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North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.North Korea is one of the last redoubts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism in the world. Yet it is not a Soviet satellite in the East European manner, nor is its government ...
Presenting a succinct, historically informed introduction to North and South Korea, the second edition of The Koreas considers the radically different ways these countries have dealt with the growing challenges of globalization. Since the first edition’s publication, the economic, political, and social differences have only intensified, making evident the relevancy and importance of Armstrong’s work, in understanding the Koreas now and in the future. Ultimately, The Koreas is a crisp, engaging primer of Korea and the Korean people in the contemporary world. This book is ideal for many courses in a variety of disciplines, including politics, history, international business, and Asian studies.
To much of the world, North Korea is an impenetrable mystery, its inner workings unknown and its actions toward the outside unpredictable and frequently provocative. Tyranny of the Weak reveals for the first time the motivations, processes, and effects of North Korea’s foreign relations during the Cold War era. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of North Korea’s present and former communist allies, including the Soviet Union, China, and East Germany, Charles K. Armstrong tells in vivid detail how North Korea managed its alliances with fellow communist states, maintained a precarious independence in the Sino-Soviet split, attempted to reach out to the capitalist West and presen...
While most analyses of Korean politics have looked to elites to explain political change, this new and revised edition of Korean Society examines the role of ordinary people in this dramatic transformation. Taking the innovative theme of 'civil society' - voluntary organizations outside the role of the state which have participated in the process of political and social democratization - the essays collected here examine Korea as one of the most dramatic cases in the world of ordinary citizens participating in the transformation of politics. Key topics discussed include: comparisons of Korean democratization to the experiences of post-authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world comparisons of the theory of civil society as developed in Western Europe and America the legacy of Korea's Confucian past for contemporary politics and society close examinations of various civil society movements South Korea and North Korea. Conceptually innovative, up-to-date and timely, the new edition of this book will be an invaluable resource for students of contemporary Korea, Asian politics and the global struggle for democracy.
The common images of Korea view the peninsula as a long-standing battleground for outside powers and the Cold War's last divided state. But, Korea's location at the very center of Northeast Asia gives it a pivotal role in the economic integration of the region and the dynamic development of its more powerful neighbors. A great wave of economic expansion, driven first by the Japanese miracle and then by the ascent of China, has made South Korea - an economic powerhouse in its own right - the hub of the region once again, a natural corridor for railroads and energy pipelines linking Asiatic Russia to China and Japan. And, over the horizon, an opening of North Korea, with multilateral support, would add another major push toward regional integration. Illuminating the role of the Korean peninsula in three modern historical periods, the eminent international contributors to this volume offer a fresh and stimulating appraisal of Korea as the key to the coalescence of a broad, open Northeast Asian regionalism in the twenty-fifth century.
The essays in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia challenge the idea that notions of modernity and colonialism are mere imports from the West, and show how colonial modernity has evolved from and into unique forms throughout Asia. Although the modernity of non-European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity, until recently East Asian scholarship has tried to view Asian colonialism through the paradigm of colonial India (for instance), failing to recognize anti-imperialist nationalist impulses within differing Asian countries and regions. Demonstrating an impatience with social science models of knowledge, the contributors show that binary categories ...
As tensions remain on the Korean peninsula, this book looks back on the decade of improved inter-Korean relations and engagement between 1998 and 2008, now known as the ‘Sunshine Policy’ era. Moving beyond traditional economic and political perspectives, it explores how this decade of intensified cooperation both affected and reshaped existing physical, social and mental boundaries between the two Koreas, and how this ‘de-bordering’ and ‘re-bordering’ has changed the respective attitudes towards the other. Based around three key themes, ‘Space’, ‘People’, and ‘Representations’, this book looks at the tangible and intangible areas of contact created by North-South enga...
It is broadly accepted that “terrorizing” images are often instrumentalized in periods of conflict to serve political interests. This volume proposes that paying attention to how images of trauma and conflict are described in literary texts, i.e. to the rhetorical practice known as “ekphrasis”, is crucial to our understanding of how such images work. The volume’s contributors discuss verbal images of trauma and terror in literary texts both from a contemporary perspective and as historical artefacts in order to illuminate the many different functions of ekphrasis in literature. The articles in this volume reflect the vast developments in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s, a field that has recently broadened to include genres beyond the memoir and testimony and that lends itself well to new postcolonial, feminist, and multimedia approaches. By expanding the scholarly understanding of how images of trauma are described, interpreted, and acted out in literary texts, this collected volume makes a significant contribution to both trauma and memory studies, as well as more broadly to cultural studies.
In this book, prominent social scientists describe quantitative models in economics, history, sociology, political science, and psychology.
At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism. Penny Von Eschen escorts us across the globe, backstage and onstage, as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz luminaries spread their music and their ideas further than the State Department anticipated. Both in concert and after hours, through pol...