Decamping the Partisans: US Hegemony and South Korea's Divisive Discourse on North Korean Human Rights

The question of what to do about North Korean human rights (NKHR) has never been more divisive. Some have explained the division in terms of prioritizing certain rights or movement strategies over others. In this paper, I demonstrate that neither of these explanations is consistent with the last three decades of South Korean public discourse on NKHR. Applying a novel combination of semantic network and discourse analysis on 28,795 South Korean newspaper articles between 1990 and 2016, I arrive at the following argument. The division between NKHR partisans in South Korea is not based on particular stances towards human rights but rather support or opposition to US hegemony and intervention on the Korean peninsula. South Korean partisanship is worth studying as a specific aspect of the NKHR Movement, and because it reflects more generally on NKHR partisanship in the West. We in the NHKR community will be far more effective at improving the actual state of North Korean human rights if we first acknowledge and address our fundamental disagreements over US hegemony and intervention on the Korean peninsula. Lastly, this paper makes a methodological contribution to digital humanities. I use semantic network analysis to visualize partisan dynamics within a corpus of media articles spanning a quarter century. I then sample the most representative articles comprising key network features and use these to conduct a qualitative discourse analysis. It is my hope that future research in Korean Studies will benefit from this complementary application of digital and qualitative methods.

Introduction

The question of what to do about North Korean human rights (NKHR) has never been more divisive. In the policy sphere, Roberta Cohen has argued that the use of more aggressive measures are justified by the 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry (UNCOI) Report on North Korean Human Rights.¹ Hazel Smith, referring to the same document, notes the similarities between the UNCOI's indictment of North Korea and the campaign to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the Iraq War.² From within the academy, Sandra Fahy has voiced concern about the suffering of North Koreans and made heart-wrenching pleas to hold the North Korean leadership culpable.³ Meanwhile, Jay Song has raised skepticism over the so-called human rights industry and its reliance on defector-activists to legitimate politically useful narratives.⁴ What are the origins of this heated division? What are the real implications of this division for the human rights of North Koreans? And what are some constructive ways to move forward?

Human rights theorists attribute this division to values, namely the type of human rights for which each camp is advocating. Daniel Chubb explains that advocates of civic and political rights (CPR) prefer top-down legal and institutional strategies, while advocates of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) opt for bottom-up engagement by civil society actors and grassroots social movements.⁵ A second explanation is that the field is actually divided over the strategies for attaining those rights. Per this second explanation, one camp believes that contentious strategies are necessary for improving human rights in North Korea as the regime has proven resistant to change. The opposing camp responds that contentious politics only box North Korea into a corner and argue that constructive engagement is the best strategy for improving human rights.

In this paper, I demonstrate that neither explanation consistently explains the division among one block of partisans at the center of the NKHR movement: South Korean liberals and conservatives. In order to disentangle South Korean partisanship over NKHR, this study analyzes a corpus of 28,795 South Korean newspaper articles spanning from the early 1990s to the passage of South Korea's North Korea Human Rights Act in 2016. Applying a novel combination of semantic network and discourse analyses, I arrive at a third explanation. The division between NKHR partisans in South Korea is not based on particular stances towards human rights but rather attitudes about American hegemony and intervention on the Korean peninsula. By American hegemony, I mean the United States' use of coercive hegemony, which I define as the ability to shape the international system by means of economic and military power. I argue that South Korean conservatives who trust Western powers and distrust North Korean leadership prefer contentious strategies and pursue CPR as this justifies the West's applying legal and institutional pressure on the North. By contrast, these same conservatives, when dealing with friendly Western nations, may prefer a cooperative strategy and emphasize ESCR over CPR. On the other hand, South Korean liberals who are leery of American hegemony and Western intervention favor cooperative strategies and advocate for ESCR in North Korea as these restrain untrustworthy hegemons in the international community. Conversely, liberals have contentiously advocated for CPR within their own country of South Korea whose pro-Western governments they view with suspicion.

South Korean partisans are worth examining because of the critical role they have played in every epoch of the NKHR Movement. Their history parallels the West's three-decades long escalation of contentious strategies for addressing NKHR. These contentious strategies include: (1) naming and shaming, (2) securitization, (3) economic sanctions, (4) encouraging defection, and (5) indictments and intervention. Partisan attitudes towards each historic escalation are defined by their attitude towards US hegemonic power. Analyzing the discourse over three decades sheds light on several historical puzzles. When was partisan framing first applied to NKHR in South Korea? Why were South Korea's liberal lawmakers able to resist international pressure to pass the NKHR Act in 2005 but not in 2016? Where do South Korean liberals and conservatives stand on the issue of NKHR after the passage of the 2016 North Korea Human Rights Act?

