Travelling to North Korea in Juche Year 101 - Better understanding or Deepening Mystification of the Hermit Kingdom?

Lecture open to the general public

Daniel Biró is visiting School of Global Studies and he will deliver a lecture on North Korea, based on his recent visit in the Hermit Kingdom.

Daniel Biró is visiting School of Global Studies and he will deliver a lecture on North Korea, based on his recent visit in the Hermit Kingdom.

He is an early-career scholar whose areas of interest include the issue of deviancy in the behaviour of states in the international system. In 2011 he was awarded his PhD in Political Science and International Relations by the Australian National University, with a thesis critically analysing one side of deviancy in International Relations, namely the issue of "state-failure" together with the proposed corrective policy, that of state-building.

Since then, his attention has turned towards the other side of the deviancy coin, the issue of so-called "rogue-states". Within this framework his long-standing interest in the way that international society constructs peripheral actors as rogues lead to research on the regional policy towards states like North Korea (DPRK), Burma/Myanmar and Cuba.

As recently put in one of the world's top newspapers, "the one thing everyone knows about North Korea is that we know very little about [the country], except that it is miserable, totalitarian, nuclear and erratic". A state often portrayed as one of the most dangerous rogues in the international system, North Korea is closely monitored, but little understood. Today the regime in power since the foundation of the state in 1948 seems to find itself at a crossroads, in the wake of the second dynastic transition. The death of Kim Jong Il - who was only its second leader - announced on December 19th 2011, has intensified the amount of speculation about the future direction of the regime under the new leadership of the barely known, twenty-something "Great Successor", Kim Jong-Un. The year 2012, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Kim Il-Sung, the Eternal President was long proclaimed by the propaganda machinery to be the year which would mark the rise of North Korea as a 'strong and prosperous great nation' [Gangsong Daeguk].

Having had the privilege of visiting the Hermit Kingdom during the celebrations marking the entrance into the second juche century, Dr. Daniel Biró shares the impressions he gathered from this recent trip. Complementing the search for clues about the regime's direction, it is worth wondering if by visiting the country today one can develop a better understanding or, if on the contrary one runs the risk of deepening the mystification, of the Hermit Kingdom.