Politics in North and South Korea
Politics in North and South Korea

Author: Yangmo Ku

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-06

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1317236750

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Politics in North and South Korea provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the political dynamics of the two Koreas. Giving equal weight to North and South Korea, the authors trace the history of political and economic development and international relations of the Korean peninsula, showing how South Korea became democratized and how Juche ideology has affected the establishment and operation of a totalitarian system in North Korea. Written in a straightforward, jargon free manner, this textbook utilizes both historical-institutional approaches and quantitative evidence to analyse the political dimensions of a wide variety of issues including: Legacies of early-twentieth-century Japanese colonial rule South Korean democratization and democratic consolidation South Korean diplomacy and North Korean nuclear crises The economic development of both North and South Korea The three-generation power succession in North Korea North Korean human rights issues Inter-Korean relations and reunification This textbook will be essential reading for students of Korean Politics and is also suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on East Asian Politics, Asian Studies, and International Relations.

North Korea
North Korea

Author: Heonik Kwon

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1442215771

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This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary authority. The result was the birth of a powerful modern theater state that sustains North Korean leaders’ sovereignty now to a third generation. In defiance of the instability to which so many revolutionary states eventually succumb, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in modern history. Kwon and Chung make an innovative contribution to comparative socialism and postsocialism as well as to the anthropology of the state. Their pioneering work is essential for all readers interested in understanding North Korea’s past and future, the destiny of charismatic power in modern politics, the role of art in enabling this power.

The Real North Korea
The Real North Korea

Author: Andrei Lankov

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0199390037

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In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive

North Korea in Transition
North Korea in Transition

Author: Kyung-Ae Park

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1442218126

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Following the death of Kim Jong Il, North Korea has entered a period of profound transformation laden with uncertainty. This authoritative book brings together the world's leading North Korea experts to analyze both the challenges and prospects the country is facing. Drawing on the contributors' expertise across a range of disciplines, the book examines North Korea's political, economic, social, and foreign policy concerns. Considering the implications for Pyongyang's transition, it focuses especially on the transformation of ideology, the Worker's Party of Korea, the military, effects of the Arab Spring, the emerging merchant class, cultural infiltration from the South, Western aid, and global economic integration. The contributors also assess the impact of North Korea's new policies on China, South Korea, the United States, and the rest of the world. Comprehensive and deeply knowledgeable, their analysis is especially crucial given the power consolidation efforts of the new leadership underway in Pyongyang and the implications for both domestic and international politics. Contributions by: Nicholas Anderson, Charles Armstrong, Bradley Babson, Victor Cha, Bruce Cumings, Nicholas Eberstadt, Ken Gause, David Kang, Andrei Lankov, Woo Young Lee, Liu Ming, Haksoon Paik, Kyung-Ae Park, Terence Roehrig, Jungmin Seo, and Scott Snyder.

North Korea Under Kim Chong-il
North Korea Under Kim Chong-il

Author: Ken E. Gause

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 2011-08-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0313381755

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One of the most vexing foreign policy problems facing the international community today is the case of North Korea. Since the late 1980s, successive leaders of the five Northeast Asian powers have confronted the challenge to little effect. Despite a variety of foreign policy strategies ranging from threats of military force to engagement to benign neglect to engagement within the context of the Six Party Talks, neither the United States, nor South Korea, nor China has succeeded in removing the problems North Korea poses for the international community. As the United States and its allies have tried to deal with these challenges, they have been met with a country whose security and foreign policies appear erratic and unpredictable. North Korea's lack of susceptibility to diplomatic pressure and willingness to engage in provocative actions as part of a brinksmanship strategy makes it a seemingly intractable problem. Policy makers face many questions with no apparent answers. This book is designed to provide the reader with an understanding of the political process and leadership environment in North Korea.

North Korea
North Korea

Author: Young Whan Kihl

Publisher: M.E. Sharpe

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780765635228

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Featuring contributions by some of the leading experts in Korean studies, this book examines the political content of Kim Jong-Il's regime maintenance, including both the domestic strategy for regime survival and North Korea's foreign relations with South Korea, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. It considers how and why the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) became a hermit kingdom in the name of Juche (self-reliance) ideology, and the potential for the barriers of isolationism to endure. This up-to-date analysis of the DPRK's domestic and external policy linkages also includes a discussion of the ongoing North Korean nuclear standoff in the region.