South Korea's NKHR discourse is also worth examining because the divisive issue of supporting or opposing American hegemony also appears to underlie NKHR partisanship in the West. If NKHR are as pressing a concern today as they were thirty years ago, then neither camp can claim a definitive win. If anything, this study shows that conservative and liberal strategies have both negatively impacted vulnerable North Korean subpopulations. Conservative ambivalence to ESCR has withheld much needed humanitarian assistance to North Koreans; liberal reluctance to make South Korea an attractive target destination for North Korean defectors has handicapped defector resettlement in the South; both views negatively impact North Korean defectors in China. If the NKHR community in South Korea and the West are to find a constructive way forward, it is imperative we first disentangle our underlying motives and face the fact that partisan entrenchment negatively impacts the actual human rights of North Koreans. In addition to addressing NKHR partisan discourse, this paper also makes a methodological contribution to the study of large corpora by introducing a novel combination of semantic network and discourse analysis. Semantic network analysis is a powerful tool for reliably identifying discourse dynamics in a massive corpus. Qualitative discourse analysis assisted by a semantic network offers rich interpretations currently beyond the reach of quantitative analyses. It is my hope that future research in Korean Studies will benefit from the complementary application of semantic network and discourse analyses.

Contentious Strategies

Naming and Shaming

Following 9-11, this strategy reached its hyperbolic zenith with Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric. At one point, even American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who were not beyond criticizing North Korea, argued that the Bush White House likely contributed to the nuclear crisis by linking North Korea to 9-11 and terrorism with its "axis of evil" rhetoric.⁶ The Bush administration continued to apply moralistic rhetoric while engaging in the Six-Party Talks. Foreign policy experts lamented that demonizing North Korea rolled back earlier gains and asserted that engagement minus the rhetoric would be a far more effective way to address both security and human rights.⁷ While successive administrations would abandon the "axis of evil" language, all have continued to employ critical rhetoric to name and shame North Korea into compliance with international human rights norms.

Securitization

The North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004 formalized several securitization strategies as official US policy by linking human rights to North Korea's nuclear program, imposing economic sanctions, and promoting defections. HR 4011 passed unanimously in the House and Senate, indicative of a bipartisan consensus on the issue. Nonetheless, the linking of North Korea's human rights to its nuclear program was criticized even before the bill came into law. Security experts argued that HR 4011 "attempts to insert human rights into the ongoing multilateral negotiations over North Korea's nuclear program-to the possible detriment of both regional security and the human rights of North Koreans." This strategy was taken as evidence that "neoconservatives and paleo-hawks, both within and outside the Bush administration, have taken a one-size-fits-all approach to North Korea patterned on Washington's approach to the 'totalitarian' societies of the Soviet bloc."⁸ However, analysts warned that, "linking human rights with DPRK nuclear non-proliferation through HR 4011's explicit Helsinki-style approach may exacerbate rather than eradicate North Korean human rights violations as well as the DPRK's ongoing nuclear standoff with the international community."⁹

As events unfolded, the failure of the linkage strategy was noted on many levels. Katherine Moon observed that securitization failed to make progress by its own legalistic and institutional standards.¹⁰ Patricia Goedde found that "denuclearization priorities, ideological polarization between human rights groups, and North Korea's own counter discourse to human rights" had reduced the effectiveness of legal mobilization for human rights protections.¹¹ Securitization hampered humanitarian efforts as North Korea took an even more adversarial stance against international governments and NGOs, which in turn led many of these aid organizations to reduce their activities or exit the country entirely.¹² The linkage of NKHR to security also caused China to shift its stance on NKHR. Whereas it had not repatriated the refugees who rushed the Japanese Consulate in Shenyang in May 2002, China reversed its tolerant stance once the US linked North Korean human rights to security and sovereignty in the 2007 Six-Party Talks.¹³ The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was also prohibited from accessing North Korean refugees in northeast China.¹⁴

Economic Sanctions

The North Korea Human Rights Act justified sanctions via the security link on grounds of not wanting to abed North Korea's military and nuclear program. Paul Liem argued that regime collapse was an explicit aim of these policies: "Regime collapse, some argue, will thus lead to a better life for the North Korean people. Informed by this view, in combination with 'intelligence' sources that predict the imminent collapse of the 'regime', US policy has been loath to provide any assistance, including food aid, that might prolong the life of the state."¹⁵ Defenders such as Balbina Hwang disagreed, arguing that the NKHR Act of 2004 intended "to make it easier for the United States to assist North Korean refugees" and "contains no hidden agenda for overt regime change or overthrow of the Kim Jong Il government."¹⁶

Other critics emphasized the humanitarian harm done by sanctions. Although food insecurity grew less acute as the famine subsided, Good Friends found it was never entirely alleviated.¹⁷ In spite of this, following the passage of the 2004 North Korea Human Rights Act, humanitarian aid shipments were cut by 80%, from 500 to 100 metric tons, and cooperation with NGOs offering humanitarian assistance to North Korea was significantly curtailed.¹⁸ Christine Hong, one of the most outspoken critics of sanctions, has pointed the finger of human rights violations back at the United States: "Cordoning off North Korea's alleged crimes for discrete consideration while turning a willfully blind eye to the violence of sanctions, 'humanitarian' intervention, and the withholding of humanitarian and developmental aid, the North Korean human rights project has allowed a spectrum of political actors … to join together in common cause."¹⁹

