Re-Imagining North Korea in International Politics

Problems and alternatives

Shine Choi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317645498
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The global consensus in academic, specialist and public realms is that North Korea is a problem: its nuclear ambitions pose a threat to international security, its levels of poverty indicate a humanitarian crisis and its political repression signals a failed state.

This book examines the cultural dimensions of the international problem of North Korea through contemporary South Korean and Western popular imagination's engagement with North Korea. Building on works by feminist-postcolonial thinkers, in particular Trinh Minh-ha, Rey Chow and Gayatri Spivak, it examines novels, films, photography and memoirs for how they engage with issues of security, human rights, humanitarianism and political agency from an intercultural perspective. By doing so the author challenges the key assumptions that underpin the prevailing realist and liberal approaches to North Korea.

This research attends not only to alternative framings, narratives and images of North Korea but also to alternative modes of knowing, loving and responding and will be of interest to students of critical international relations, Korean studies, cultural studies and Asian studies.

1 International relations, interrupted

Issues of positionality and intercultural relations

DOI: 10.4324/9781315761541-2

Introduction

What lies behind claims of expertise and possession of a good grasp of a place and a problem like North Korea? Their benefits are widely assumed but what are the consequences of such knowledge claims? Who bears the cost and who benefits when North Korea can be ‘packaged up’ and ‘known’? How does reality come to be rendered as a static, singular object that can be known? This chapter questions the very basis of such judgements.

If North Korea – a term with an ever-changing referent – has largely become a numbing reality, it is not because we have exhausted all that we can know about North Korea under the tight censorship of that state. If the North Korean state feels predictably belligerent and barbaric, and its society unknowable but at the same time mappable, this sense of familiarity is not a mere reflection of reality. Knowing North Korea (or to be more precise, our positions of knowingness) arises from the over-determined way various bodies, sites and representations associated with North Korea are imagined using our binary constructions of good/bad, better/worse off, normal/deviant and benign/malign that prevail in international imagination. Put differently, the way frameworks, theoretical concepts and scientific methodologies are deployed, prop up a privileged and idealized image of the international community wittingly and unwittingly, that necessitates the numbing repetitive production of an ‘Other’. They are caricatures, which in themselves are not bad, but they are caricatures that not only hinder our understanding and efforts to solve the problem of North Korea in any meaningful sense but create the problem of a deviant North Korea, which in turn produces things such as international crises and international conundrums.

The main argument in this chapter is that the postcolonial recasting of ‘international problems’ as ‘intercultural problems’ has fundamental, reverberating implications on how we go about encountering, engaging with, intervening in, worrying about and imagining politics, the international and a problem like North Korea. As mentioned in the Introduction, intercultural refashioning means attending to international politics as a series of encounters between bodies that are differently inscribed by power and cultural mediation. While Inayatullah and Blaney (2004: 14–15) value culture for how it highlights the constructed order of reality (and explain this by pointing out how culture is different from nature), I shift the focus slightly and value culture for highlighting how specific, situated cultural resources get mobilized by differently mediated intersubjective positions in reality and sense-making practices. Seeing international problems as instances of intercultural encounters is to insist that there is no objective reality or neutral position from which to compel solutions to problems of war, conflict, instability and violence, nor is there a morally defensible or harmonious way of resolving tensions and conflicts. I argue that the perennial problems of violence, conflict and domination are fundamentally problems of difference, identity and power that are mediated by and mediate culture as well as the movement between cultures. To be clear, cultures themselves only exist as ‘units’ through reification of differences and the continual maintenance of the power asymmetries that make this reification of cultures possible. My primary concern in this chapter is to lay a theoretical foundation for the cultural turn taken in this book.

