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We prefer not to provide links to closed sites. But for those of you with access to an academic library, two recent review essays on North Korea provide useful introductions to the literature on the country. (Truth in advertising: both reviews address our work, often with useful critical commentary.) We focus here mainly on books that have appeared in the last five-or-so years.
In an essay entitled “Trends in the Study of North Korea" in The Journal of Asian Studies (70, 2), Columbia historian Charles Armstrong notes the tendency to try to get beyond diplomacy toward the lives of the people. He covers a number of academic books, including:
- Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh's The Hidden People of North Korea (2009). Oh has long been arguing that we should just forget about the nuclear issue and focus on a strategy of regime change and humanitarian assistance.
- Brian Myers' The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves – And Why It Matters (2010). We were intrigued with this book, even if critical of any statement about how “North Koreans” see themselves. Which ones?
- Patrick MacEachern, Inside the Red Box (2010), a useful effort to parse North Korea’s political institutions;
- Andrei Lankov, North of the DMZ (2007). Always intereting, Lankov provides short, readable vignettes on a variety of features of everyday life, from housing and food to courtship;
- Armstrong claims that Jane Portal's Art Under Control (2005)—which we have not read--is the first English-language study of visual art in the DPRK.
- Armstrong pairs our account of the famine—rooted in Sen’s model of entitlement failures—with Hazel Smith’s 2005 Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance, and Social Change in North Korea. He also notes Meredith Woo-Cumings’ 2002 The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons, from the Asian Development Institute , which links North Korea’s troubles to long-run shifts in weather patterns. Although intriguing, we think climatic explanations for North Korea’s troubles tend to underestimate the regime’s failure to adjust to such shifts and the problematic quest for autarchy.
Armstrong then goes through the refugee testimony. Among his—and our favorites is Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, which as he rightly notes comes to very similar conclusions as our Witness to Transformation although much more elegantly (our review can be found here. ) He also notes Yong Kim’s 2009 Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor, another story made moving by the fact he had been an insider and believer.
We found Armstrong’s catalogue of documentary film and photographic sources particularly interesting since it is not our bailiwick. Some of these we have seen, many not:
- Daniel Gordon's trilogy on life in the DPRK: The Game of their Lives (2002), A State of Mind (2004), and Crossing the Line (2007).
- The South Korean On the Border (Ch'ŏngukŭi kukyŏngŭl nŏmda), dealing with refugees, was highly popular in the country.
- The Dutch production A Day in the Life (2004) offers a close-up view on the rhythms of family, work and school for residents of Pyongyang.
- The 2006 film A Schoolgirl's Diary was the first North Korean movie to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, and according to Armstrong “offers a fascinating glimpse of art and life in a changing North Korea.”
Armstrong also provides a catalogue of photographic studies, many from earlier in the postwar period.
Over at International Security, political scientist Dave Kang—who has written widely on both North and South Korea—reviews three recent books with the chilling title of “They Think Their Normal: Enduring Questions and New Research on North Korea.” The title reminds us of Bruce Cumings’ 2004 North Korea: Another Country.
Kang drills down into our Famine, MacEachern’s Inside the Red Box and Suk-Young Kim’s Illusive Utopia: Theatre, Film and Everyday Performance in North Korea (2010); we will review this fascinating book in a future post. Kant cites a mass of the extant academic journal literature as well.
Kang has long been an intelligent defender of engagement with North Korea, based on some simple international relations basics: “If one sees North Korea as fundamentally insecure, predictable, and concerned about its external relations, then engagement and carrots are the best way to lure the leadership into accommodating outside powers. If, however, one sees the regime as fundamentally aggressive, unpredictable, and motivated by internal factors, then pursuing deterrence and isolation is the most effective way to deal with it.” You can guess which way he falls.
Two of Kang’s conclusions are worth highlighting. First, he believes that as strange as North Korea may appear, it is amenable to social science inquiry. Hear, hear. And second, he notes that policies designed to contain North Korea’s military provocations undercut our efforts to engage North Korea economically and thus reform it and address the humanitarian questions. Unfortunately, many advocates of one route or the other don’t admit the tradeoffs as squarely as Kang.
