Situating Knowledge about North Korea: Tracing Mainstream Publications on a Topic in International Relations

Abstract

How does mainstream knowledge on a topic develop? This study looks at publications in leading International Relations (IR) journals over the past 25 years to examine who publishes what on the issue of North Korea. Of particular interest are the countries where the authors work and where they received their education. This study also examines the citations of these mainstream articles, the institutional origin of their authors and the languages the articles were written in to see which kinds of research articles influence mainstream articles. The study then examines the theoretical makeup of these mainstream articles in order to understand the range of theoretical perspectives. Corresponding with literature that examines the discipline of IR as a whole, the study finds that mainstream scholarship on North Korea is mostly dominated by scholars working and educated in the US with noticeable contributions form South Korea and some scholars from other Western countries as well as the Asia Pacific. The study also finds that academic articles written in languages other than English play virtually no part in the main stream IR discourse n North Korea. In terms of theory and method, most mainstream articles fall within a relatively narrow range that spans soft-ratio-nalism and non-postmodern constructivism. These results show that patterns of American and European dominance in the discipline of IR as a whole are also visible in the mainstream discourse on North Korea, and that this discourse does not engage with journal publications written in languages other than English.