[Culturepedia] BTS and the Expanding Language of Peace: What Can Korean Culture Teach a Divided World?

 

Over the past decade, the world has found a new way to encounter Korea: through the music, stories and ideas of BTS. 

Young people across continents have learned Korean lyrics, searched for their meanings and exchanged interpretations with strangers thousands of miles away. People of different nationalities, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds have found common ground in songs written in a language many of them did not initially understand.

That is why BTS's global influence cannot be measured by chart positions, streaming numbers or the size of their concert stages alone. At the heart of their work has been a recurring set of ideas: learning to love oneself, finding the courage to speak in one's own voice, accepting difference and discovering ways to remain connected despite it..

Taken together, these ideas amount to something broader—a language of peace.

This is not peace in the traditional political sense. It is something more intimate and, perhaps, more difficult to achieve: a way of relating to other people. It means respecting another person's dignity, refusing to exclude them because they are different, and recognizing that every individual has a life and a voice worthy of being heard.

Peace Begins With How We Relate to One Another

Follow BTS's message over the years and the meaning of peace begins to look considerably larger than the absence of violence.

It includes recognizing difference, protecting one's own voice, respecting the existence of others and believing that people who come from entirely different worlds can still find a way to connect.

The LOVE MYSELF campaign, launched by BTS and UNICEF in 2017, offers a  clear example. Its immediate objective was to help prevent violence and abuse against children and young people. But is underlying message reached beyond opposition to violence itself.

The campaign began with the individual—with learning to respect and love oneself—and extended outward to respect and love oneself.—and extended outward toward recognizing the dignity and worth of others. The trajectory was from self-respect to respect for others, and from the individual to the community.

Seen this way, peace does not necessarily begin with institutions or treaties. It can begin with the way one person regards another.

Rather than trying to change, control or dominate those around us, simply recognizing another person's right to exist as the are can become an act of peace.

Difference Is Not the Opposite of Peace

A similar idea surfaced when BTS visited the White House in 2022.

Suga spoke the importance of recognizing that being different is not wrong and that equality begins with accepting difference. V, meanwhile, emphasized that every person has their own history and deserves to be valued and respected.

The remarks were brief, but they distilled an attitude BTS had expressed repeatedly throughout their career.

Peace does not require everyone to become the same. It requires people to coexist without demanding sameness.

Our languages may differ. Our cultures may differ. We may have grown up in completely different environments and developed radically different ways of understanding the world. Yet peace becomes possible when those differences are acknowledged rather than treated as reasons for exclusion.

In this respect, BTS’s relationship with their global fandom offers a striking real-world example.

ARMY is not a community united by a common nationality or language. Fans have had to translate lyrics, explain cultural references and negotiate differences in language and context. What emerged was not the disappearance of difference, but a demonstration that connection can exist alongside it.

The point is not that everyone became the same.

It is that they did not have to.

Finding a Name, a Voice and a Story

RM’s 2018 address at the United Nations General Assembly offered perhaps the clearest expression of this philosophy.

Speaking openly about his own insecurities and fears, he encouraged young people to begin by loving themselves, to find their own names and voices, and ultimately to tell their own stories.

The significance of that message lies partly in its choice of subject: the individual.

Wherever a person is born and whatever circumstances shape their childhood, they possess a life that cannot be reduced to a category. They have their own experiences, fears, ambitions and memories.

This has been one of the defining characteristics of BTS’s worldview. Their music has often resisted the impulse to reduce people to broad identities or stereotypes. Instead, it asks listeners to look more closely at the individual behind the label.

A person may speak another language, belong to another culture or hold values entirely different from our own. Yet they remain a person with their own anxieties and hopes, failures and aspirations.

The wider that perspective becomes, the smaller the distance between people can become.

How Culture Can Extend the Reach of Peace

One of the most compelling aspects of BTS’s global success is that they did not become global by stripping away their Korean identity.

They went outward from Korea carrying their language, experiences and cultural references with them.

The details were often intensely local: Seoul and Ilsan, classrooms and practice rooms, the pressures of youth, competition, self-doubt, loneliness and growth. Yet those experiences crossed borders because their emotional truths were recognizable elsewhere.

The cultural differences did not disappear. Instead, BTS demonstrated that empathy can cross those differences.

That may be one of culture’s most powerful contributions to peace.

Culture rarely changes people by instructing them to change. It works more subtly. It allows us, for a moment, to inhabit someone else’s perspective.

A song, a lyric or a personal story can make a distant person feel less distant. Someone whom we once viewed primarily as a member of another country, ethnicity or culture can become something more specific: a person who has favorite songs, private fears, disappointments, hopes and dreams.