Visual Politics and North Korea
Visual Politics and North Korea

Author: David Shim

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1135011362

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In the realm of international relations, there are seemingly few states like North Korea. Whether it is the country’s human rights situation, its precarious everyday life or its so-called foreign policy of coercion and nuclear brinkmanship, no matter what this ‘pariah’ nation says and does it affects the state and stability of regional and global politics. But what do we know about North Korea and how do we come to know it? This book argues that visual imagery plays a decisive role in this operation. By discussing two exemplary areas – everyday photography and satellite imagery – the book takes into account the role of images in the way that particular issues related to North Korea are understood in contemporary geopolitics. Images work. They do something by evoking a particular perspective of what is shown in them, allowing only specific ways of seeing and knowing. In this sense, images are deeply political. Individual methodological usages in the book can provide a procedural basis from which to start or rethink further studies on visuality, both in IR and beyond. It also opens an innovative path for future studies on East Asia, making the book attractive to a range of specialists and thus holding an appeal beyond the boundaries of a single discipline.

Inside the Red Box
Inside the Red Box

Author: Patrick McEachern

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-12-21

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0231526806

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North Korea's institutional politics defy traditional political models, making the country's actions seem surprising or confusing when, in fact, they often conform to the regime's own logic. Drawing on recent materials, such as North Korean speeches, commentaries, and articles, Patrick McEachern, a specialist on North Korean affairs, reveals how the state's political institutions debate policy and inform and execute strategic-level decisions. Many scholars dismiss Kim Jong-Il's regime as a "one-man dictatorship," calling him the "last totalitarian leader," but McEachern identifies three major institutions that help maintain regime continuity: the cabinet, the military, and the party. These groups hold different institutional policy platforms and debate high-level policy options both before and after Kim and his senior leadership make their final call. This method of rule may challenge expectations, but North Korea does not follow a classically totalitarian, personalistic, or corporatist model. Rather than being monolithic, McEachern argues, the regime, emerging from the crises of the 1990s, rules differently today than it did under Kim's father, Kim Il Sung. The son is less powerful and pits institutions against one another in a strategy of divide and rule. His leadership is fundamentally different: it is "post-totalitarian." Authority may be centralized, but power remains diffuse. McEachern maps this process in great detail, supplying vital perspective on North Korea's reactive policy choices, which continue to bewilder the West.

North Korea/South Korea
North Korea/South Korea

Author: John Feffer

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2003-09-20

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9781583226032

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The Korean peninsula, divided for more than fifty years, is stuck in a time warp. Millions of troops face one another along the Demilitarized Zone separating communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea. In the early 1990s and again in 2002-2003, the United States and its allies have gone to the brink of war with North Korea. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are fueling the crisis. "There is no country of comparable significance concerning which so many people are ignorant," American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood said of Korea some time ago. This ignorance may soon have fatal consequences. North Korea, South Korea is a short, accessible book about the history and political complexites of the Korean peninsula, one that explores practical alternatives to the current US policy: alternatives that build on the remarkable and historic path of reconciliation that North and South embarked on in the 1990s and that point the way to eventual reunification.

North Korea and Northeast Asia
North Korea and Northeast Asia

Author: Samuel S. Kim

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2002-10-09

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1461639611

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A country of stark contradictions and puzzles, North Korea exhibits uncanny resilience in the face of external shocks and internal woes, raising important questions of theoretical and real-world significance. What has made it possible for North Korea to defy the classical realist axiom, 'The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept'? What is the nature of the North Korean threat in post-Cold War Northeast Asia? What kind of bargaining leverage does Pyongyang exercise in system-maintaining survival strategies? What are North Korea's prospects for sustaining such survival strategies in the uncertain years ahead? This volume offers a major reappraisal of the changing relationship between North Korea and its neighboring powers in the post-Cold War era in both theoretical and practical terms. The contributors examine the complex interplay of global, regional, and national forces that have influenced and shaped the changing patterns of conflict and cooperation in North Korea's relationships with China, Russia, and Japan and with the United States. Within the context of Northeast Asian geopolitics, the book tracks, explains, and assesses North Korea's survival strategies in both the security and economic domains, as well as the prospects of these strategies in the coming years.