Rare earth minerals, technology metals and extractive landscapes in North Korea’s web of political life

Abstract

This paper examines a moment, using material sourced from within the United States National Archives, Record Group 242, in which North Korea’s spaces and geographies of mineralogical knowledge and extraction, particulary those of Rare Earth minerals and technology metals used for the most part for war and military capacity were reconfigured at the behest of a nexus of local, geo-political and ideological interests. Documentary and Cartographic material sourced from Pyongyang’s Mining/Resource Ministries and from the pre-Liberation colonial government, during the US Army’s occupation of Pyongyang in 1950 allows for new perspectives on the place of these materials within North Korea’s web of political and material life. This paper suggests that the nexus of interests and processes which enabled the extraction of Technology Metals and Rare Earths in North Korean would prove vital for the development of Pyongyang’s present and future relationships with nature and developmental possibility. The physical and social landscapes generated by this development would later support North Korea in its political quest to capture both real and imagined Socialist modernity.