Archive for May, 2012:
Hydrological Engineering,Coastal Land Reclamation and the Multifunctional Paradigm in the DPRK
As any student of ancient Chinese history can tell you, historically speaking, there is nothing more fundamental to political legitimacy in East Asia than the ability of a regime to harness, control, and regulate water both as agricultural resource and danger. In both guises — sustainer and potential destroyer — water politics appear repeatedly in […]
Anti-Rat Bombast and Rational Conference: Weekly Digest
Spring arrives, and with it, the season for demonstrations of all kinds — spontaneous, coordinated, repressed. Comrades in Zhongnanhai are hardly ignorant of the fact, but it is the North Korean leadership that has taken mobilization to new levels with the blossoming weather. After all, there is no point in ending up like Syria. Steven […]
Strategic Divergence: Different Countries, Differing Views
Although it may be too early to tell, it seems that a strategic divergence may be developing between Washington and Seoul as a result of domestic politics and frustration over failed diplomacy. A nascent surge in populism in South Korean politics and indications of a hawkish shift in American foreign policy towards the peninsula suggest […]
Hybridization of Performance Scale: Missile Launch
We may never know what has transpired behind the curtain — or the growing wall of statues — in Pyongyang, but we can appreciate very much being treated as the audience to a great performance. The intermingled leadership of the Korean Workers’ Party and the Korean People’s Army has been putting their new auditorium in […]
France and North Korea: Odd Partners
When Charles de Gaulle’s government shocked the West in 1964 by recognizing Maoist China, a French trend of difference — particularly when it comes to East Asia — with its neighbors and the United States was emphasized. Today, even as France is locked in a domestic struggle for the angry rural voter and “neither advancing […]
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