Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Korea (north), history'

Juche ideology, created by founder Kim Il-Sung, governs all aspects of North Korean society. This thesis attempts to answer the questions of why and how Juche ideology and the cult of personality surrounding Kim Il-Sung were successfully implemented in North Korea. It is a historical analysis of the formation of the North Korean state that considers developments from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, with particular attention paid to the 1950s-1970s and to Kim’s own writings and speeches. The thesis argues that Juche was successfully implemented and institutionalized in North Korea due to several factors, including the rise of Korean nationalism, the personal history of Kim Il-Sung, the Korean War and resulting domestic strife, and the influence of the international socialist movement. It provides a historical explanation of Juche and its importance within North Korea, which in turn is necessary for understanding North Korea as a whole.

xvi, 341 p. : ill. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: KNIGHT GN855.K6 R6 1997<br>The primary purpose of this dissertation is to reconstruct sociocultural development in the North Han River Valley in Korea during the prehistoric and proto historic periods ( ca 6000 B .C.-A.D. 300). Based on theoretical ideas about the close relationship between cultural behavior and the natural environment as well as synthetical observation of archaeological data in the North Han River Valley, I have proposed the following testable hypothesis in regard to 'sociocultural development in the North Han River Valley : that its unique ecosystem brought about a subsistence pattern unique to the region. The North Han River Valley's specific geographical formation, connected with the Lower Han River Basin by way of the river system, brought it under the crucial influence of the latter's more advanced cultural elements. The circumscribed environment derived from the distinctively developed geomophological formation of the North Han River Valley influenced autochthonous sociocultural development in the region. Enumerating the most basic factors, the affluent riverine resources of the Valley enabled Chiilmun period inhabitants be heavily dependent on riverine fishing supplemented by the hunting and gathering of wild vegetation. Riverine fishing as well as hunting and gathering richly supplemented the agrarian economy which became dominant in the Valley after the appearance ofMumun people in later prehistoric times. Due to population saturation of limited arable lands, Mumun agrarian people became increasingly circumscribed and could not evolve into a state-level society. In association with this factor, the geographical proximity of the Valley to the Lower Han River inevitably brought it under the influence of advanced cultures emerging in the Lower Han River Basin. This process, which began in the later Mumun period, actually has continued to the present, passing through the protohistoric State Formation period and Paekche kingdom.<br>Committee in charge: Dr. C. Melvin Aikens, Chair; Dr. Song Nai Rhee; Dr. William S. Ayres; Dr. William G. Loy; Dr. Philip Young

This dissertation is a study of ordinary North Korean people who have persevered in the face of tremendous social, political, and economic trials throughout their country's modern history and a tribute to their unflagging ingenuity and good humor that allowed them to hold onto their humanity. Focusing on the question of agency within the realm of everyday living, my inquiry examines the emergence of a laughing subject during the post-Korean War period and the state's efforts to discipline him through cinema in the succeeding decade. A product of the new Soviet-sponsored cultural policy of the 1950s that promoted social and political satire across the socialist world, the jester became an identity tactically adopted by various individuals, which was responsible for the proliferation of nonconformist practices in North Korea. Using Michel de Certeau's concept of the everyday as a sphere of creative inventiveness, this work describes and analyzes the small acts of "comic disobedience" by means of which the ordinary person has been able to outmaneuver the existing order and create a thriving underground culture of antidiscipline. Spanning a variety of media from print cartoons to live-action cinema to animation, the official response to the jester's challenge, on one hand, sought to create identifiable comic characters and, on the other, effectively demarcate between humor and satire with a view of turning a jarring cacophony of laughing voices into a harmonious chorus of collective mirth serving the state's needs. Based on Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, my method of analysis suggests that, despite the government's attempts to eliminate any ambiguity from newly constructed ideological texts, the ordinary individual always finds myriad ways to exercise autonomy through his unending playful subversion of official discourse. By tracing the evolution of this dynamic in the North Korean streets, movie theaters, and film studios over the course of nearly two decades, I argue that the production of formal film comedy was inextricably bound up with the state's desire to interpellate a politically loyal and socially conformist subject and should be seen as part of the larger everyday aesthetic of living that took root within the socialist world.<br>East Asian Languages and Civilizations

