North Korean Studies

This article examines the discourse and visual culture surrounding the Thirteenth World Festival of Youth and Students, which took place in Pyongyang in July 1989. I show how the visual ephemera, performances, and architectural monuments connected to the event served as a call to acknowledge the prevailing effects of the Cold War era at a historical moment widely heralded as marking a definitive thaw in Cold War tensions and the emergence of the so-called global contemporary period.

A sequel to the groundbreaking volume Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, the present volume examines in depth interactions between Western racial constructions of East Asians and local constructions of race and their outcomes in modern times. Focusing on China, Japan and the two Koreas, it also analyzes the close ties between race, racism and nationalism, as well as the links race has had with gender and lineage in the region. Written by some of the field's leading authorities, this insightful and engaging 23-chapter volume offers a sweeping overview and analysis of racial constructions and racism in modern and contemporary East Asia that is unsurpassed in previous scholarship.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Tables
Conventions
Preface

1. Introduction: The Synthesis of Foreign and Indigenous Constructions of Race in Modern East Asia and Its Actual Operation, Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel
I. Antecedents: A Detailed Examination of Early Western Racial Constructions of East Asians
II. Interactions: The Fusion of European and Asian Constructions of Race
III. Nationalism: Interactions between Race and Ethnic Nationalism in East Asia
IV. Gender and Lineage: The Impact of Domestic and Foreign Racial Constructions

PART I: ANTECEDENTS
2. East Asians in the Linnaean Taxonomy: Sources and Implications of a Racial Image, Rotem Kowner and Christina Skott
The Linnaean Revolution and View of Humankind
Sources of Linnaeus’ Racial Perspective on East Asians
The Essence of Asia: Swedish Views of China
Swedish Reports and Linnaeus’ Revision of His Human Taxonomy
Linnaeus’ Legacy and the Unfolding Racial View of East Asians
3. Constructing Racial Theories on East Asians as a Transnational “Western” Enterprise, 1750-1850, Walter Demel
The Founding Fathers of Racial Theories: Linnaeus, Buffon, Kant and Camper
The Second Generation: Multiple Directions
4. The ‘Races’ of East Asia in Nineteenth-Century European Encyclopaedias, Georg Lehner
Classifying the Peoples of Asia
The Encyclopedias' Main Sources for Remarks on the “Races” of East Asia
Chinese, Japanese and Koreans: Descriptions of East Asian peoples
Stereotypes of East Asians in General Knowledge
Visual Representations of Race in Works of General Knowledge
Concluding Remarks
5. The Racial Image of the Japanese in the Western Press Published in Japan, 1861-1881, Olavi K. Fält
Background
The Oldest People on Earth
The Shining Japanese Race
Weak and Inferior Race
Praising the Endeavors of a Poor Race
Conclusion

