
Ahn tweets at @ChristineAhn.
[SHARE]
Expert DirectLink
-
Korea's Beef With U.S. Is About More Than Exports
NPR, The Bryant Park Project [June 13, 2008] -
South Korea's Beef with America
Foreign Policy in Focus [June 2008] -
U.S.-Korea Food Fight
Asia Times [August 2007] -
Reunification is on the March
International Herald Tribune [February 2006] -
Famine and the Future of Food Security in North Korea
Food First Policy Brief 11 [May 2005] -
Why War is All the Rage (co-authored with Gwyn Kirk)
San Francisco Chronicle [May 2005] -
Trustee Fees: Use and Abuse (co-authored with Pablo Eisenberg)
Georgetown University [2003] -
Shafted, Free Trade and Americas Working Poor (editor)
Food First Books [September 2003] -
WMC Features
Gloria Steinem and Christine Ahn return to the DMZ to call on the leaders of the United States and North Korea to return to talks and negotiate a final settlement to the nearly 70-year-old Korean War. Ahn's article argues the importance of including women in the peace negotiations.