Extraterritorial Displacement: The Transnational Meaning of National Flags during Contentious Politics and the Far Right

Flags often intervene in the image space of protests, though the common assumption would be to match the nationality of the flags with their territorial site of protest rather than consider their extraterritorial displacement—how does one go about interpreting seemingly unfamiliar couplings such as the national flags of South Korea, the US, and Israel? This article argues that by taking a transformative approach that ultimately allows national flags to be decoupled from territorial borders, it is possible to extract important insights about how the domestic might interface with the transnational. Specifically, the article isolates the Korean Protestant right and their ideology behind the phenomenon of the triple waving of the South Korea–US–Israeli flags to illustrate how this serves as the focal point for (i) the reinforcement of the transnational far-right agenda such as anti-LGBTQI rights, anti-immigration, and Islamophobia; and (ii) the rearticulation of imperial structures of politics.