PART II: INTERACTIONS
6. The Propagation of Racial Thought in Nineteenth-Century China, Daniel Barth
The Background: Imperial China and the “Other”
Stage I (1846-1851): Marques and Wei Yuan
Stage II (1851-1855): Hobson and Muirhead
Stage III (1855-1872): The Self-Strengthening Movement
Stage IV (1872-1892): John Fryer and the Chinese Scientific and Industrial Magazine
Conclusion: Chinese Intellectuals, Social Darwinism and Race
7. Learning from the South: Japan's Racial Construction of Southern Chinese, 1895-1941, Huei-Ying Kuo
The South Seas as Japan’s Backyard, 1895-1914
Japan's Expansion into the Southern Chinese Networks, 1914-1928
Chinese Anti-Japanese Nationalism and Japanese Discourses on South Seas Chinese, 1928-1936
Southern Chinese as Non-Han Races, 1936-1941
Conclusions
8. “The Great Question of the World Today”: Britain, the Dominions, East Asian Immigration and the Threat of Race War, 1905-11, Antony Best
Immigration and “the Awakening of Asia”
The Prophets of Race War
Critics of White Solidarity
Finessing the Racial Divide
Conclusions
9. “Uplifting the Weak and Degenerated Races of East Asia”: American and Indigenous Views of Sport and Body in Early Twentieth-Century East Asia, Stefan Hübner
Sportive Citizenship Training in the Philippines
Chinese Cooperation and Acceptance of American-Style Modernization
Japanese Resistance and its Defeat by American Style Modernization
Conclusion
10. Racism under Negotiation: The Japanese Race in the Nazi-German Perspective, Gerhard Krebs
Early Nazi Views on the Japanese Racial Position
Becoming More Aryan
The Problem with the Japanese in the Nazi Worldview
Continuing Mutual Mistrust
The End
11. Discourses of Race and Racism in Modern Korea, 1890s-1945 , Vladimir Tikhonov
Race and Its Uncertainties
The Emergence of Race Theories in Modern Korea: One of the Logics of the “Civilized World”
“Race” and “Ethnic Nation” in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945
Conclusion: Race as a Path to Modernist Self-assertion?
12. The United States Arrives: Racialization and Racism in Post-1945 South Korea, Nadia Y. Kim
Contextual Background: America Marches In and Mass Mediates
The American Military, Whiteness, and Imperialist Racial Formation
American Mass Media, White Heroes, and Counter-Hegemony
Blackness and Imperialist Racial Formation
Racism and Invisibility in Korean “America”
Concluding Remarks
13. A Post-Communist Coexistence in Northeast Asia? Mutual Racial Attitudes among Russians and Indigenous Peoples of Siberia, David Lewis
Discrimination against Siberian Peoples as an Outcome of Racial Prejudice
The Origin and Legacy of Russian Attitudes to Asians
Racial Attitudes among Indigenous Siberian Peoples
The Communist Model of Racial Modus Vivendi
The Impact of Prolonged Racism on Indigenous Siberian Peoples
Marriage as an Anti-Racist Means in a Multi-Racial Society

PART III: NATIONALISM
14. Nationalism and Internationalism: Sino-American Racial Perceptions of the Korean War, Lü Xun
Descendants of the Mongolian Hordes: American Perceptions of the Chinese
The Ambitious Wolf: Chinese Perceptions of Americans
The Mirrored Self: A Nation-State in the Making
15. Gangtai Patriotic Songs and Racialized Chinese Nationalism, Yinghong Cheng
Gangtai Patriotic Songs: A “Colored” Political Genre of Pop Music
A Tacit Collaboration between the Party-State and Capitalist Cultural Producers in Hong Kong and Taiwan
The Interaction between Gangtai Patriotic Songs and Chinese Popular Nationalism
Analyses
Concluding Remarks
16. Japanese as Both a “Race” and a “Non-Race”: The Politics of Jinshu and Minzoku and the Depoliticization of Japaneseness, Yuko Kawai
The Historical Trajectories of Jinshu and Minzoku
Being a “Race” and a “Non-Race” in Present-day Japan: An Empirical Study
Conclusions and Implications
17. Ethnic Nationalism in Postwar Japan: Nihonjinron and Its Racial Facets, Rotem Kowner and Harumi Befu
Premises of Nihonjinron
Nihonjinron as a Manifestation of Japanese Nationalism
Nihonjinron and Its Concern with Origin, Blood and Racial Hierarchy
The Impact of Race-Related Tenets on Everyday Life
Functions of Ethnic Nationalism in Contemporary Japan
Concluding Remarks
18. Ethnic Nationalism and Internationalism in the North Korean Worldview, Tatiana Gabroussenko
The Soviet Discourse of the Outside World: Conditional Internationalism
The North Korean Worldview in the “Soviet Era”: Echoing the Soviet Paradigm
Mono-Ethnicity as a Special Korean Virtue: The Evolution of the North Korean World Vision under the Influence of Juche
North Korean Propaganda about Foreigners from Inclusive and Alienating Perspectives
Conclusion