The purpose of this comparative and historical study is to consider a reconceptualization of the notion of educational policy transfer, based on an analysis of how the reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation in the two Koreas influenced the educational development of North and South Korea from 1945 to 1959. The conceptual framework for the research drew on a definition of 'policy' as a comprehensive concept comprising of policy process and practice 'on the ground,' and going beyond a rigid definition of it as a formally recorded and proclaimed statement by a government. This concept of policy enabled me to analyze the process and practice of the educational reforms from a multi-dimensional perspective, incorporating the beliefs of local actors and the bureaucracy of domestic institutions. For this purpose, historical sources including South Korean, North Korean and US government documents, magazines, newpapers, teachers' resumés and guides and the memoires and diaries of important policy-makers were analyzed; historical documentation was complemented by expert interviews with eleven South and North Korean policy-makers and academics. In South Korea, educational reforms were implemented to promote liberal democratic ideals in the education system. Curricular and systemic changes were made to teach democratic procedures and concepts, such as the introduction of the subject social studies, the establishment of a single-track school system, and the introduction of a student-centered pedagogy to primary schools. In North Korea, a socialist-communist ideology, along with an attraction to the Soviet Union as a model state to follow, was extensively promoted through a series of educational reforms as political indoctrination intensified in the adult education and school curricula. In both contexts, the localization of the reforms was affected by cultural and social factors unique to Korea: the authoritarian legacy of Confucianism and Japanese colonization, and the nationalism that had been fostered for the purpose of state-formation. The Korean case indicates that the state-centric, linear and static view of educational policy transfer should be replaced by a new conceptualization which includes the complex web of decision-making and implementation processes that involve negotiations and compromises among various politicians and administrators who are driven by national as well as personal interests and goals. For example, although the educational reforms in the two Koreas were developed by Soviet and US military in order to maximize their long-term security interests in the Korean peninsula, the key actors who implemented the reforms were Korean policy-makers, who had been appointed to key positions of the educational administrations through the bureaucratic politics between the military authorities and the Korean polity. Although the overall objective of the educational reforms was to extend the ideological influences of the Soviet Union and the USA in the Korean peninsula, specific programs and policies for the reforms depended on the Korean policy-makers' understanding and interpretations of different ideologies.

At the time that this thesis is printed, we are reminded of the tumultuous relationship between North Korea and the United States every day. If we follow the mainstream news regularly, it seems like we are on a steady path to war. Ultimately, this paper is centered around the question: what is the best foreign policy strategy for both countries to achieve respective goals, without descending into armed conflict? Specifically, I evaluated the failures of the last three U.S. Presidents and used their shortcomings to explain limitations in current foreign policy strategy. I also attempted to show North Korean concerns and perspectives regarding these issues, as our cultural and national biases often prevent us from seeing this issue with true clarity. For some background, I combined personal experience with a primary source interview. I then used scholarly articles from a variety of ideological lenses to analyze events from multiple viewpoints. Throughout the paper, I try to force readers to think critically about these events, rather than consume them through short headlines on the evening news. I learned that there is major potential for diplomatic alternatives to armed conflict in this relationship. I also learned that the current foreign policy strategies both countries are engaging in do not serve their best interests, or help to achieve foreign policy goals. These ideas are crucial to understand, as the likelihood for war between North Korea and the United States becomes greater each day. Furthermore, this war would result in immense loss of life and the displacement of millions of innocent people.

