정부의 안보인식과 위기관리 시스템 : 사스(SARS)와 메르스(MERS)사태를 중심으로

Abstract

This study analyzes the influence the government’s security awareness and the control tower as a response system exert on the risk management for new infectious diseases. With the advent of globalization and a post-Cold War order, the concept of security has been expanded from its traditional focus on ensuring the territorially defined nation from military threat to further encompass various agenda and objects. The new and recently increasing epidemics are characterized by uncertainty and rapid spatio-temporal spread, and thus their outbreaks are not limitedly conceived as simple health crises but further understood as threats to national security. In order to respond to such crises, an integrated control tower must be established at the national level. This study offers a comparative analysis of the South Korean government’s security awareness and response system for the 2003 SARS and the 2015 MERS outbreaks. The results of this analysis reveal that the Roh Moo-Hyun government was capable of minimizing SARS-related damage by means of an integrated crisis management system on the grounds of an expanded security awareness, whereas the Park Geun-Hyue government endorsed a traditional security awareness based on military security, which resulted in a division of labor in security and disaster in different organizations, that failed to properly operate a crisis management system at the time of outbreak at the cost of political, economic and social disorder and loss. This experience accentuates the importance of a security-based awareness for epidemics and the need for a control tower capable of effectively responding to disasters, and further demonstrates that the state must become the principal agent for national security guaranteeing citizen safety from epidemic threats.