Encouraging Defection

Another controversial strategy which purports to benefit North Koreans while destabilizing the North, is encouraging defection. Migration scholars refer to migration resulting from targeted policies as planned displacement, thereby distinguishing it from the unplanned displacement that takes place in the aftermath of crises. Bo-hyuk Suh (Sŏ Posŏk) notes that while the worst effects of the North Korean famine had subsided by the late 1990s, the largest waves of migration from North Korea to China, and from China to third country destinations like South Korea, did not occur until the early 2000s. This delay suggests that the ensuing migration was not an immediate effect of the famine crisis but rather the result of policies implemented post-famine.²⁰

Some policies such as sanctions exacerbated pre-existing push factors such as the food insecurity and economic hardships persisting after the famine.²¹ Other policies enhanced the pull factors. Legal avenues were opened for North Korean migrants to seek asylum or refugee status in South Korea and other third-party destinations. These avenues were made possible by the characterization of North Korean migrants as political defectors, in spite of a study by Chang, Haggard and Noland indicating that the vast majority of North Korean migration to China was economically motivated.²² The US North Korea Human Rights Act increased funding for NGOs supporting the trafficking of migrants through China to locations where they could apply for these legal statuses. Foreign governments also funded NGOs distributing media to North Koreans emphasizing the higher quality of life which North Korean migrants might enjoy in South Korea.²³ Each of these policies was explicitly designed to increase the pull factors attracting North Koreans toward a particular migration destination.

Few would begrudge North Koreans the right to relocate, should they so choose, to a place where they could enjoy greater economic opportunities and political rights. Moral arguments against encouraging defection have not criticized defector's desires to migrate, but rather the political motives of those policies which actually place migrants at greater risk of harm and exploitation. The vast majority of North Korean migrants crossing into China are undocumented and perpetually at risk of being caught, exploited and returned to North Korea to suffer even greater abuses. In the early 2000s China responded positively to pressure by international NGOs to accommodate North Koreans seeking for asylum, but suddenly took a hardline once North Korean human rights were linked to the issues of security and sovereignty.²⁴ The precarious existence of North Koreans in China is made even more so "when refugee rights are politically constructed by the concerned states' political and economic interests as well as by international relations."²⁵

Indictments and Intervention

The movement to advocate NKHR by legal and institutional means achieved its peak in 2014 with the UNCOI Report on North Korean Human Rights. Chubb notes that the report's attention-drawing headline was its recommendation that specific North Korean leaders be referred to the International Criminal Court.²⁶ Roberta Cohen argued that "Rights Up Front and the Responsibility to Protect may need to be applied" and also urged for planning to minimize refugees and displacement caused by radical change on the peninsula.²⁷

Several scholars retorted that the compiling and adoption of the UNCOI report was reminiscent of building the case against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invasion. Hazel Smith noted that, as with the case against Iraq, the absence of statistics, or misinterpreted statistics become accepted as fact, and have implications for how the international community views the DPRK and justifies undermining its sovereignty.²⁸ Jay Song's detailed analyses of the report has revealed several factual errors.²⁹ For one, Song found that the number of defector testimonies was inflated by compiling data from reports or databases in which the same defectors had been interviewed multiple times. Song also pointed out that defector testimonies which constituted the core evidence of the UNCOI report have been accused of embellishing reality and recounting familiar anecdotes and tropes as personal experience.³⁰ Bereft of reliable information, Hazel Smith laments, "the received wisdom becomes unchallenged and unchallengeable in scholarly, policy, and media discourse. Inconsistency and misrepresentation is not primarily due to conscious bias but much more because of the unconscious adoption of a securitized perspective through which knowledge about North Korea is filtered."³¹

The UNCOI escalations proposed or implied by the UNCOI range from military intervention to the referral of North Korea's leadership to the International Criminal Court. A 2017 review of UN NKHR resolutions, the 2004 and 2016 NKHR Acts in US and South Korea, respectively, concluded that the legalistic approach had failed on both counts, in terms of de-escalating the nuclear crisis and improving the state of NKHR.³² With the UNCOI report, criticisms about the failure of past approaches could now be cited as evidence that more radical measures were required. Whereas options in the early 2000s were limited to alienating North Korea with critical rhetoric and economic sanctions, the UNCOI report put armed intervention and targeted prosecution on the table and further widened the gap between supporters and critics of contentious strategies.

