Korea’s Domestic Cold War

Posted by on Dec 4, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Korea | 0 comments They’re the last three hunger strikers standing. Actually, they’re sitting—just outside the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. The weather is turning cold, and they’re bundled up against the wind. The three men are legislators. Two of their number have already collapsed and ended up in hospital. In November, the government attempted to ban their political party—the United...
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Collapsism

Posted by on Oct 16, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Korea, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments When small children want something to go away, they close their eyes. Poof! The monster disappears. The spoonful of spinach vanishes. The spilled milk evaporates. Except that they don’t. U.S policymakers indulge in a similar variety of child’s play called collapsism. They close their eyes when they want a particularly despised adversary to go away. And poof! Kim Jong Eun’s North Korea...
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Competitive Suffering

Posted by on Jul 10, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Human Rights, Korea | 0 comments I was nearly at the end of a presentation on the North Korean prison camp system, when the last person in the audience grasped the microphone to ask a question. His question was so unexpected that I was literally blindsided. Up to that point, I’d already described the conditions inside North Korea’s prison camps as “odious” and “systematic,” which qualified them as a crime against...
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Infantilizing North Korea

Posted by on May 10, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Korea | 2 comments Political cartoonists love to portray North Korea as an irrational and infantile force. It’s either a baby with a nuclear rattle or a little truant in need of a timeout. The relative youth of the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, encourages such representations, but the practice predates his ascension to power. According to the dictates of their profession, cartoonists must exaggerate to make...
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The Real North Korea

Posted by on Apr 21, 2013 in Articles, Book Reviews, Featured, Korea | 0 comments Any book that purports to tell the story of the “real North Korea” runs the risk of serious overhype. North Korea, after all, is perhaps the least understood, least accessible, and least research-friendly country in the world. It has been called an “intelligence black hole.” Journalists rarely visit, and when they do they can’t just interview anyone they please. Historians rarely visit,...
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The Paradoxes of the Pacific Pivot

Posted by on Apr 10, 2013 in Articles, Asia, Featured, Korea, Uncategorized, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments The “Pacific pivot” of the United States is nothing new. At the same time, it doesn’t really exist. And yet, even though it doesn’t exist, this pivot is partly responsible for the escalation of tensions in and around the Korean peninsula. How can all three of these statements be simultaneously true? Such are the paradoxes of the U.S. shift in attention toward the Pacific Rim. The Obama...
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