This post is extracted from the introduction to a recent special issue, Everyday Politics in North Korea, published in the Asian Studies Review. The full introduction can be read here and is currently available open access to all readers. The articles in the special issue can be read here.
Research on North Korean politics and society has come a long way since the 1990s. While North Korea’s political elite still get most of the attention, superb research over the last few decades has illuminated the daily political realities of North Korea. This special issue pulls together research by colleagues on the theme “everyday politics in North Korea”.
Drivers of Everyday Politics
How can we systematically approach the study of everyday politics in North Korea? In the special issue’s introductory essay, we propose four areas – socialization, surveillance, survival, and support – that researchers of everyday politics in North Korea can use to situate their analyses as they assess everyday politics in the DPRK.
First, as in all political systems, North Koreans are socialized into their political context. They go to school, consume the media around them, are raised by families who have been socialized into the system, and speak with friends who have been exposed to a similar context.
Formally, the North Korean government attempts to socialize citizens to follow certain rules and norms of political behavior. The school system works to perpetuate the values associated with the government ideology: support for the Kim family, national independence and self-reliance, opposition to the United States and Japan, unity, contempt for perceived traitors, and the collective over the individual.
However, political socialization can be influenced by major national events that do not portray the government positively. In the North Korean case the mid-1990s famine – the “Arduous March” in official terminology – was a key turning point in the political socialization of its citizens. The lesson that many North Koreans took away from that period, namely that the state could not always be relied on, have likely helped shape the political attitudes and everyday orientations of many citizens.
Second, the North Korean government surveils its population intensively and extensively. Everyday politics is not – or at least not thought to be by its citizens – unobserved by the North Korean government. Surveillance permeates society in overlapping forms.
At the same time, in interviews, some North Koreans, often from the provinces far from Pyongyang, testify to the existence of a sphere for somewhat free discourse – to a limit. Among trusted friends or family, certain topics of discussion related to politics can be acceptable. But this dense surveillance system helps ensure that opposition does not emerge in North Korea and drives whatever resistance may exist into the realm of everyday politics – subtle, uncoordinated, and difficult to trace.
Third, survival in North Korea has an everyday political dimension insofar as some citizens must make choices that balance their outward disposition toward the state with their physical well-being. This was most manifest during the famine. In the absence of the state’s willingness to live up to its promise of providing for the citizenry, people faced little choice but to turn to black markets, foraging, growing crops on public land, or escaping North Korea altogether. These choices were profoundly political in a context that demanded obedience. Today, the economic realities do not appear as dire as they were in the mid-1990s, but that period fundamentally changed the way that most North Koreans procure the things they need to survive.
Fourth and finally, everyday politics can illuminate levels and modes of support for the state. Some North Koreans support the state, a few may be defiantly against it, and many are likely politically apathetic, appropriately socialized to not question the state’s righteousness, or too fearful of repression to speak about politics. In general citizens outwardly comply with the performative expectations of North Korean public political life while on an everyday level frequently violate its norms and strictures without the apparent intention to oppose the government. This is a common pattern in dictatorships, where the performative aspect of everyday life is often crucial to survival and helps us to understand many paradoxes in North Korea.
Articles in the Special Issue
The articles in the special issue address these themes and collectively advance our understanding of everyday politics in North Korea. Together they constitute an interdisciplinary and multi-method collection of the state-of-the-art on everyday politics in North Korea.
The first two articles are primarily about official socialization efforts and ground our empirical focus in the North Korean school system. Schools are a key node of political socialization in any society, and here Myunghee Lee and Jinsoo Cho offer detailed analysis of school curricula and student response amid changing political circumstances. In her piece Lee, drawing on political socialization and autocratic legitimation literatures, analyzes school textbooks to uncover what themes relevant to socialism and communism the state wishes to instil in students. Addressing themes of socialization and surveillance, Cho uses social theories of biopolitics and power to interrogate the country’s physical education curriculum and its eroding control over students after the Arduous March.
The next article takes the viewpoint of the state and address the theoretical themes of support and socialization. Junhyoung Lee works to understand what messages the North Korean government disseminates to garner support among the citizens as well as how they are disseminated. He focuses on the content of the ideology, using text analysis of the government’s new year’s messages over time to understand the ways in which the DPRK’s legitimation messages have remained the same and in what ways they have changed.
The final two articles turn their attention primarily to themes of survival and support, interrogating the patterns and meanings of changed state-market relations for everyday politics in North Korea. Hyung-min Joo, Taehee Whang, Young Jun Choi, and Wooseon Choi and Justin Hastings and Andrew Yeo focus on the realities and potentialities of today’s marketized North Korea which stemmed from the imperative to survive amid the collapse of state capacity in the mid-1990s.
Joo and co-authors use survey data with over 1,300 North Korean defector respondents to better understand how marketization has changed everyday life in North Korea. Their large sample size allows for insights that can complement other methods. Hastings and Yeo inquire about whether and what type of civil society may be emerging because of marketization. This is in many ways the key question in understanding North Korean politics as it is perhaps the most important variable that has changed in the past several decades.
Taken together, these contributions explain how the conceptual tools of socialisation, surveillance, support, and survival help us understand North Korea’s everyday politics. They bring varied data, methods, and disciplinary insights to the question and can be a touchstone for future research on the topic.
Image: Photo by Thomas Evans on Unsplash