PART IV: GENDER AND LINEAGE
19. In the Name of the Master: Race, Nationalism and Masculinity in Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, Kai-man Chang
From Anti-imperialist Nationalism to Cultural Nationalism
Masculinities That Matter
Conclusion
20. Sexualized Racism, Gender and Nationalism: The Case of Japan’s Sexual Enslavement of Korean “Comfort Women”, Bang-soon Yoon
Korean “Comfort Women”: Drawn in as Substitutes
The Nature of Victimization
Colonial Policies and the Mobilization of Korean Women
Treatment of Korean “Comfort Women”
Lives under Sexual Slavery
Nationalism, Gender and Sexual Violence
Conclusion
21. “The Guilt Feeling That You Exist”: War, Racism and Indisch-Japanese Identity Formation, Aya Ezawa
Power, Discourse, and “Mixed Blood”
The Indisch and the Dutch East Indies
The Indisch Community under Japanese Occupation
Indisch-Japanese Relationships
Indisch-Japanese Descendants
Conclusion
22. ‘The “Amerasian” Knot: Transpacific Crossings of “GI Babies” from Korea to the United States, W. Taejin Hwang
“An Act of Both Humanity and Patriotism”: The Amerasian Immigration Act of 1982
“Confucius’ Outcasts”: The Korean Amerasian “Plight”
Inter-country Adoption of Korean “GI Babies”
Living as a “Mixed-Blood Child” (Honhyeola) in Cold War Korea
“Half-American Also is American”: Towards Migration
Conclusion and Postscript

PART V: CONCLUSIONS
23. The Essence and Mechanisms of Race and Racism in Modern East Asia, Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel
The East Asian Contribution to the Study of Race and Racism
East Asia’s Role within the Rise of Racial Theory and the Resulting Hybridity
Sources and Manifestations of Racism
The Close Links between Racism and Nationalism
The Role of Gender and Lineage in Constructions of Race and Racism
East Asia and the Future of Race and Racism
Contributors
Bibliography
Index

"The purpose of this analysis is to provide an overview of the North Korean situation in order to design effective mission strategies among the North Korean people.  This analysis will provide a summary overview of the current North Korean culture, current missionary work, and possible strategies for the future.  Due to the intense suspicion of foreigners and extreme resistance to religious activity, missionaries will have to rely heavily on political, social, and humanitarian methods in order to evangelize the North Korean people" (taken from the introduction).

Marching Through Suffering is a deeply personal portrait of the ravages of famine and totalitarian politics in modern North Korea since the 1990s. Featuring interviews with more than thirty North Koreans who defected to Seoul and Tokyo, the book explores the subjective experience of the nation's famine and its citizens' social and psychological strategies for coping with the regime. These oral testimonies show how ordinary North Koreans, from farmers and soldiers to students and diplomats, framed the mounting struggles and deaths surrounding them as the famine progressed. Following the development of the disaster, North Koreans deployed complex discursive strategies to rationalize the horror and hardship in their lives, practices that maintained citizens' loyalty to the regime during the famine and continue to sustain its rule today. Casting North Koreans as a diverse people with a vast capacity for adaptation rather than as a monolithic entity passively enduring oppression, Marching Through Suffering positions personal history as key to the interpretation of political violence.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) is one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world, which does not provide its citizens with even minimal level of freedom of religion. The system is harder against Christians than to other religions, and the country is usually international rankings on the extent of the persecution of Christians. Although the freedom of religion is enshrined in the country’s constitution, it is not respected in practice. At the same time, Christianity is affected by the anti-religious communist traditions of the North Korean regime. According to the nationalist state ideology, Christians are a foreign element in the country, and the religious cult of the Kim family, which leaves no room for other beliefs. When young Kim Jong-un (1984-) came to power and the country’s diplomatic activity intensified in 2018, many hoped that the situation of the North Korean population would improve, the country’s isolation from the world would ease, which would be beneficial for Christians. So far we have not seen any positive change and there is no indication that repression will ease in the future.

The two Koreas’ divergent growth and development paths resulting from political-economic or socioeconomic differences eventually have led to differences in environmental and ecological issues, North and South Korea typifying the problems facing poor and advanced countries respectively. Putting their differences aside, the two Koreas share certain environmental risks that derive from their common geographical location: the Korean Peninsula. The most representative of the many environmental risks they share is climate change. This report aims to explore North Korea’s domestic and foreign policies in response to the crisis of climate change. In particular, it focuses on North Korea’s climate change policy under the Kyoto Protocol system, which had set the first rules and norms for international cooperation coping with climate change since the launch of the UNFCCC.