The chapter begins by interrogating how critical traditions in IR have gone about problematizing the prevailing approaches to international relations that see social, political and ethical problems solely or primarily as policy problems requiring the production of the most accurate facts and the most sophisticated assessments. While appreciative that poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist traditions reflexively question truth claims about sovereignty, anarchy, security and so on, the chapter seeks to push the debate further by examining how they face up to and debate the issue of positionality. In other words, it asks how fully these critical traditions face up to, question or displace their different positions and practices of complicity that sustain the current contours of power. Archiving alternative terms of intercultural relations, locating shifts in power asymmetries and creating alternative presents and futures – these are major and recurring concerns in this chapter and this book. I introduce the metaphor of translation to articulate the idea that alternative terms of intercultural encounter do not exist outside power or culture but exist somewhere between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ culture, power and our imagination. The latter half of the chapter juxtaposes arguments made by Donna Haraway and Trinh Minh-ha with those made by critical IR scholars who have spoken explicitly on the question of displacing the prevailing hierarchies and ushering in alternatives. Trinh Minh-ha engages political events and issues of responsibility, social change and justice from a position that radically rethinks the relationship between culture and politics. Focusing on Trinh’s concepts of ‘speaking nearby’ and ‘non-knowingness’, I argue that her various aesthetic, lyrical and poetic compositions help to make explicit the intimate problems of identity, difference, culture, knowledge and language. Trinh helps to foreground how critical engagements with international/intercultural relations require multi-layered, multi-directional interpretative interventions that profoundly respect the mediatory dimensions of politics. Self-reflexive interrogation of critical interventions is not optional but formative to this project.

Dissent

In writing about North Korea, I am not interested in the knowledge agendas grounded in Western science that take an accumulative, instrumental approach to knowledge. I am invested in shifts away that understand knowing in relational ways. I try to flesh out this commitment throughout the book. Many IR scholars have made this book’s shift from problem solving to critical engagements possible by working to denaturalize and decentre mainstream versions of realism and liberalism. Tactics range from Ashley’s (1984, 1988) philosophical deconstruction, to Sylvester’s (1995) and Tickner’s (1992, 1997) deployment of feminist theory, and to Inayatullah and Blaney’s (1996, 2004) efforts to bring postcolonial historicity into IR theory. As a collection, they offer critical examinations of the philosophical, theoretical and scientific roots of the claims that ‘the international’ is a distinct sphere or level of analysis best characterized using the concept of anarchy and as a realm composed mainly by rational, isomorphic states. These critical interventions question the universalizing effects of the idealized image of the ‘West’ and ‘Man’, and challenge mainstream IR dependence on positivist, structuralist and statist assumptions to prop up their positions. (Neo)realism and (neo)liberalism are particular views that privilege Eurocentric, patriarchal, masculinist and colonialist positions that have gained prominence through structuralism and positivism. Relying on structuralism and positivism for authority (and assuming that this position is politically neutral and value-free) confuses particular and deeply problematic cultural beliefs for universal scientific truths and unmediated, incontestable facts.

The thrust of these dissentions lie in their argument that IR’s inability to respond adequately to critiques of Eurocentrism, sexism, intolerance of difference (or indeed, the manner in which IR assimilates these critiques in order to neuter them) is symptomatic of the positivist commitments of the discipline. For instance, Richard Ashley notes how in the face of a specific historical problem (i.e. the post-World War II era of America’s growing international ambition), the discipline made ‘an ideological move toward the economization of politics’ (Ashley 1984: 279; also see Tickner 1997: 618–19). Here Ashley points to the ways in which mainstream IR sought to depoliticize international practices that are inherently ambiguous, contentious and contingent by relying on the reductive and technical treatment offered by positivism and structuralism. Christine Sylvester (1996) expresses an opinion shared by many others when she points out how Eurocentric and masculinist logics embedded in mainstream IR’s foundational concepts remain intact in ‘new’ conceptual developments; that is, ‘new’ conceptual frameworks use the same technical and theoretical assumptions whilst claiming to achieve a clean break from colonialism and patriarchy. In their effort to expose these problematic logics, critical IR scholars have scrutinized directly theoretical frameworks such as development, good governance, human rights, strategic asymmetry, regional stability and so on.¹

The above convergence of critical positions is not an entirely harmonious affair and perhaps rightly so. The early 1990s dispute between Sankaran Krishna and James Der Derian in the pages of the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political remains an illustrative example of the tensions between different critical IR positions. Underlying Krishna’s original review article of the poststructuralist and postmodernist IR writers is the idea that these writers are out of touch with the realities of international politics from their insulated positions of privilege as Western academics.² Krishna argues that the focus on representation, the self and the rejection of modernist politics works against and appears limited and delimiting from a postcolonial perspective attentive to the continuing domination of the world by the West. In response, Der Derian argues that Krishna has misrepresented the postmodern/poststructuralist approach, and moreover, the accusation that postmodernist international theory works to depoliticize global politics is an expression of intolerance by Krishna. Der Derian argues that productive styles of political engagement come in many forms, and attempts to turn this debate with Krishna into an occasion for ‘dialogical reasoning’ (Der Derian 1994: 13). Moreover, Der Derian and those sympathetic to his ‘indulgent’ endeavours would point out that personal and expressive explorations are especially important at this historical juncture when ‘the heroic myth’ of intellectuals uncovering truth ‘to an attentive public which thus “enabled” can change the course of history for the better’ no longer holds true. For Der Derian, there is an ever greater need to ‘break through the logjam of social scientific discourse’ (ibid.: 137, 139).