This thesis investigates the future direction of Japanese security policy by asking whether Japan can contribute to international security through the use of economic rather than military power after the Cold War, and what are the policy-making obstacles to this. Chapter one outlines how the post-Cold War debate on security has shifted from military to economic conceptions of security, and how this makes it possible to conceive of Japan as a global civilian power which employs its economic strength to contribute to international security. Chapters two and three then go on to construct a detailed theoretical model of economic security policy and Japanese economic power in order to test empirically the concept of global civilian power in the case study. Chapter four introduces the case study of Japan-North Korea security relations and demonstrates that since the end of the Cold War the North Korean security threat has come to be perceived by policy-makers in Japan as generated by economic insecurity, and thus requiring the types of economic solutions that a global civilian power can provide. Chapter five then tests the model of Japanese economic power against the case of North Korea and reveals that even though Japan has the latent capacity to use economic power to help resolve this security problem, as yet it has not mobilised sufficient economic power to enable it to act a global civilian power. Chapter six looks at the internal security policy-making process in Japan in order to explain the reasons behind Japan's non-fulfillment of the role of a global civilian power, and argues that in fact Japan in this period has increased its military role in security by utilising the legitimacy of the North Korean threat. In the light of the preceding arguments, the conclusion reappraises the concept of global civilian power, Japan's security role, and the implications for global security.

The cutting dates of 10 wood timbers (girders and corner rafters) of Sinmu-mun, the north gate of Kyungbok Palace in Seoul, were determined by the dendrochronological method. Tree-ring chronologies of unknown dates derived from the timbers were crossdated using the graphic comparison method against the dated master chronologies derived from living trees. The living trees for the masters used for this study were Pinus densiflora Sieb. et Zucc. (Japanese red pine), a major timber species for Korean traditional buildings. By comparing the Sinmu-mun samples with the masters from the western Sorak Mountains in central-eastern Korea, the Sinmu-mun samples yielded the cutting dates A.D. 1868, 1869, and 1870/1871. Surprisingly, these dates are 3 to 6 year later than the known date (A.D. 1865) of the Sinmu-mun reconstruction, which was recorded in a historical document ‘Ilsungrok’, the King’s official diary. Since the time that the Sinmu-mun construction date had been questioned, another record was found in the 1872 April issue of Ilsungrok, indicating the rebuilding of Sinmu-mun in the 1870s. Both pieces of evidence, from tree-ring dates and historic records, prove that the rebuilding of Sinmu-mun started after the Fall of 1870, but not later than April 1872. The results prove that tree-ring dating is a precise dating method and it can be applied to archaeological studies on Korean structures.

This paper analyzes the the past and current security landscape in Northeast Asia with particular emphasis on the Korean Peninsula and the United States' involvement there. The paper assess policy successes and failures and presents several new policy options. The proposals include economic and diplomatic solutions to encourage the normalization of relations on the Korean Peninsula.

Doctor of Philosophy<br>Department of Security Studies<br>Dale R. Herspring<br>North Korea and the ruling Kim regime continues to present a unique security dilemma to both East Asia and the international community. The Kim regime's actions, which often include hostile military and diplomatic foreign policy actions, often seem inconsistent with parallel efforts to peacefully engage the international community. This research examines the following question: what has been the historic relationship between North Korea’s domestic conditions and its propensity to engage in “hostile” diplomatic and military activities? I also consider whether the concept of diversionary theory, the idea that leaders pursue external conflict when faced with domestic problems, is an explanation for these actions. The study initially proposes there is a relationship between North Korea’s domestic challenges and its willingness to engage in conflict activities aimed primarily at South Korea and the United States. To test these ideas, I conduct a quantitative analysis of North Korean event data collected from both US and Korean sources from 1960-2011 and a qualitative analysis of three case studies. My findings provide only limited support to the idea that internal conditions faced by the Kim regime influence its conflict behavior. More influential are a select number of external conditions, especially those involving South Korea, which often prompt North Korean responses and heightened conflict levels. This research also finds that the ruling Kim regime has often turned to diversion-type actions as a means to achieve domestic goals, yet diversionary theory itself is insufficient to explain these activities. North Korea represents an ongoing security dilemma for both East Asia and the international community and in this study, I demonstrate how historical and political science methods can be used to examine and explain the actions of this reclusive state.