Contentious Strategies in Korea

Rise of South Korean NKHR NGOs

A fair amount of work has been done on the partisan origins of North Korean human rights discourse and social movements in South Korea. Kyongyon Moon (Mun Kyŏngyŏn) analyzed "the relationship between the policy stances of South Korean administrations in respect of North Korean human rights (NKHR) and NGO (nongovernmental organization) advocacy." The liberal Kim Dae-jung (Kim Taejung) and Roh Moo-hyun (No Muhyŏn) administrations supported humanitarian NGOs concerned with ESCR whereas the conservative Lee Myung-bak (Yi Myŏngbak) administration supported human rights NGOs advocating for CPR.³³ Moon also noted that in multiple cases, neo-conservative founders of South Korean human rights NGOs were once ardent student activists who disapproved of establishment liberals Kim and Roh pivoting away from CPR advocacy in the South towards ESCR advocacy for the North.³⁴ Research on the early years identifies some key stages and compelling actors in South Korea's NKHR movement. But did the partisan division begin with these disillusioned liberals in the late 1990s? How important was Lee administration support to the expansion of South Korean human rights NGOs?

Securitization, Sanctions, and Encouraging Defections

A second body of research addresses the reactions of South Korean liberals to securitization. According to Bo-hyuk Suh (Sŏ Pohyŏk), South Korean liberals opposed linking NKHR to security and sanctions as this harmed North-South bilateral relations.³⁵ Liberals were also skeptical of encouraging defection. Echoing the concerns of Western critics, they believed that humanitarian actions ought to be "taken in order to help and respect the wants and needs of the displaced" and not simply bald attempts to destabilize the North Korean regime. Liberals also argued against planned displacement on the grounds that it would harm the human rights conditions of defectors in the North and South. If "the number of planned displacements is expected to increase due to the support outlined in the US North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004", then who would pay these defector's resettlement costs upon their arrival in South Korea?³⁶

A parallel body of research addresses the effects of these strategies on defectors in China and South Korea. Several years after these policies were implemented, researchers confirmed liberal skepticism. The biggest supporters of NKHR bills, US and Japan, were reluctant to accept asylum seekers. Mikyoung Kim (Kim Mikyŏng) found that the politicization of human rights had only exacerbated the actual state of human rights for North Koreans in China and the DPRK. Within South Korea, US, Japan and China, negative stereotypes about defectors had prevailed, making it difficult for North Koreans to adapt.³⁷ Eunyoung Choi (Ch'oe Ŭnyŏng) argued that drawing further attention to human trafficking had only worsened the plight of North Korean women in China and further stigmatized the image of defectors upon entering South Korea.³⁸ This body of research addresses the period of greatest activity on NKHR. However, several gaps remain in the historical narrative. How did liberals and conservatives react to news about the precarious life of defectors in China and difficulty of adapting to life in South Korea? How did their partisan commitments affect their attitudes towards defectors?

UNCOI Report

A final body of research examines the process by which South Korean actors helped bring about the 2014 UNCOI report and what effects its adoption had on South Korean politics. In an earlier study, I argued that the expanding network of South Korean human rights NGOs ultimately catalyzed the international movement to document human rights abuses and indict North Korea's leadership in the 2014 UNCOI report.³⁹ Throughout this process, the Ministry of Unification and Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) played a supporting role in researching and documenting the state of human rights in North Korea.⁴⁰ This enterprise was not without its detractors and other researchers have criticized the so-called human rights industry's reliance on defector-activists to legitimate what they deem politically useful narratives.⁴¹ Scholars have also evaluated "how a longstanding policy of relative silence on North Korea's human rights record acceded to identity-driven pressures arising from the UNCOI and influenced South Korea's international image-management strategy." Most notably, Sarah Son points out that the passage of the UNCOI pressured South Korean liberals to stop stonewalling South Korea's North Korea Human Rights Act.⁴² This contemporary body of literature documents the most recent chapter of NKHR in which CPR and contentious strategies have achieved peak international consensus, but was it inevitable that South Korean legislators would pass the North Korea Human Rights Act in the years following the UNCOI report? Where did South Korean liberals and conservatives stand on the issue of NKHR after passing the 2016 North Korea Human Rights Act? And considering the discourse as a whole, what accounts for partisan differences among South Korean liberals and conservatives on the issue of NKHR? What have been the implications of partisan division on the actual human rights of North Koreans? And what are some constructive paths forward?

Semantic Network of NKHR Discourse

Media Sources

In order to map NKHR discourse in South Korea, a corpus of articles was compiled from South Korean news media spanning the years 1990 to 2017. Articles were drawn from two digitized media repositories, BigKinds and the Choson Ilbo websites.⁴³ The BigKinds repository is managed by the Korean Press Foundation and catalogs news articles from conservative national dailies such as DongA Ilbo, liberal dailies such as Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang Shinmun, as well as a number of regional dailies. As such it reliably spans mainstream ideological perspectives in South Korean popular discourse. Two notable national dailies, Chosun Ilbo and JoongAng Ilbo are absent from the BigKinds repository. As Chosun Ilbo is the conservative journal of record in South Korea, articles were drawn from its repository and combined with those from BigKinds.

