Reviews

Anarchy and Assimilation: A Review of Recently Published Books in East Asian Studies

By | January 23, 2015

In this dual book review, Dr. Robert Winstanley-Chesters and Steven Denney review Sho Konishi’s Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan and Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, respectively.

Command and Conquer: The Co-option of Market Forces in the DPRK

By | December 31, 2014

Marketization in North Korea does more to maintain the regime than undermine it, argues Park Hyeong-jung of KINU. In the latest in a series of review essays covering key elements of contemporary North Korean economic history, Christopher Green reviews Park’s “Towards a Political Analysis of Markets in North Korea.”

Svoliking in the High Grass: New Approaches to Understanding Authoritarian Regimes

By | September 17, 2014

Steven Denney reviews a few key works on “the politics of authoritarianism,” providing researchers with multiple comparative frameworks for understanding North Korea as authoritarian regime.

And the Show Goes On: How the State Survived Marketization

By | September 01, 2014

In post-famine North Korea, the spread of markets has created a dilemma for the state. While markets are sources of revenue, they also threaten to state’s survival. How has the state responded? In the third installment in a series of reviews, Peter Ward looks at Yang Mun-su’s work on the state’s response to marketization.

After the Collapse: The Formalization of Market Structures in North Korea, 1994-2010

By | June 09, 2014

With the collapse of the state-run distribution service in North Korea, market trading, selling, and buying became a means of survival. What started then is now an integral and formalized part of economic and social life. Peter Ward’s second review concerns Joung Eun-lee’s article on market development in North Korea from the early 1990s to the present.