Fighting Power: Interpretive Issues The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, 1950 Hammes, Thomas Xavier Lincoln College Submitted for Doctor of Philosophy in History Trinity Term 2008 When the Korean War broke out on 25 June 1950, the Marine Corps was ordered to deploy an air-ground brigade from California in less than ten days. Due to five years of massive budget and manpower cuts, the Marine Corps did not have even a brigade immediately available. The only way to meet the sailing timeline was to organize, man and equip the force while actually embarking it. As it embarked, the brigade had to incorporate marines flown in from posts all over the western United States; draw equipment from war reserves held hundreds of miles away; reorganize many of the existing units under new tables of organization; and add an experimental helicopter detachment from the east coast of the United States. Despite these enormous handicaps and numerically superior enemy forces, the brigade won every engagement. This performance was in stark contrast to the performance of all other US forces at this stage of the war. The brigade’s brief existence (7 July to 6 Sept 1950), combined with its exceptional combat record under adverse conditions, provides the opportunity to study the impact of institutional culture, education, doctrine, organization, training and leadership on performance in combat. Research showed that a key element of the brigade’s success was the Marine Corps’ institutional culture. In particular, the culture of remembering ensured marines understood the unchanging aspects of war and provided its men with the education, training, doctrine and organization to cope with its enduring friction, fog and chance. At the same time, the culture of learning ensured the marines understood what was changing in the character and tools of war so the brigade was well adapted to the realities of modern war from its first day in combat.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.<br>What causes alliances to split between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and its allies and how can this information be used to predict Beijing's relationship with North Korea? Since its founding in 1949, the PRC has become engaged in several alliances, formal and informal; however, the majority of these friendships fell to the wayside. The Soviet Union, Mongolia, and North Vietnam all gained and lost China as an ally. This thesis identifies which factors led to the deterioration and splitting of these alliances. It argues that factors concerning national sovereignty have a heavy significance when combined with the involvement of a competitive power. The explanations for the collapse of these historical alliances provide critical insight into China's current friendship with North Korea. This thesis shows that the conditions that led to alliance splits in the historical cases are not present in the current relationship with North Korea. It then concludes that the Sino-North Korean alliance will remain viable for the foreseeable future.

This research attempted to analyze the North Korean nuclear crisis using a rhetorical history that evaluated the discursive framings of the George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. I used an inductive format to use rhetorical criticism to create interpretive lenses for each presidential administration. Studying each presidential administration’s rhetoric provided for a number of thematic elements that informed the context of the crisis. I found the George H.W. Bush administration deployed a rhetoric of compliance. This rhetorical frame failed to meet the needs of the North Koreans to be seen as legitimate. The William J. Clinton administration used a rhetoric of negotiation. Clinton’s rhetorical posture was unable to account for the suspicions of the Republican Congress elected in 1996 that derailed the Agreed Framework of 1994. The George W. Bush administration utilized a rhetoric of verification. George W. Bush’s rhetorical choices produced the six-party accord, but ultimately may not be able to satisfy the need for complete transparency. This is especially true in light of the events surrounding North Korea and Syria’s nuclear program. It was concluded that each presidential administration failed to satisfy the exigency of the situation due to a number of constraints. By studying these rhetorical constraints, scholars can better understand the role that presidential rhetoric and history play in how events unfold.<br>Thesis [M.A.] - Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Science, Elliot School of Communication

Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Science, Elliot School of Communication.<br>This research attempted to analyze the North Korean nuclear crisis using a rhetorical history that evaluated the discursive framings of the George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. I used an inductive format to use rhetorical criticism to create interpretive lenses for each presidential administration. Studying each presidential administration's rhetoric provided for a number of thematic elements that informed the context of the crisis. I found the George H.W. Bush administration deployed a rhetoric of compliance. This rhetorical frame failed to meet the needs of the North Koreans to be seen as legitimate. The William J. Clinton administration used a rhetoric of negotiation. Clinton's rhetorical posture was unable to account for the suspicions of the Republican Congress elected in 1996 that derailed the Agreed Framework of 1994. The George W. Bush administration utilized a rhetoric of verification. George W. Bush's rhetorical choices produced the six-party accord, but ultimately may not be able to satisfy the need for complete transparency. This is especially true in light of the events surrounding North Korea and Syria's nuclear program. It was concluded that each presidential administration failed to satisfy the exigency of the situation due to a number of constraints. By studying these rhetorical constraints, scholars can better understand the role that presidential rhetoric and history play in how events unfold.