In order to identify the broadest, least biased collection of news articles related to NKHR, I searched the above mentioned news repositories using the keyword "puk'anin'gwŏn [North Korean human rights]." These searches yielded 28,795 articles spanning from 1990 to 2017. Several fields were collected from the selected articles including article title, author, date of publication, article text, and newspaper in which the article appeared. A minority of the selected articles has NKHR as their main topic. The majority were written about other topics but tangentially referenced NKHR. This was an ideal combination of articles, given the project's goal of identifying major topics in South Korea's public discourse about NKHR and seeing how these topics linked to public discourse more broadly. That being said, the data are not without limitations. Although the corpus procured for this study included all newspaper articles in two news databases which explicitly referred to North Korean human rights, it by no means contains the entirety of discourse on the topic. Moreover, we may debate whether news media adequately represents the actors and themes of South Korea's partisan NKHR discourse, or whether better sources exist.

From Corpus to Network

My goals for assembling such an expansive corpus were to identify major themes, conflicts and transitions in South Korea's conservative and liberal NKHR discourse since its inception in the early 1990s. However, for a corpus of nearly 30,000 articles spanning three decades, these goals could not be easily attained through conventional discourse analysis alone. Therefore I adopted a mixed analytical strategy combining computational semantic network analysis with in-depth reading and qualitative analysis. First, using computational analysis, I extracted prominent themes from corpus articles and then constructed a semantic network mapping these themes and their co-occurrences as nodes and edges. I colored the nodes and edges of this network using a measure of liberal-conservative partisanship. With this network representation of the discourse, I was able to identify highly contested themes, the respective framings liberals and conservatives linked to these themes, and how these contentious patterns changed over time. I then selected and read the articles comprising key nodes and edges in order to understand the substantive events and discursive conflicts driving each critical point in the discourse. Thus the computational and qualitative analyses are not merely complementary but methodologically intertwined. As a map of the discourse, the semantic network makes it possible to identify and select the most relevant articles for qualitative analysis out of an otherwise insurmountable corpus. Conversely, qualitative analysis of those articles comprising the most interesting nodes and edges of the network provides essential context of those structural features.

The first step of this analytical strategy was to construct a semantic network from the NKHR corpus articles. Networks are comprised of nodes and edges. In social networks, nodes generally represent social entities such as individuals, states or organizations, and edges represent interactions or relationships between those entities. In semantic networks, nodes represent symbols or units of meaning, such as words, images or topics; edges represent semantic connections between those symbols. For the NK Human Rights corpus, I had no preconceived list of topics or keywords which I could use as nodes. I considered identifying high-frequency terms in the corpus and using these as nodes; however, individual words or word pairs seemed too multivalent to reliably indicate a specific topic or theme of discourse. Instead, I performed latent topic modeling on the NK Human Rights corpus using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and used these latent topics as nodes of the network.

LDA latent topics are essentially collections of words which frequently co-occur throughout a corpus and indicate a latent theme or topic. LDA analysis yielded more than 1000 latent topics. Upon analyzing the distribution of these topics across the corpus, I selected the fifty highest scoring topics and used these as the nodes of the semantic network. The decision to select fifty latent topics was subjectively pragmatic. I included enough latent topics to sufficiently visualize key structural features in the network, but not so many as to obscure these structures in a dense hairball of nodes and edges. Researchers replicating this procedure may choose more nodes or fewer, depending on the degree of complexity they intend to tackle in their analysis. I labeled each of the fifty latent topics by looking first at the collection of co-occurring words that comprise each topic, and then by reading several articles in which the latent topic scored highly. The label attached to a latent topic serves as a convenient shorthand for its underlying theme but should not be thought to fully encapsulate the meaning of the latent topic.

Next, edges were constructed between the latent topic nodes. A co-occurrence edge was recorded between two latent topics if each topic's score exceeded a designated threshold within a sufficient number of articles. These thresholds were also selected pragmatically. I included enough edges to visualize key structural features, but not so many as to visually obscure these structures. As with nodes, researchers replicating this procedure may choose more edges or fewer, depending on the degree of complexity they intend to address in their analysis. This process of selecting only the highest scoring latent topic nodes and edges generates a semantic network depicting the most prominent, persistent elements of the discourse, like a Google Map zoomed out for perspective. The vast majority of peripheral themes and connections are omitted in this process of network curation. Moreover, rather than construct a single network to represent the entire twenty-eight year span, Nodes and edges were disaggregated into annual network "slices." Thus, the resulting semantic network is actually a series of twenty-seven networks, each depicting the most prominent topics and linkages in a given calendar year.

