How do scholars examine a country whose borders have been largely closed since its inception? This is a conundrum that persists for observers of North Korea. It is also one that academicians in Soviet studies once faced. The latter attempted to approach this challenge from the outside—that is, through sources that were found or generated outside the federation’s borders. Defector and émigré accounts, captured documents, records of international exchange with foreign nations and their citizens, and a plethora of published materials and artwork, all backed by Cold War money, helped build the field of Sovietology and furnished scholars with material to try to pull back the “iron curtain.” Does the same framework of the “outside” work for scholars in the field of North Korean studies? The editors of Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands believe so.Decoding is a collection of essays that explores North Korea through people, politics, and trade existing on or outside its borders—mainly in the borderland with China. To the editors, the border region is a “barometer” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s relationship with its most important ally, China, and a workaround to the “outright guesswork” that scholars of North Korea tend to engage in (14). It is no surprise that the volume’s stated purpose and focus mirror those of Sino-NK, the online forum that the three editors are involved in (Adam Cathcart as founder and senior editor, Christopher Green and Steven Denney as senior editors). Acting as a bridge between the world of media and the world of academia and think tanks, the forum aims to inform readers about history and developments on the Korean peninsula—the “center of our analytical gaze”—as well as the region around it.1 The book straddles these worlds, too.The volume centers on the contemporary DPRK. Its eighteen chapters are divided into five parts: discussions of geography (summary of border literature and comparisons to other areas), examples of scholarly approaches (surveys, data, ethnography, archives), specific moments in history (1600s–1800s, 1950s–1970s, 1990s), status of special economic zones and marketization, and, finally, analysis of defectors and human rights issues. While section titles entice the reader with mentions of “theory” and “methodology,” the subject matter of the individual chapters is more modest. The essays are a mix of scholarly analysis of specific policies, documents, and the like, and personal observations and updates on North Korea’s “internal development and direction” (15). The varied content will find a diverse audience: digestible information on travel and projects related to North Korea for the general audience and research pieces for the scholarly audience.Several of the essays demonstrate the possibilities of research on North Korea. In part 1, to frame the overarching concepts of border and borderland, Elisabeth Leake reminds us of the definitional tension between the two (chapter 2). Borders are spaces that represent the limits of a state’s sovereignty and ability to enforce law, while borderlands are “spaces of potential exception,” where acts not ordinarily tolerated by the state are in fact accepted (49–50). As recent scholarship shows, such spaces of exception and sovereignty exist everywhere but are most visible at a state’s borders, where the activities of other states and transborder peoples continually challenge its power.2 Leake’s analysis extends to borders in south and central Asia, specifically to draw comparisons with North Korea’s land borders. As she points out, the great-power conflicts that so deeply carved divisions between new and old countries during the Cold War remain today.Part 2 presents examples of approaches to the study of North Korea. Markus Bell and Rosita Armytage assert that ethnography—a tool to understand both the “insider’s view” and the “outsider’s view” of groups of people, values, and social structures—allows for analysis of North Korean migrants and the societies in which they resettle (chapter 5). The authors present accounts of four generations of Koreans who moved between colonial-era Korea, Japan, and North Korea and experienced downward and upward mobility based on their ties of kinship, nation, and political allegiance. The ethnographies, while exemplary, are given too little space for elaboration, and the reader is left wanting to know more. In chapter 7, Adam Cathcart examines the obstacles that thwart historical research on Kim Il Sung, particularly his guerrilla experience in Manchuria and early years of the DPRK. As is well known, it is not only lack of access to physical archives that makes research challenging but also historical circumstances that have thinned the existence of the archive in the first place: Kim Il Sung and his comrades were too busy fighting a war to write; he destroyed specific documents; North Korean academics seldom participated in scholarly exchanges, and so on. In a rare case of scholarly exchange, an intriguing file in the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives details the activities of a ten-person North Korean delegation that journeyed through Manchuria to visit battle sites and scavenge for artifacts left by Korean revolutionaries or Kim Il Sung himself. The goal was to supply material for a partisan history of the leader.Parts 3 and 5 add scholarly depth, with their respective analyses of historical moments and discourses of defector-migrants. In chapter 8, Yuanchong Wang recovers the forgotten history of Fenghuang Gate, a zone of interaction on Chinese territory until the late nineteenth century. As he describes, though Qing China and Chosŏn Korea agreed upon the Yalu River as their shared border, in practice, a thick border between the river and the gate existed (sixty to eighty kilometers from Ŭiju on the Yalu River).3 