The struggle between the President and the Congress over the power to control the use of military force is an enduring dimension of U.S. foreign policy. In the 20th century Arthur Schlesinger labeled the growth of Presidential war power the “Imperial Presidency.” While some scholars have attempted to explain the expansion of Presidential power based on the Cold War or nuclear weapons, there has been little work studying the link between America’s ascending role in international legal frameworks and this domestic legal transformation. In this dissertation, I argue that America’s participation in international legal frameworks, such as the United Nations and NATO, has been a central factor in enabling the growth of Presidential war power. These international frameworks allow the President to circumvent Congress and to assert that the use of military force was something other than a ‘war’ that would need Congressional authorization. In case studies of pre-WWII aid to Great Britain, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War, I demonstrate how the rise of executive war power relied on America’s growing participation in international legal frameworks. The dissertation contributes to the nexus of International Relations and Constitutional scholarship. It offers a unique interpretation of Presidential war power while also offering new insights on the nature of the United States’ relationship with international legal frameworks. I argue that participation in international legal frameworks has been ‘democracy-undermining’ as the President utilizes those frameworks to circumvent the Constitution’s restrictions on Presidential war power.

This dissertation examines how North Korea’s version of nationalism was constructed by taking a material thing as my point of departure. Vinalon is a kind of synthetic fiber developed by a Korean scientist during the Japanese colonial era. North Korea succeeded in the industrial production of vinalon in 1961. The construction of the Vinalon Factory in Hamhŭng was completed by North Koreans using their own resources and manpower. Unlike nylon, which uses oil as the main raw material, vinalon uses locally-mined anthracite and limestone as the main raw materials. For these reasons, North Korea was proud of the industrialization of vinalon, eventually giving it the title of “Juche [self-reliance] fiber.” Although North Korea emphasizes solely its self-reliant aspect, vinalon has had a global history from the colonial period to the post-war era. I argue that the global network of technological knowledge made the industrial production of vinalon possible and that the industrialization of vinalon was a historically contingent process of experimentation. Uncovering the global history behind the industrialization of vinalon and probing vinalon as a material produced in the dynamics between Juche and the global, my work contributes to the rethinking of U.S.-Soviet-centered Cold War scholarship by investigating Second World-Second World and Second World-Third World relationships. Furthermore, focusing on the agency of the vinalon products in people’s everyday lives, my project explores how vinalon threaded North Korea’s Juche discourse through a variety of products that penetrated into the everyday and the gendering of those products. By analyzing the interaction between the scientific and the socio-political realms on the one hand and by exploring how the Mother Party discourse became embodied in the form of the material vinalon on the other hand, my dissertation goes beyond the politics-centered narrative that has dominated scholarly work on North Korean ideology. In this dissertation, I utilize diverse sets of textual, material, and visual sources, as well as interviews, while combining methods from social and global history, material culture studies, history of science and technology, gender studies, and STS studies. Each chapter of the dissertation explores different aspects of the social life of vinalon in North Korea. Chapter 1 investigates how the industrialization of vinalon allowed North Korea to promote its legitimacy as a postcolonial independent nation-state while contributing to the expansion of the Juche discourse, providing background on the processes through which vinalon was invented and industrialized. This chapter shows that the successful industrialization of vinalon and subsequent fetishization of Juche science facilitated the formulation of Juche ideology in middle to late 1960s North Korea. Chapter 2 uncovers the global history that enabled vinalon to be industrialized, focusing on the global circulation of technological knowledge from the colonial period to the 1960s. This chapter also traces how the vinalon industry developed differently in Japan and China in response to changes in the world chemical industry. Chapter 3 explores the social conditioning processes in which people’s perceptions of vinalon were constructed through their interactions with the state’s promotion of science, particularly in the form of literature. Taking a look at how the popularization of science and vinalon products consumed in the everyday lives of the people were connected to the construction of North Korean national identity, this chapter uses the case study of vinalon to examine the crossroads where science, the masses, and national identity intersect. Chapter 4 deals with how vinalon played the role of a maternal artifact that embodies the leader’s love for the people as well as the discourse of the Mother Party. Here I probe how the affective aspects of the fiber based on its materiality and representation contributed to the process of making the Mother Party discourse stronger and more pervasive. Chapter 5 addresses how the uses of vinalon in the realm of the everyday have changed over time, what role vinalon played in the process by which North Korea reinforced nationalism in response to social crises, and how vinalon has been consumed in the process of constructing an ideological fabric of North Korea today. Clothes, socks, blankets, scarfs, bags, and other products made from vinalon became the objects by which people directly experienced Juche in their daily lives. By looking at vinalon as a thread that played a pivotal role in weaving the Juche discourse into North Korean society, my dissertation shows that vinalon acted as an effective vehicle to project North Korea’s Juche materially and discursively in the people’s everyday lives.