As my primary variable of interest with respect to South Korea's NKHR discourse was partisanship, I colored nodes and edges according to their partisan orientation. I operationalized partisanship as the relative importance attributed to nodes and edges by South Korean conservatives and liberals. I measured the relative partisan importance as the percentage share of liberal and conservative articles in which a given node or edge appear. Liberal and conservative articles were defined as those published in Hankyoreh and Choson Ilbo, respectively. These two national dailies were selected because they are recognized as South Korea's liberal and conservative newspapers of record, respectively, and because corpus article frequencies in the two papers were quite similar for the years observed (Fig. 1). I then colored network nodes and edges using a three-color raster which transitioned from red to white to blue as the percentage of articles addressed by liberal media ranged from 0% (exclusive coverage by conservative media) to 50% (equal coverage by conservative and liberal media) to 100% (exclusive coverage by liberal media).

Coloring network nodes and edges by partisanship reveals that the NKHR discourse in the 1990s was dominated by liberals. By the mid-2000s conservatives had joined the conversation and most topics were discussed by both camps with similar frequency, as reflected by the moderate

Fig 1.

NKHR corpus article counts by Chosun and Hankyoreh. A color version of this figure is available in the online article.

intensities of the blue and red hues. By the mid-2010s, the discourse had become deeply polarized as reflected by the prevalence of dark reds and dark blues. Coloring also reveals that even as the discourse evolved and polarized over time, certain topics remained central to both camps. The topic "politics of N/S unification" persists across all three observed decades. The topic is frequently discussed as evidenced by its large node size. Moreover, it is discussed with equal frequency by both camps, as evidenced by its intensity remaining within the moderate range between light red and light blue. The centrality and equal frequency with which both camps address this topic does not imply a consensus of partisan views. Edges linking these white nodes to "deep red" or "deep blue" nodes provide some indication of how each camp attempted to frame the contentious "white hot" topics.

Network Periodization

Several insights may be gleaned by visually inspecting the semantic network as a whole. For one, we may observe the connectivity, density and number of components in the network. Throughout the 1990s, latent topics in the NK Human Rights network were largely disconnected. Only in the network slices of the early 2000s do we see the number of edges begin to increase. As connectivity increased, the network did not emerge as several disparate clusters, but rather as a single, densely connected component. These macro features reflect the gradual coalescing of disparate topics in the corpus into a coherent discourse. However, far from implying universal and harmonious understandings, meso level analysis reveals that this densely connected component was comprised of a highly contentious and polarized discourse.

Measuring structural changes in a semantic network over time can be a method for periodizing a discourse which avoids the pitfalls of researcher bias. Periodizing the discourse is achieved in two steps. First, an Inter-layer Assortativity analysis was performed, which calculates pairwise correlations between all possible pairs of the twenty-seven networks (Fig. 2). Second, these pairwise correlations were used to hierarchically cluster all twenty-seven network slices (Fig. 3). This analysis was initially developed as a way to reduce the number of slices by aggregating slices sharing a similar structure.⁴⁴ I have adapted this methodology, applying it to temporally ordered semantic network slices. The resulting clusters may be interpreted as periods of the corpus where discourse structure was relatively stable.

Fig 2.

Inter-layer assortitivity matrix.

Fig 3.

Hierarchical clustering of network slices.

The dendrogram indicates two major clusters, the right cluster spanning 1990 to 1998 and the left cluster spanning 1999 to 2017. The left cluster may be further divided into two smaller clusters, the right cluster spanning 1999 to 2009 and the left cluster spanning 2010 to 2017. The following analysis explores each of these periods. I identify prominent features from among the network slices within each period, and then select corpus articles from within each of those features for in-depth reading and discourse analysis.

Semantic Network and Discourse Analysis of Three Periods

As mentioned above, the computational and qualitative parts of this analysis are mutually dependent. As a of map of the discourse, the semantic network makes it possible to identify and select the most relevant articles for qualitative analysis. Conversely, qualitative analysis of those articles comprising the most interesting nodes and edges of the network provides essential context of those structural features. In this section I present analyses for each of the three key periods identified in the network periodization above: Period 1 (1990–1998), Period 2 (1999–2009), and Period 3 (2010–2017). For each period, I identify important nodes and edges and interpret their meanings in terms of themes and conflicts in the NKHR discourse. I then offer a detailed analysis of the discourse appearing in the newspaper articles which comprised these nodes and edges.

Period 1 – Emergence of Partisan Camps (1990–1998)

Network Features Between 1990 and 1998

Period 1 spans the years between 1990 and 1998. Network features during this period are quite sparse. The period is nonetheless important as it marks the emergence of the NKHR discourse. Most of the network slices in this period do not contain structures larger than a single tie, the exception being 1994. Graph 1 depicts the largest network component in the 1994 slice. At the center of the component is a white dyad linking the topics "politics of North-South unification" and "increase in defectors in Korean society." Surrounding this dyad are blue linkages to a number of other topics. The white dyad suggests that conservatives and liberals were both actively discussing some common issues. The presence of blue linkages and absence of red linkages suggest that liberals were engaging in multi-faceted

Graph 1.

