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Successive South Korean governments have made every effort to build the foundation for the peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula. The Park Geun-hye administration has also emphasized the importance of laying the foundation for peaceful unification and presented it as one of four administrative priorities. However, regardless of which administration assumes office, a state-centric approach has been taken towards the issue of unification. Whoever governs in South Korea, unification diplomacy targeting the four great powers has been their foremost priority. Such a state-centric approach may perhaps be an inevitable strategy to achieve Korean unification, particularly given the history of the division of the two Koreas and international relations around the Korean Peninsula. German unification in 1990 was made possible due to the interaction and cooperation among neighboring powers in the process of the Cold War's collapse. Therefore the roles and influences of the four great powers in the process of Korean unification cannot be understated. However, Korean unification has not yet been realized despite many efforts through the state-centric approach. On the contrary, it is debatable whether the state-centric approach focusing on the great powers has made unification rather difficult due to the serious conflicts of interest among those powers regarding Korean unification. This is the paradox of unification diplomacy in building the foundation for peaceful unification on the Korean Peninsula. In this context, it becomes necessary to recognize the weaknesses of a state-centric approach in the case of Korean unification and to search for new possibilities that nonstate actors can provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]