Managing Editor's Comments

Abstract

Greetings to all our loyal readers and Happy New Year. Twenty sixteen is upon us and, as I am sure you all know, North Korea did not take long to make its impact felt on the news stories of both the solar and lunar New Years. I am sure many of you have been busy writing or doing interviews as, once again, the insight of North Korea scholars is in high demand. However, perhaps only in my own reflection, something felt different about the most recent nuclear and rocket tests. The tone in the media, while doing its best to cover the story in a way that portrayed it as an outrage, didn't seem to have the same effect as previous tests' coverage. Policy makers went through the usual motions of talking about sanctions and how dangerous North Korea is, but skepticism over the veracity and effectiveness of the reported H-bomb tests seemed to prevail. Even the rocket test seemed rather pedestrian. In my humble opinion, the dynamics of the nuclear program in terms of achieving DPRK policy objectives have changed vis-a-vis the perception of the actors involved. In light of this, NKR decided to publish two commentary essays that capture some of this shift in thinking in addition to a number of articles which question prevailing thought on North Korea.Hazel Smith challenges the longstanding common perception that nothing has changed in North Korea since the famine of the late 1990s. By using a wealth of data available from a number of aid agencies and organizations, she is able to demonstrate, again contrary to common discourse on North Korea, that nutrition and health outcomes in the DPRK have improved greatly since the famine period. She contributes to a shift in North Korean Studies from securitized, opinion-based discussions in which all North Koreans are either victims or villains, and which very often obscure or ignore the mundane but important facts on the ground, toward careful, qualified, data-based analysis of societal change in the post-famine era of marketization in the DPRK.Kevin Gray re-examines the question of why economic integration between the two Koreas has remained so limited through moving beyond a focus on strategicmilitary tensions to examine the influence that South Korea's domestic political culture plays. He argues that anti-communism, inter-Korean tensions, and the broader context of the Cold War initially contributed toward South Korea's national development. While there was a break in this rhetoric during the Sunshine Policy but a resurgence of South Korean discourse of anti-communism continues to be a key variable in preventing progress on the North Korean question. This suggests that left over Cold War attitudes and the dominance of chaebols in the economy may play as big a role in the current impasse as North Korea's behavior itself.Henry Em then discusses security on the Korean peninsula in terms of governmentality. Instead of focusing on institutional attributes that characterize regime type, this article examines the rationalities and techniques of government deployed since South Korea's founding in 1948. Em focuses on three issues identified as emblematic of unruliness: military service avoidance, criminality/espionage, and non-productivity. The first two illustrate how sovereign power came to be established. The third example illustrates how governing rationalities have shifted since the 1990s. By focusing on rationalities and techniques of government, he shows the importance of critically evaluating discourses and policies that emphasize selfautonomy, self-responsibility, and tolerance. …