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| North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un |
By Steven Denney
Part two of a two-part series that looks at the new era in North Korean studies.
Students of North Korea are being introduced to a wealth of new data, much of which comes from sources actually from North Korea. The effect, as I argued yesterday, has been to give “voice” to those who have for a long time been without. However, as important as it is to give voice to the formerly voiceless, there are intellectual hazards couched in the sudden influx of new data into a field of study that has for so long suffered from a dearth of information. Christopher Green, in “New Era, New Challenges: North Korean Analysis on Virgin Soil” addresses this issue head-on and offers some advice to those in the field of North Korean studies.
There is a “human tendency,” notes Green, “to perceive something as new when, in truth, it was simply not visible before.” [italics in original] In other words, because the public only just started listening to defector voices carefully, what they say tends to come across as new. But this is a bias inherent in the listener, not the world. With a “torrent flooding down upon the Internet-savvy public,” the role of theory becomes much more important. Similar to the role theory plays in interpreting “big data,” the literature on the “politics of authoritarianism” is bound to play an increasingly important role in explaining regime durability and indicating how to understand the dynamics of North Korea’s “personalist-party regime (PDF),” among other things. Further along in the article, Green uses the literature on the politics of authoritarianism to provide a deeper analytical interpretation of the Jang Sung-taek purge and the intra-elite feud between Hwang Pyong-so and Kim Won-hong than one might find elsewhere.
Read the full story at The Diplomat