Every climate policy is somewhat related to adaptation and mitigation, which the UNFCCC highlights as the two fundamental response strategies to address climate change issues. While mitigation looks at limiting climate change by reducing GHG emissions and by enhancing the use of clean and renewable energy resources, adaptation aims to lessen the adverse impacts of climate change through a wide-range of system-specific actions. The priority of North Korea’s policy toward climate change has been to minimize direct damage from natural calamities caused by extreme weather events and to address food shortages and water management, which are indirect offshoots of natural disasters. In short, North Korea’s approach to national capacity-building for climate change has been an adaptation policy rather than mitigation policy. A lack of mitigation policy in North Korea seems rational: North Korea’s GHG emission levels have been quite low due to its decrepit economy and absolute energy shortages. North Korea’s adaptation policy still appears to have focused on land management and restoration of a wrecked environment for the construction of basic infrastructure. North Korea has assumed an unusually active attitude toward international regimes and cooperation related to climate change. This was mainly because the Kyoto Protocol system under the UNFCCC-centered international climate change regime was driven by the principles of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) and Polluter Pays (PP). These principles of the Kyoto Protocol system made North Korea a beneficiary country that would receive financial and technological assistance from advanced economies, and the North Korean regime was able to transform its foreign policy to make good use of the international system under the name of the country’s climate change diplomacy.

North Korea’s impoverished economic conditions render the implementation of its climate change policy difficult without international cooperation or assistance. Hence, it has been heavily reliant on assistance and aid from international organizations or individual advanced economies in order to strengthen its national capacity-building. Yet, how sincere North Korea really was about promoting international cooperation on climate change, and whether it was truly in earnest about national capacity-building for climate change, does raise some questions. For one, while North Korea actively sought financial and technological assistance from advanced economies based on the principles of CBDR and PP, it is doubtful whether it faithfully fulfilled the “common responsibilities” that were due from Non-Annex I Parties. In addition, doubts linger over the role of the NCCE (National Coordinating Committee on Environment), which has been responsible for the North Korean diplomacy and international cooperation on climate change, as well as the distribution of foreign aid during the Kyoto Protocol era.

The ramifications of climate change have been more serious for North and South Korea, the co-occupants of the Korean Peninsula, compared to the global average. Although they are bound to share the same ecological destiny, they have yet to even launch a discussion on climate change cooperation. Inter-Korean cooperation on climate change, mostly South Korea’s assistance or aid to tackle climate change in North Korea as well as the Korean Peninsula, was neither sustainable nor long-term—it was more like a one-off deal. In fact, inter-Korean bilateral cooperation has focused more on the South providing the impoverished North with humanitarian assistance and afforestation funds—in other words, hefty funding—than on the two Koreas working together to achieve the common goal of responding to the threats of climate change on the Korean Peninsula. The two Koreas need to propose and pursue initiatives that are for the common good of the Korean Peninsula, rather than cooperation that is rooted in one side’s political and policy agenda. Only when this happens can the two Koreas build trust, and can South Korea truly be of help in North Korea’s national capacity-building to cope with climate change risks.

Climate change on the Korean Peninsula seems to have had more important implications than anywhere else in the world. For the two Koreas, which share the Korean Peninsula, climate change is both a threat and an opportunity. As long as North and South Korea both respond to climate change and remain firmly committed to guaranteeing the sustainability of the Korean nation and the ecosystem of the Korean Peninsula, they may reduce the threat of climate change and at the same time establish peace on the Korean Peninsula. Furthermore, inter-Korean cooperation on climate change, a low politics issue, may help to defuse tensions from North Korea’s nuclear threats and bring actual progress in the trust-building process of the Korean Peninsula.

To achieve these objectives, this chapter examines Canada’s changing
interests in an evolving region from three levels: trade and economy, security
and as a middle power. This chapter is divided into several parts.
The first part briefly introduces Canada’s interactions with Asia in the
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This serves to paint a broad
picture of Canada’s “Asian” engagement. The second part introduces the
concept of middle power and how it relates to Canadian foreign policy
engagement in the region. The third part of this chapter aims to chart out
possible opportunities for Canada to align itself with other middle partners
as a critical mass that can shape the Indo-Pacific region such that it
is conducive to Canadian national interests. This proactive engagement is
necessary as being absent from the Indo-Pacific table, Canada’s interests
could be on the geopolitical menu.