Largest network component in the 1994 slice. A color version of this figure is available in the online article.

conversations about this topic and that conservatives were not. The latent topics alone do not offer much insight, but the nodes and edges conveniently point us back to specific articles within the corpus in which these topics were discussed during the period in question. I selected several corpus articles from 1994 in which these nodes and edges scored highly. For this and all periods, I was careful to sample articles from white, blue and red regions of each component. Articles corresponding to these network components were selected for in-depth reading and resulted in the following analysis.

Kim Young-sam Administration Unsure about NKHR

By 1994, the North Korean famine had become more serious and the number of famine refugees exiting the country was on the rise. Access to North Koreans elevated the visibility and awareness about conditions in North Korea. The Kim Young-sam (Kim Yŏngsam) administration faced a dilemma of how to balance North-South economic cooperation with the perceived nuclear threat. Unification Minister Lee Yeong-duk (Yi Yŏngdŏk) signaled this uncertainty in an interview on January 31 in which he admitted that the administration was uncertain of whether continued economic cooperation with North Korea would result in voluntary change or whether more heavy-handed enforcement might be required.⁴⁵ In the following months, conservative columnists were skeptical that the South's continued economic cooperation with the North would induce the North to negotiate on nuclear issues; these writers argued that the Kim government should take bold actions.⁴⁶ Liberal columnists were keen to advocate for the human rights concerns of the rising number of North Korean defectors in Russia and China but did not support the linkage of human rights to political and military packages.⁴⁷

Liberals Hold NKHR Forum

In April 1994, the liberal opposition held a NKHR Symposium.⁴⁸ Following this event, liberals would continue to oppose the linkage of NKHR to political issues and, citing Carter's claim that there was no evidence of plutonium, would continue to downplay the nuclear issue.⁴⁹ Liberal calls for decoupling human rights and politics was also consistent with President Clinton's decision to decouple human rights issues in China from economic agendas. South Korea conservatives criticized both Clinton and the Blue House for this stance, arguing that the US and South Korea should address North Korean human rights more aggressively.⁵⁰ Conservatives also criticized South Korea, US and Japan for their lack of action on the Japanese abductee issues.⁵¹

Kim Young-sam Government Takes a Stance on NKHR

In late August 1994, the Kim Young-sam government appears to have formed a firm policy stance on North Korean Human Rights. On August 28, Kim Deok (Kim Tŏk), director of the National Security Planning Agency issued a report on human rights violations in North Korea. The report cited physical evidence of political imprisonment, torture and public executions. Conservative columnists quickly sounded their approval of the Kim administration's taking an adversarial stance on NKHR and urged the government to take aggressive measures. A key plank in the conservative argument was that South Korean liberals had once held the authoritarian regime in South Korea accountable for human rights violations; why would they hold the authoritarian regime in the North to a different standard?⁵² Consistent with the prominence of liberal linkages in the 1994 network component, media analysis reveals that in 1994 South Korean liberals had already developed a clear anti-securitization stance on NKHR. By the year's end we also see South Korean conservatives realizing the value of NKHR as a rhetorical weapon for justifying aggression against the North Korean regime, as well as a wedge for dividing liberals.

Period 2 – Rise of Conservative NKHR (1999–2009)

Network Features Between 1999 and 2009

Period 2 spans the eleven years between 1999 and 2009. The network slices from 1999 to 2002 are again quite sparse but larger components appear beginning in 2002 (Graph 2). Graphs 2–4 depict the expansion of NKHR

Graph 2.

Largest network component in the 2002 slice.

discourse between 2002 and 2004. After 2004, component structure remains similar for several years. I focus on 2002 to 2004 as this represents the earliest emergence of a conservative discourse. Historically, we know that this period corresponds to the growth of human rights NGOs in South Korea. From the semantic network we directly observe the conservative discourse first appear in the form of light red nodes and edges in 2003 (Graph 3) followed by deep red nodes and edges in 2004 (Graph 4). In 2004 we also observe the return of a liberal discourse. It is interesting that nearly every year, red and blue partisan discourse centers on the same white dyad observed in 1994, linking the topics "politics of North-South unification" and "increase in defectors in Korean society." In 2004, a number of other topics and edges join this discursive core. Labels such as "NK nuclear issue & 6-party talks" reflect the expansion of the discourse following the securitization of NKHR. Using the same procedure mentioned above, articles corresponding to these network components were selected for in-depth reading and resulted in the following analysis.

2002 – North Korean Defectors Rush the Spanish Embassy in China

On March 14, twenty-five North Korean defectors rushed the Spanish embassy in China and requested political asylum in South Korea. North Korea and IR experts called for increased support for defectors and a reexamination of Kim Dae-jung's (Kim Taejung) soft approach to Korea-China relations and inter-Korean diplomacy.⁵³ Liberal experts tempered conservative alarms with calls for caution, perspective and fact-finding.⁵⁴

Graph 3.

