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Paper short abstract:

Exploring human rights and development issues in North Korea raises a crucial methodological question regarding the agency of North Korean interviewees and scholars. Based on postcolonial theories, this paper addresses the agency and power dynamics within the academic and N. Korean studies domains.

Paper long abstract:

Can the subaltern speak? As G. Spivak asked this question many decades ago, the question is still valid for scholars who have been attempting to find the voices of North Koreans. This is particularly the case in research that deals with the daily lives of North Korean people and their human rights. However, while North Korean Studies has been dominated by scholars who have researched North Korea from both inside and outside the country, there have been relatively few studies on the methodological issues involved in studying North Korea.

The primary challenges in studying people’s daily lives in North Korea are that most foreign researchers either cannot visit North Korea at all or are very restricted in where they can travel, and academic freedom is highly restricted in North Korea. Therefore, under such restrictive conditions, the methodologies available to scholars who study North Korea are quite limited, including 1) relying on information from North Korean migrants who left the country, 2) studying materials published by official North Korean sources, and 3) more recently, making use of satellite images and GIS data (Son 2022).

While each method of approaching North Korea has advantages and disadvantages with regard to studying the country and its people, this paper particularly aims to focus on the first method of utilizing verbal accounts provided by North Korean settlers in other countries, mainly in China and South Korea and also with a few cases in the UK (Lee 2019, Lee and Lee 2014). This indeed is a method that is widely used since it is North Korean migrants who can most fully describe daily life in North Korea from their direct personal experience. Various methods of data collection have also been used, including (among others) surveys, experimental research methods, and in-depth interviews, often combined with an ethnographic or phenomenological approach.

Indeed, since many scholars, research organizations, and governmental organizations want to interview them, most North Korean migrants have multiple experiences of acting as research participants. These unique experiences of North Korean migrants could be used positively in many ways if research guidelines are strictly employed in the field. Unfortunately, however, this is not always the case, and this raises ethical questions regarding the methodological approach.

This issue becomes even more challenging when dealing with human rights issues in North Korea. Because of its notoriety regarding human rights violations committed under its authoritarian political regime, North Korea has been the target of many human rights organizations, governmental organizations and researchers who have been working on that topic. Since human rights studies often have to deal with people’s deeply personal experiences that many respondents may find difficult to share, studying human rights in North Korea calls for even more sensitive approaches. However, several respondents have indicated that this was not their experience and their voices got lost in human rights activism or research on North Korea.

What are the fundamental issues underlying this issue that North Korean respondents repeatedly raise? Is it due to the social environment in South Korea, where most of the studies on North Korea are being conducted? Or are such phenomena the result of specific characteristics or circumstances in the academic community? Or is it a fundamental issue that cannot be avoided in social science studies, as has been pointed out in many studies into methodological issues? Or is it simply caused by the capability of an individual researcher?

This article is based on the research experience of the two authors, one from South Korea and the other born in North Korea, and aims to answer the above questions using post-colonial theories and various other concepts discussed in the literature on methodology.

* The previous version of this paper in Korean received a Vice Prime Minister Award.