This paper uses C.E. Merriam's symbolism analysis method to analyze stamps related to DPRK-USA and inter-Korean relations, which were issued from 1945 to 2021. Stamps were focused on “anti-USA” and “unification” among the “DPRK Today” homepage “Chosun Stamp” section of Pyongyang Moranbong, an affiliate of the Unified Front Department of the Korean Workers' Party. The stamps were analyzed by organizing the annals of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un, and based on this, they were divided into symbolism such as Miranda (praise of power) and Credenda (trust of power).
As a result of the analysis, DPRK-USA and inter-Korean relations stamps were issued or stopped in close correlation with the situation in Northeast Asia, and symbolic manipulations such as Miranda and Credenda were being used. In the U.S.-North Korea relationship, the period between June 25 and July 27, the date of the outbreak of the war and the armistice, is set as the period of anti-U.S. struggle, and symbolism is used to maintain power. It was to utilize Miranda, who celebrates North Korea's victory in the North Korea-U.S. confrontation, and the Credenda of legitimacy to save the South Korean people from American rule. North Korea also described various disturbances in South Korea as “anti-U.S. and anti-government,” and used Miranda and Credenda by manipulating symbols as South Korean people trying to overthrow the regime and hoping for North Korea-led “unification of their homeland.” In particular, from the Kim Jong-il period, it showed a tendency to defend the regime and worked closely not only to maintain DPRK-USA and inter-Korean confrontation but also to maintain the power of North Korea.

This article takes a closer look at the internal evolution of the North Korean political system and how it has been subjugated to the personalist regime of the Kim family. The author argues that North Korea should no longer be perceived as a totalitarian regime since it is now a fully entrenched personal regime in the first place. The author investigates how this process of personalization took place in the institutional, ideological and mobilizational dimensions of the DPRK as well as the influence on its international relations (gatekeeping). Based on these insights the author provides some scenarios for endogenous transitions from this regime type and how hereditary succession and personalism affect its survival strategies..

The deep structural and cultural changes taking place in North Korea provide an opportunity to conduct influence operations to shape that country’s culture and society, either to destabilize the government or to prepare the population for a regime change. This paper presents a conceptual model of how contradictions between top down, imposed culture and organic, indigenous culture can be exploited to destabilize the system, and eventually repattern the culture. The process includes the following steps: identification of the cultural type; understanding relevant cultural forms; identification of vulnerable targets; evaluation of the information system; identification of effective elements of persuasion; mapping of the architecture of social control; and introduction of new “attractors” to damage or destroy the constituent cultural myths.

The Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, also North Korea) Kim Jong-Il initiated a renewed Chollima campaign in 2008 for a third time in the history of the nation, in an attempt to rescue the crumbling economy.  Although all those desperate attempts failed, they reflected how important the Chollima Movement (CM) was both in the history of the nation and to North Korean people.  Yet, due to the emergence of the Juche idea and the intensification of the North Korean nuclear crises, the period of the CM remained largely untouched by scholars and its importance in North Korean history was overlooked.  Although the idea of the CM was introduced by North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung in 1956 under the country’s first Five-year Plan (1957-61), it was not kicked off until 1959, a year after the start of the Chinese Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign.  Since then, the origin and history of the CM were glossed over, if not omitted, in official North Korean accounts.  This essay attempts to fill the gap and find out to what extent, if at all, the Chinese GLF has influenced the CM, and the reasons behind the emulating efforts.  The essay will set the background by providing basic information of the two movements before moving on to a comparative analysis between the two.  It will then explain how GLF was emulated in the DPRK, along with an exploration of the reasons and motives behind.  It could be seen then the CM was, to a large extent, an emulation of the GLF, and such emulation was primarily voluntary in nature.

As a Pentagon report revealed widespread sexual abuse in the U.S. military, the mayor of Osaka, Japan, Toru Hashimoto, came up with a remedy. Speaking to a U.S. military commander, he suggested that U.S. marines stationed in Japan make more use of Okinawa's sex industry. It could be auseful tool, he said, for curbing their "aggressive sexual desires."

Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar decor." Guy Debord, La société du spectacle, 1967, para.169 (English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith) "Urbanism doesn't exist: it is simply an "ideology", in Marx's sense of the word." Attila Kotányi, Raoul Vaneigen, "Programme élémentaire du bureau d'urbanisme unitaire", in Internationale situationniste, no. 6, 1961.

Ongoing ideological or political conflicts in the modern world have led to appalling human rights violations against North Korean defectors who attempt to escape from their repressive country and seek freedom. Although some North Korean defectors have survived the life-threatening escape journey and arrived in free countries, their overwhelming challenges have not yet ended, as they now face a range of issues and challenges in resettlement, adjustment, and learning process in new and competitive societies. North Korean Defectors in a New and Competitive Society articulates several hurdles that North Korean defectors encounter, from their long journey of escape to assimilation in their new homes. This book seeks to raise international awareness of human rights violations against North Koreans, and to emphasize the importance of helping them overcome the substantial cultural gaps between North Korea and their new homes.

Let me sketch out here my vision of the cloistered cornucopia of AD 2100: Management of Planet Earth is entirely rationalized. Nature still nurtures. Artificial intelligence is history. The Machine has met its Master. The rich are enraptured. The poor are happy. The ducks of demography are all in a row. Never more is heard the discouraging word. Welcome to my sanguine vision of our future totalitarian utopia.
~
Climatologist Kent M. McGregor reviewed the entire book favorably in: AAG Review of Books. 2 (2) 2016, pps 84-86. He writes of my chapter: "David Nemeth's chapter is an incredibly idiosyncratic personal monologue in which the future becomes a kind of totalitarian dystopia. Using several parables, he elucidates an unusually positive view of a future wherein increasing happiness abounds and human desires and needs are satisfied. An elitist oligarchy uses a carefully designed code of best practices to manage the earth's resources. The result is a productive socioeconomic society in which the lower class has been dumbed down and now live happily in a kind of fool's paradise. He included a frank discussion and comparison to the social situation in North Korea, where citizens are required to appear to be happy."

Dr. McGregor's synopsis is accurate, but the futuristic society I describe is not a "totalitarian dystopia." It is instead -- and significantly -- a "totalitarian utopia."

The head of the second team of Polish medical doctors servicing the hospital told the PNA: 'During my 8-month stay, having 150 at disposition and 12 specialist clinics, doctors made 700 surgeries, provided ambulatory aid to more than 110,000 people. RTG lab made 12,000 X-rays and about 3,500 pictures. There were about 400 prescriptions per day.'

Indonesia remains one of the few countries in the world where a significant percentage of its population still thinks positively about North Korea despite the burgeoning relationship between Indonesia and South
Korea. This phenomenon can partly be explained by looking at the
formation, strengthening, and the peak of Indonesia-North Korea relations, which took place during Indonesia’s own tumultuous period of the 1960s. In this period, Cold War politics, notably the Sino-Soviet split that led to China’s aggressive policies in East and Southeast Asia, converged with both Indonesia and North Korea’s foreign policy goals, leading to a deepening relationship between these three countries. Conversely, once these three countries—Indonesia, North Korea and China—no longer shared the same foreign policy objectives due to the dynamics of their own domestic politics, the tripartite relationship cooled, and as a result, the relationship between Indonesia and North Korea has been on the doldrums since then.

نیم دانگِ پیونگ یانگ» روایت دو سفر امیرخانی به رازآلوده‌ترین کشور دنیاست. جایی که نه تنها اینترنت و ماشین« شخصی، که اصولا فردیت بی‌معنی است؛ حزب کارگران جمهوری دموکراتیک خلق کره بر همه چیز مسلط است، و مردم باید رسما رهبر خود، و پدر و پدربزرگش را، پرستش کنند. هیچ‌کدامِ این‌ها اما برای کسی که با کره شمالی کمی آشنایی داشته باشد تازگی ندارد. هزاران مقاله و کتاب و مستند در این باره نوشت شده است. پس منتظریم ببینیم دستاورد آقا رضا از این سفر چیست؟ در «جانستان کابلستان» امیرخوانی به دنبال انسان افغانستانی بود؛ در «نیم‎دانگِ پیونگ‎یانگ» آیا موفق می‌شود انسان کره شمالی را از پس غبار بازنمایی‌اش در رسانه‌های غربی به عنوان مفلوک‌ترین، و از زبان حزب به عنوان خوشبخت‌ترین، انسان جهان بشناسد؟