In that moment, a category becomes an individual.

Perhaps peace begins with precisely that shift.

BTS and ARMY: Building a Community Through Translation

The global relationship between BTS and ARMY can also be understood as a form of cultural translation.

Fans from different countries have listened to the same songs, translated lyrics, explained cultural references and shared interpretations. One person’s understanding has become another person’s entry point into a language or culture that was previously unfamiliar.

Translation, however, is about more than replacing words in one language with words in another.

At its best, translation is an act of attention. It requires an attempt to understand not only what someone is saying, but also the cultural context in which those words carry meaning.

That makes the translation culture within the BTS fandom particularly significant.

Instead of rejecting what they do not immediately understand, fans have repeatedly found ways to understand it. Rather than allowing a language barrier to end a conversation, they have looked for ways across it.

Much of the global network surrounding BTS has been built through precisely these small acts of translation, explanation and sharing.

They may seem ordinary.

Collectively, they are not.

The Expansive Meaning of LOVE MYSELF

Among BTS’s recurring messages, few have been as enduring as “LOVE MYSELF.”

At first glance, it appears to be a simple message about self-love. But the broader trajectory of the campaign suggests something more ambitious: self-respect is not an endpoint. It can become the foundation for respecting others.

The movement is from recognizing one’s own dignity to recognizing the dignity of another.

That is also where the personal and social dimensions of peace meet.

A person consumed by self-hatred may struggle to extend respect to others. Someone who feels that their own voice is constantly being suppressed may find it harder to make space for someone else’s voice.

BTS’s message therefore connects an individual’s inner life with the way that individual relates to the world.

Peace begins within the self, but it does not have to end there.

The “Skills of Peace”

Viewed together, BTS’s major messages form a remarkably consistent arc.

LOVE MYSELF emphasized self-respect. Their United Nations appearances urged people to find and protect their own voices. Their White House remarks stressed that difference is not a defect.

The settings and circumstances changed, but the underlying principle remained remarkably stable: do not erase the individual.

Do not reduce a person to a group, stereotype or image. See them as someone with a name, a history and a life of their own.

Perhaps this is the most practical form of a “language of peace” that BTS have offered.

Before peace becomes a grand political ideal, it can exist as a series of ordinary human practices: respecting oneself, acknowledging another person’s difference, listening to someone else’s story and resisting the impulse to turn an unfamiliar person into an abstraction.

It is, in a sense, a way of reducing the scale of peace—from nations and institutions to one person standing before another.

And BTS and ARMY have demonstrated that relationships built at that scale can eventually reach millions of people.

What Korean Culture Can Give Back to Korea

BTS’s rise is one of the clearest examples of Korean culture becoming a global force. But globalization also raises a question in the opposite direction:

What can Korea learn from the connections its culture has created around the world?

Millions of people have translated Korean lyrics to understand their meaning. Fans from vastly different cultural backgrounds have listened to the same music and found emotional common ground.

Yet their identities did not have to disappear for those connections to form.

Difference remained. Connection emerged anyway.

That may be one of the most valuable lessons Korean culture has gained through its global expansion.

Peace is unlikely to mean that everyone thinks alike. It is closer to the ability to recognize another person as human even when their beliefs, culture and life experiences differ radically from our own.

This is the direction in which BTS’s message has consistently moved.

From loving oneself to respecting others.

From respecting others to connecting across cultures.

From understanding another culture to seeing the stranger within it as an individual human being.

The language of peace expands one relationship at a time.

None of this means BTS can—or should be expected to—solve the world’s conflicts. That is not the responsibility of musicians, nor should it be.

But the language they have repeated over the years leaves us with a question worth asking.

If people on opposite sides of the world can use Korean songs to discover something of one another’s humanity, how often do we extend that same curiosity to the people around us?

How often do we see someone who is different from us not as a category, but as a person?

Perhaps peace is ultimately realized not on a grand stage, but in the space between two people.

It is the decision to acknowledge difference without surrendering another person’s dignity. It is the willingness to listen to a story unlike our own. It is remembering that the person standing across from us—however unfamiliar their language, culture or worldview—also loves, worries, hopes and dreams.

The greatest contribution of Korean culture to the world may not be its ability to make Korea more visible.

It may be its ability to make strangers feel a little less distant.

And what Korean culture brings back home from that journey may be an equally valuable inheritance: a language of peace, and the possibility of expanding it.

For more than a decade, BTS have offered the world a simple but consequential idea: peace does not have to begin with a grand declaration.

It can begin with the decision to see one person, fully and without reduction, as a person.