Evaluating Everyday Politics in North Korea

In North Korea, as elsewhere, there exists a society beyond the state, and an everyday life where government authority meets and mixes with the private sphere. Examining this sphere is crucial for a holistic understanding of North Korean politics, both in the past and the present, and this is the goal of this Special Issue. Our introductory essay reviews the diverse literature on everyday politics in North Korea and assesses patterns within it. Next, it proposes four theoretical considerations in the hope that they may lend common ground to those doing research on everyday politics in North Korea and facilitate more theoretically informed discussion. Researchers can use these areas–socialisation, surveillance, survival, and support–to situate their analyses more theoretically as they assess everyday politics in the DPRK. Each of the contributions to this Special Issue addresses some or all of these areas, which are intended to be a framework to bring the contributions, and by extension the broader topic of everyday politics in North Korea, into a deeper theoretical conversation.