North Korea

Sonia Ryang is associate professor of anthropology and international studies at the University of Iowa.

It is always 'the North Korean nuclear problem' to our media, taking all of its cues from Washington, not North Korea as a country of twenty-three million human beings with whom we have been at war since 1950, not North Korea and American relations with it as a subject worthy of serious investigative journalism, not a North Korea that Washington might get many things wrong about, much as it did Iraq. In this volume readers will find a number of absorbing essays that depart from this opaque, uninformative, and ultimately uninterested consensus. North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding is a timely and courageous book that offers an alternative view of this isolated nation that is simultaneously so distant and unknown, and so close to an enemy that has been just across its southern border for 60 years: us.

• Chapter 1 Introduction: North Korea: Going Beyond Security and Enemy RhetoricChapter 2 Chapter 1. North Korea and the Birth Pangs of a New Northeast Asian OrderChapter 3 Chapter 2. Socialism, Sovereignty, and the North Korean ExceptionChapter 4 Chapter 3. Biopolitics, or, the Logic of Sovereign Love—Love's Whereabouts in North KoreaChapter 5 Chapter 4. The Split Screen: Sin Sang-ok in North KoreaChapter 6 Chapter 5. The Politics of Unification and Neoliberal DemocracyChapter 7 Chapter 6. Refugees, Abductees, "Returnees": Human Rights in Japan-North Korea Relations