Nation-Being in North Korea: New Perspectives on Human Rights
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The North Korean government has drawn criticism from the international community for its human rights abuses, which were deemed crimes against humanity by the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 2014 Commission of Inquiry report. Few would argue that these transgressions—which include sexual violence, enslavement, torture, and murder, among others—are anything less than appalling. And yet, the dialogue surrounding the issue of human rights in North Korea is far from straightforward. Rather, a variety of stakeholders—including governments, international bodies, non-governmental organizations, individual actors, and North Korean defectors—are driven to resolve the North Korean human rights problem by a wide range of motivations and with diverging methods. In this thesis, I argue that these discrepancies arise due to stakeholders’ various concepts of historical progress, which have resulted in a human rights dialogue that has largely been subsumed by other goals. To reset and reframe the conversation, I engage with critiques of the global human rights movement as well as with North Korea’s own human rights thinking, unpacking the meaning of “human rights” in the context of North Korea by exploring how both “human” and “rights” are understood in the DPRK. I show that North Korean individuals are conceived of as “nation-beings,” given meaningful existence by their nation. Thus, in contrast to the Western individualist concept, North Korea defines “human rights” as the rights of the North Korean nation itself. I posit that, absent an open human rights dialogue within the country, North Korean fiction offers an invaluable window into the DPRK’s own view of its human rights situation; thus I analyze works of North Korean short fiction to illustrate how human rights are presented within the DPRK. Finally, I offer some implications for how these insights may make the human rights conversation more productive moving forward.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Gordon, Haley |
|---|---|
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies |
| Primary advisor | Zur, Dafna |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford Global Studies |
|---|---|
| Subject | East Asian Studies |
| Subject | Center for East Asian Studies |
| Subject | North Korea |
| Subject | Human Rights |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Gordon, Haley. (2021). Nation-Being in North Korea: New Perspectives on Human Rights. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/sg652jx3736
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- haleymgordon@gmail.com
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