Jeju Special Self-Governing Province of the Republic of Korea, together with the International Peace Foundation and the East Asia Foundation, will convene the 4th Jeju Peace Forum on June 21-23, 2007, which is a biennial sequel to the first, second, and third Forums successfully held in 2001, 2003, and 2005, respectively.

Since it was launched in 2001 as a venue for leaders from the public and private sectors to jointly promote common peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia and on the Korean Peninsula, the Jeju Peace Forum, with the full support of the Korean government, has now established itself as one of Korea's most important international conferences, drawing key political, business, media and academic leaders from Northeast Asia and the world.

Unlike the previous forums, the 4th Forum is for the first time organized by Jeju Peace Institute(JPI) in affiliation with the International Peace Foundation. JPI is planning to provide a forum for broader and more in-depth discussions by forming a planning committee composed of scholars, experts, and practitioners in related fields. In addition, the 4th Forum will be on a larger scale, and the quality of its content will be enhanced as an international conference worthy of the name.

Particularly, the 4th Forum will proceed in the form of "forums in the forum" by holding two special sessions: Special Session on "From Helsinki to Jeju: Designing the Jeju Process for a Multilateral Cooperation Mechanism in Northeast Asia," and Special Session II on " IT Cooperation in East Asia." This reflects the organizer's(JPI's) keen awareness that we need to closely examine the correlations between the formation of a Northeast Asian Security /Economic Community and IT(Information Technology) that brings about big changes in international relations, as well as changes in political, security, and economic processes at a domestic level.

The 4th Forum purports to explore the European experience in political, security, and economic fields and apply it to the problems of peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia. In other words, throughout this forum, with the key issues including the 'cooperative framework in Northeast Asia' in mind, we will address the European experience during the Cold War and in the post-Cold War era, such as CSCE/OSCE(Conference for Security) and Cooperation in Europe/Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), German Unification and the EU economic and political integration. We will try to discover applicable ideas and frameworks for peace and prosperity, and examine whether they are useful for accelerating the process of institutionalizing regional peace and common prosperity.

If scholars, experts, political leaders, business leaders, government officials, and administrative workers have a chance to scrutinize thoroughly whether the European experience is of pragmatic help for the bright future of East Asia, and opportunities to figure out the limitations and prospects suggested by the grasped differences between Europe and Asia and their similarities, then those understanding may serve as theoretical and empirical bases for pushing forward to peace and prosperity in East Asia more efficiently by reducing trials and errors in the future in efforts to apply the European experience to the East Asia case.

A peaceful solution to the Korean problem is one of the core preconditions for achieving peace and prosperity in the Northeast Asian region. Accordingly, as the previous forums have pursued, by providing chances for political and economic leaders in the region to enhance mutual understanding through in-depth discussions of major issues, the 4th Peace Forum also intends to play an important role in accelerating the process of institutionalizing peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia, as well as on the Korean Peninsula.