This article analyses North Korean ideologies concerning war and violence. For that, first there is a theoretical review of how ideologies are linked with organised violence. Siniša Maleševićʼs theory about the ideologisation of violence in Modernity is reviewed as well as Carl Schmittʼs concept of the political and his later update concerning partisanship. Following the theoretical approaches, there is an analysis of the North Korean ideologies proper, focused on Songun (military-first ideology) and on its counterpart the Chʼongdae (the gun philosophy) and what they stipulate with reference to violence and war. In the conclusion, it states that both Songun and Ch‟ongdae deal with enmity in extremes and are aware of the possibility of war involving North Korea. Even if just for defensive purposes, they call for revolutionary violence. They also serve the purpose of constant mobilisation and legitimisation of war in the country: This way it is always ready for war. Moreover, as both Schmittʼs and Maleševićʼs theoretical approaches would predict, these North Korean ideologies do not seem to be open for compromise, exactly because they deal with absolute enmity and dehumanize their enemies.

Today, in parallel with the more familiar names of Andrei Lankov, James Hoare, B.R. Myers, Victor Cha, Charles Armstrong and David Kang, we can count on the work of numerous authors, not necessarily “new” in terms of publications, but relatively less known to the public. Also, quite importantly, we are witnessing a rise in the number of (and visibility of) female scholars in a field that was largely male-dominated until recently. All of them present interesting approaches to previously uninvestigated topics, having introduced new concepts, presented new sources or re-evaluated old ones.

The concepts of filial piety are different not only between cultures but also within the same culture, if the starting point of views are different. This paper, a case study of Korean culture, is to help explain that saying. By the research method of historical – cultural comparison, we would like to highlight the characteristics of the tradition of filial piety in Korean culture through the Confucian-oriented historical records in “Samguk sagi” (三國史記, Historical Record of the Three Kingdoms) and the Buddhist-oriented legendary – historical accounts in “Samguk yusa” (三國遺事, Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms).

Korean unification seemed a conceivable prospect at the turn of centuries, especially after the Inter-Korean summit in 2000. Costs of such an endeavor are hard to estimate, although having in comparison German unification, we may expect that such a process could ruin both economies, followed by socio-political systems of both countries. There are even bigger doubts, whether is there any actor of the regional scene that could support Korean unification, as for main regional players: China, Japan or the United States such a change would a serious challenge. That‟s why, it‟s important to focus on German example again and increase regional trust and alliance system.
The main goal of this paper is presenting possibilities of Korean unification, assessing it‟s costs, having German unification in comparative perspective, as well as assessing possible influence of Korean unification on the regional system and approaches of regional powers towards the process and the New Korea.

The long controversy and struggle over Charles Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weakmay have, for the Korean Studies community felt uniquely transgressive and offensive, but the malfeasance and academic corruption of the episode is not by far the only instance of productive difficulty in the recent history of the academic field. This paper not only attempts to think through questions of authenticity and intellectual ownership in Korean Studies’ difficulties with the writer formerly
known as Professor Charles Armstrong, but also to explore other moments of complexity, both historical and contemporary, in the discipline. These include questions and problems surrounding co-production and practices of shared and creative authorship in many recent North Korean defector/refugee narratives, alternative views of truth telling and notions of “truthyness” familiar in a world of #fakenews and post-truth. The paper seeks a longer, deeper historical frame for considering Korean Studies “wicked” problems of authorship, touching on complicated processes of misinformation, disinformation and re-publication from the Cold War, past visions of political and ideological realities weaponized by security agencies and actors whose agendas and ambitions have not always entirely been clear. Ultimately beyond concrete notions of truth and objectivity, the paper asks whether Korean Studies should be concerned with the origin stories and provenance of text as much as with source and citation.

Hanbok (South Korea) or Joseon-ot (North Korea) is the traditional Korean dress. It is often characterized by vibrant colors and simple lines without pockets. Although the term literally means "Korean clothing", hanbok today often refers specifically to clothing of the Joseon period and is worn as semi-formal or formal wear during traditional festivals and celebrations.