This area, part of the “prohibited zone,” was designed to delimit Manchu homelands and segregate Manchus from non-Manchus, including Koreans. Thus, whereas the Yalu River crossing remained quiescent, Fenghuang Gate flourished as a center of activity where emissaries, traders, and visitors interacted. Jumping forward a few centuries, Dong Jo Shin (chapter 9) provides a fascinating analysis of how language was subsumed under Marxist ideological terms and subsequently used to attack minority ethnic groups in the PRC during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Contrary to the Soviet view that national languages and cultures constituted part of the Marxist trajectory of historical development, Mao believed that any manifestations of “local nationalisms”—that is, non-Han Chinese nationalism—ran counter to the conditions of historical materialism (197).4 The Korean language, as such, was considered an “anti-communist language,” and Korean intellectuals who refused to integrate Chinese loanwords into their discourse were censured during the revolution. Korean literary production managed to survive, but over time the effect of this language policy was an overall decline in Korean proficiency levels among Koreans in Yanbian.The final section of the volume seeks to understand the issue of North Korean defectors. One needs only to peruse newspaper headlines or bestseller lists to grasp how central the narrative of the refugee has become to international discourse on North Korea. As one of the only ways to study “real” North Koreans, they have been made a subject of study by anthropologists and others, too. In one of the most illuminating chapters, Sarah Bregman lends a critical eye to the discourse on human rights in South Korean and Euro-American “publics,” arguing that it produces and reproduces perceptions of an illiberal North Korean state that stands in opposition to the liberal, democratic world; members of this liberal world then instrumentalize that image to justify their common mission to save the North Korean people from an oppressive state (chapter 16). Bregman shows that North Korean defectors, the majority of whom are female, participate in this binary liberal-illiberal discourse, the unwitting result of which has been to constrain their agency to speak on their own terms and to silence other kinds of human rights movements, including those focused on inter-Korean reconciliation. The women are caught in a bind, even though they managed to cross into the free world.Ed Pulford’s essay on notions of “Koreanness” moves the geographical focus to the northern limit of the border, where China, North Korea, and Russia meet. This last substantive chapter is a welcome one, for too often observers and scholars forget that Russia shares a border with North Korea, the fateful result of an 1860 treaty in which China ceded lands on the left bank of the Tumen River to Russia and lost an outlet to the Pacific Ocean in the north.5 As Pulford demonstrates, despite the physical distance that separated them until the 1990s, Koryŏ saram (Goryeo saram)—Koreans from Soviet lands—and Chosŏnjok (Joseonjok)—Koreans from China—both lived under socialist and postsocialist countries as ethnic minorities, experiences that destabilize presumptions of a stable, homogenous Korean identity even outside the peninsula.The volume as a whole attempts to bring the “discipline” of border studies to the field of North Korean studies. But the editors overlook an important point: border/borderland studies is not a distinct discipline or method, nor is scholarship on the Sino–North Korean border so new that there is a stated “lack of established practice.”6 Border/borderlands studies is above all a perspective. It breaks down the boundaries to conventionally studied areas by asking why those boundaries exist and what has been elided by their construction.7 The same tried and true methods of critical reading, data gathering, language skills, and analysis apply—even more so when researchers seek out sources beyond those established boundaries.The issue of sources is the most pressing for the editors and all who attempt to study North Korea. Access to sources inside North Korea remains impossible for the foreseeable future, while sources outside its borders are limited in number and scope, largely state-generated narratives and high-level diplomatic documents, particularly on the subject of the Korean War.8 There are hopes that a rich repository of materials resides within Russian and Chinese archives, but gaining access is unpredictable, if not difficult.9 Beyond its closed status, the challenges of studying North Korea are deepened by past and present geopolitical circumstances—an anticommunist dictatorship in South Korea that condemned as a crime any discourse about the North and Cold War ideologies that helped proliferate images of the North as a backward, illegitimate state. The trajectory of the field of Soviet history and political science demonstrates how powerful Cold War frameworks were in conjuring the idea of a totalitarian state, but also how other perspectives could emerge and interrogate that framework, perspectives that opened the door to the possibility of resistance and power apart from the state.10 The change in focus allowed for a rereading of ordinary sources, including newspapers, and equipped scholars with new questions to handle the avalanche of materials that were suddenly available to them in the early 1990s. Scholars of North Korea are moving in a similar direction as much as possible, beyond Cold War frameworks that privilege security and humanitarian questions, and analyzing ordinary sources available on the “outside” in new ways.For its part, Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands successfully moves beyond staid frameworks and enriches our view of North Korea from the outside in.