Non-Traditional Security Issues in North Korea ed. by Kyung-ae Park (review)

Is it possible that North Korea’s nuclear weapons, ballistic missile tests, bellicose rhetoric and aggressive provocations are a sign of its weakness and insecurity rather than its strength? What if traditional security discourse and policy, centered on the military dimension of interstate relations, not only prevented scholars from seeing the source of this weakness, but also contributed to greater insecurity in other, non-traditional areas? If this were the case, how might traditional and non-traditional security issues be interconnected, and how might scholars, analysts, and policymakers begin to conceptualize and pursue solutions to the many complex problems presented by North Korea?

While the vast majority of North Korea–related literature remains narrowly focused on the nuclear and missile issues within a traditional state-centric, realist framework, the various authors in Kyung-ae Park’s edited volume, Non-Traditional Security Issues in North Korea, take a decidedly different approach. Inspired by the constructivists of the Copenhagen school, the work of human security scholars, and, in some cases, by their own experience within North Korea, the authors problematize traditional security discourse in order to address the above questions.

Moving beyond an exclusive focus on military threats to the state, the various authors define security “in terms of freedom from threats to the safety and welfare of society and the individual” (p. 51). Furthermore, they widen the definition of threat to include not just military but also political, economic, societal, and individual issues. Such non-traditional security (NTS) issues include energy and food security, migration, gendered effects of economic crisis, human rights, and illicit transnational activities. A brief historical overview helps situate the overall work.

Starting in the late 1980s and increasing with the end of the Cold War, North Korea experienced a series of external and internal shocks. Despite its purported self-reliance, North Korea’s economy and agricultural system were fundamentally dependent on the Soviet Union and China for cheap imports, raw materials, and spare parts at concessional “friendship” prices. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and China’s shift to a more market-based trade relationship, North Korea could no longer acquire the energy and other inputs it needed, and its industrial economy began to collapse, taking with it the agricultural system. Extensive flooding and drought in the mid-1990s exacerbated these structural problems. These shocks, combined with North Korea’s centralized, inefficient, and tightly integrated economy, led to the emergence of various NTS and human security issues.

For those in the field of North Korean studies, these issues are not new. There is an expanding literature on North Korea’s economic breakdown, famine, refugee crisis, fledgling marketization, human rights abuses, and even the lives of ordinary North Koreans.¹ In fact, the various authors in this volume not only extensively cite this literature but also have contributed to it. However, what makes the current work a worthy contribution is that it brings many of these issues together in one accessible volume, and, more important, does so within a unique, NTS framework. In the preface, Park correctly notes that no other book in the field has done this.

The most interesting and consequential aspect of the book, however, is not solely its NTS framework but its focus on the intersection of traditional and non-traditional security issues. The opening and closing chapters by Jae-Jung Suh and Brendan Howe, respectively, provide conceptual bookends for this approach. Suh (chapter 1) modifies Charles Tilly’s famous dictum (war makes the state and the state makes war) and instead notes how “war also breaks, or at least weakens, states,” with North Korea being a textbook case (p. 4). Suh describes North Korea as an “insecure state, unsafe society,” wherein the leadership’s obsessive pursuit of regime security either causes or exacerbates NTS challenges in a way that profoundly threatens the welfare of ordinary North Koreans (p. 9). This degradation of human security...