Partly because of the indirect way in which Krishna goes about his criticism, his contention that postmodern/poststructuralist IR is ‘out of touch’ and a product of privileged Western academia that can be politically disabling, remains unaddressed by Der Derian. In response to Krishna’s impatience for his kind of critically engaged research, Der Derian retorts, ‘That none of us [IR poststructuralist writers] have written the book Krishna would have is of little concern to me; that others should do so is’ (Der Derian 1994: 134). In other words, Der Derian does not see anything theoretically and politically problematic about poststructural theory as articulated in his writing. This debate between Krishna and Der Derian is useful for my exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of the cultural turn at work in this book. Put very simply, I think Der Derian’s response has missed the point and the valuable ideas behind Krishna’s criticism, and especially the significance of positionality in IR.

Positionality

Feminist IR scholars like Cynthia Enloe (1990, 1993, 1996, 2000, 2003) and Ann Tickner (1992, 1997, 2001) have persistently raised this issue of positionality in relation to gender and women. They argue that occupants of the centres, which admittedly are difficult to define but all the while exist, have a hard time ‘hear[ing] the hopes, fears, and explanations of those on the margins, not because of physical distance … but because it takes resources and access to be “heard” when and where it matters’ (Enloe 1996: 186). While I think that their conceptualization of power in relation to positionality requires further complication, the point I wish to emphasize is that an adequate recognition of one’s position in the circulation of power as an issue of difference requires something more than Der Derian’s kind of retort to Krishna. Centring requires a lot of work – active, conscious, habitual, ingrained and ingraining – which at the same time involves keeping some Others away from the centre, in the margins and on the bottom rung. My guess is that undoing this is equally a lot of work. Much feminist research and criticism, most certainly works by Enloe and Tickner, has been directed at mainstream IR, especially the canon of (neo)realist and (neo)liberal thinking, but the thrust of their argument can also be directed at critical and poststructural IR. In short, all approaches – no matter how critical – must adequately face up to the challenge of positionality. However, seeing the value of these arguments does not necessarily mean we also have to commit to a rigid model of political research; indeed, a single model for political empowerment and power would simplify the objects of our study.

Where Der Derian disappoints is that his dialogic model still privileges the masculine, white, erudite self, not only in how research is conducted and written, but also in how political change is pursued. For instance, in his more recent publication, Virtuous War (2001), Der Derian sees himself as a lone traveller making a journey into the world of military-industrial-media-entertainment network where agents of international relations remain little changed from those envisioned by mainstream IR. In short, the focus on ‘men’ as the doers and the absence of ‘women’ and ‘others’ in global politics remains completely unaddressed. Even after decades of feminist IR criticism, Der Derian does not even ask the most obvious reflexive questions – for example, what is it about his subject position in the network that gives him access to the discourse circulating among US military officers, Pentagon staff and other high-ranking security strategist types? Nor does he ask historicized and contextualized questions about virtuality and technological warfare – for instance, what are the different consequences of technology for subjectivities that are differently positioned by gender, class, ethnicity and religion, to name only the most obvious? While Der Derian (2001: 199, 202) at times relies on insights by feminists like Haraway and Elshtain to further a particular argument about virtuous war and virtuality, he does not consider the larger feminist concerns about gender (and here I would add race, ethnicity, postcoloniality) in considering issues of power, mimetic mediations, military-technoscientific authorities and violence in global politics. I am here returning to an observation by feminists: ‘Some men want to appear to acknowledge and accept feminist arguments without actually giving up any of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on translation
• Introduction: what North Korea problem?
• 1 International relations, interrupted: issues of positionality and intercultural relations
• 2 Displacing the detective eye/I: seeing translation and mediation
• 3 What ‘seeing’ suffering demands of us: photographic engagements with North Korea(ns)
• 4 I love you. Do you love me? Conflict, melodrama and reconciliation, South Korean blockbuster style
• 5 Objecting objects: be(com)ing North Koreans in an affective world
• Conclusion: how do you solve a problem like North Korea? It depends on who you are
• Index