evidence: In their constitutions, South Korea asserts the entire Korean Peninsula as its territory while North Korea claims to represent all of the Korean people. Even though the two Korean states de facto recognize each other, the idea of Korea as the nation-state of the Korean people remains fundamental, as does the notion that Koreans North and South are the same people. Thus, there are major contradictions in the concepts of Korean nation-state, its sovereignty and people, in legal, perceptional, and practical domains. While the divergence among the domains emerged in the first few years of the ROK and DPRK’s existence, the incongruences within each domain developed later. This study traces the genealogy of contradictions in South Korean intellectual discourse on nation-state and discovers the bifurcation of the concept into the "nation" and the "state" during the 1960s, followed by the consolidation of the phenomenon during the 1970s—the period when the two Koreas internalized the division.