<p>This project examines the events from 1866 to 1871 in Korea between the United States and Joseon, with a specific focus on the 1866 <i>General Sherman</i> Incident and the United States Expedition to Korea in 1871. The project also examines the present memory of those events in the United States and North and South Korea. This project shows that contemporary American reactions to the events in Korea from 1866 to 1871 were numerous and ambivalent in what the American role should be in Korea. In the present, American memory of 1866 to 1871 has largely been monopolized by the American military, with the greater American collective memory largely forgetting this period. </p> <p>In the Koreas, collective memory of the five-year crisis (1866 to 1871) is divided along ideological lines. In North Korea, the victories that Korea achieved against the United States are used as stories to reinforce the North Korean line on the United States, as well as reinforcing the legitimacy of the Kim family. In South Korea, the narrative focuses on the corruption of Joseon and the Daewongun and the triumph of a “modernizing” Korean state against anti-western hardliners, and is more diverse in how the narrative is told, ranging from newspapers to K-Dramas, leading to a more complicated collective memory in the South. </p> <p>This Thesis shows that understanding the impact that the first state-to-state encounters had on the American-Korean relationship not only at the time but also in the present, is key to analyzing the complicated history of the Korean-American relationship writ large.</p>

<p>My dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the Korean War stories in America in relation to the history of the national security state of America from the Cold War to post-911 era. Categorizing the Korean War stories in three phases in parallel with three dramatic episodes in the national security of America, including the institutionalization of national security in the early Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar Cold War system in the 1990s, and the institutionalization of homeland security after the 9/11 attacks, I argue that storytelling of the Korean War morphs with the changes of national security politics in America. Reading James Michener’s Korean War stories, <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i> (1956), and <i>The Manchurian Candidate</i> (1962) in the 1950s and early 1960s, I argue that the first-phase Korean War stories cooperated with the state, translating and popularizing key themes in the national security policies through racial and gender tropes. Focusing on Helie Lee’s <i>Still Life with Rice</i> (1996), Susan Choi’s <i>The Foreign Student</i> (1998), and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s <i>Memories of My Ghost Brother</i> (1996) in the 1990s, I maintain that the second-phase Korean War stories by Korean American writers form a narrative resistance against the ideology of national security and provide alternative histories of racial and gender violence in America’s national security programs. Further reading post-911 Korean War novels such as Toni Morrison’s <i>Home</i> (2012), Ha Jin’s <i>War Trash</i> (2005), and Chang-Rae Lee’s <i>The Surrendered</i> (2010), I contend that in the third-phase Korean War stories, the Korean War is deployed as a historical analogy to understand the War on Terror and diverse writers’ revisiting the war offers alternative perspectives on healing and understanding “homeland” for a traumatized American society. Taken together, these Korean War stories exemplify the politics of storytelling that engages with the national security state and the complex ways individual narratives interact with national narratives. Moreover, the continued morphing of the Korean War in literary representation demonstrates the vitality of the “forgotten war” and constantly reminds us the war’s legacy.</p>