Evaluating Everyday Politics in North Korea

ABSTRACT

In North Korea, as elsewhere, there exists a society beyond the state, and an everyday life where government authority meets and mixes with the private sphere. Examining this sphere is crucial for a holistic understanding of North Korean politics, both in the past and the present, and this is the goal of this Special Issue. Our introductory essay reviews the diverse literature on everyday politics in North Korea and assesses patterns within it. Next, it proposes four theoretical considerations in the hope that they may lend common ground to those doing research on everyday politics in North Korea and facilitate more theoretically informed discussion. Researchers can use these areas – socialisation, surveillance, survival, and support – to situate their analyses more theoretically as they assess everyday politics in the DPRK. Each of the contributions to this Special Issue addresses some or all of these areas, which are intended to be a framework to bring the contributions, and by extension the broader topic of everyday politics in North Korea, into a deeper theoretical conversation.

KEYWORDS:

• North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK)
• everyday politics
• authoritarianism
• totalitarianism

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to their colleagues in the Special Issue and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this introduction, and the editorial team of Asian Studies Review for facilitating the Special Issue.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. There is a debate about the proper terminology for North Koreans in South Korea and/or China. In this article, we choose not to focus at length on this question, and instead use the term ‘defectors’ throughout, simply because it is the most used. Small but significant populations of non-defector North Koreans live in China, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.

^2. For example, one of the most important works on the famine in Maoist China during the Great Leap Forward was written using Chinese Communist Party documents (see Yang, 2012).

^3. For a fascinating elaboration on this in novel form by an author claiming to be writing clandestinely inside North Korea, see Bandi (2017)

Additional information

Funding

The authors wish to thank the Korea Foundation for support via the grant Everyday Politics in North Korea: Understanding, Tracking, and Theorizing Change.