Largest network component in the 2003 slice. A color version of this figure is available in the online article.

Graph 4.

Largest network component in the 2004 slice. A color version of this figure is available in the online article.

Liberals were particularly skeptical of calls to increase government funding to assist defector integration.⁵⁵ "Conservatives want North Korea to collapse," one critic wrote. "If the defector issue is the result of North Korea's struggling economy, how much worse would it be if it collapsed entirely?" "How much will it cost South Korea and Seoul to clothe, feed and employ all of these defectors?"⁵⁶ Liberals supported more humanitarian assistance for North Koreans abroad but were reluctant to encourage defection and separate NKHR from inter-Korean reconciliation.⁵⁷

2003 – UN Resolution on Human Rights in North Korea

On April 16, 2003, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted resolutions expressing concern over human rights conditions in the DPRK, Turkmenistan, and Myanmar. This action triggered unprecedented anger among South Korean conservatives now keenly aware that the international community was adopting a stance on North Korean human rights which closely aligned with their own. Some directly criticized North Korean leadership and laid out the case for use of military force on North Korea.⁵⁸ Others leveled criticisms at "South Korean conscience groups", such as the National Human Rights Commission of Korea for "ignoring North Korean human rights issues only because they do not meet their political goals."⁵⁹ Liberals were also aware of the growing conservative consensus within the international community and accused South Korean and American conservatives of oversimplification and being overly aggressive.⁶⁰ One North Korean defector taking a liberal stance opposed the UN resolution on the pragmatic grounds that it undermined ongoing negotiations over the North Korean nuclear issue and would not substantively improve NKHR.⁶¹

2004 – US NKHR Act and US Presidential Election

October 2004 was a pivotal time in US politics. In mid-2004, American support for the Iraq War fell below 50%. In Congress, the US Senate passed the North Korea Human Rights Act on September 28, the House on October 4, and the president signed the Act into law on October 18, just weeks before his re-election on November 2. South Korean media held several events hosting American experts such as Victor Cha, David Kang and Christopher Hill. During these events, experts agreed that regardless of whether Bush or Kerry won the presidential election, North Korean issues would become the top priority of the next US administration and that America's North Korea policy would likely clash with Roh's agenda of inter-Korean dialogue.⁶²

Conservative media celebrated the passage of the NKHR Act and the prospect of the US undercutting Roh's inter-Korean talks but were less excited by Hill's implication that US-North bilateral talks would essentially cut South Korea out of the loop.⁶³ Liberals complained that the Act's annual provision of $20 million to private organizations helping defectors was designed to encourage mass defection and destabilize the North Korean system. This aggressive policy, liberals warned, would induce North Korea to "continue to instigate systemic instability and drive it in a more closed direction without actually helping North Koreans improve their human rights." This would "threaten the basic framework for peaceful coexistence between the two Koreas" and saddle the South with the costs of defector resettlement.⁶⁴ The sudden increase in discourse complexity observed in the 2004 network component is reflected here as the NKHR issue became intertwined with nuclear politics, US-ROK relations, North Korean sovereignty and defector resettlement.

Period 3 – Culmination of Contentious Strategies (2010–2016)

Network Features Between 2010 and 2016

Period 3 spans the years between 2010 and 2016. The network slices from 2010 to 2013 contain some prominent conservative components; however, the liberal discourse becomes particularly complex in 2014 (Graph 5) and then strongly polarized in 2015 and 2016 (Graphs 6 and 7). Historically we know that this period corresponds to the adoption of the 2014 UNCOI report and passage of the 2016 North Korea Human Rights Act in South Korea. In the semantic network, this is reflected by the emergence of previously unobserved latent topics such as "legislative conflict over passing a bill", "one-shot law, human rights act (SK), National Assembly procedure" and "Park's strong response to NK security crisis." Following the same procedure used for the two earlier periods, articles corresponding to these network components were selected for in-depth reading and resulted in the following analysis.

2014 – UNCOI Report

February 17, 2014, the UNCOI issued a report on North Korean human rights. The report documented human rights abuses in North Korea, unambiguously placed the blame on North Korea's leadership and recommended that these be referred to the International Criminal Court. South Korean liberals condemned the report as "an ambush on inter-Korean relations."⁶⁵ Liberal editors speculated the resolutions' true

Graph 5.

Largest network component in the 2014 slice. A color version of this figure is available in the online article.

Graph 6.

Largest network component in the 2015 slice. A color version of this figure is available in the online article.

Graph 7.

Largest network component in the 2016 slice. A color version of this figure is available in the online article.

purpose was to justify future military intervention as the US had done prior to its invasion of Iraq.⁶⁶ South Korean conservatives immediately interpreted the adoption of the UNCOI report as the impetus required to pass South Korea's North Korea Human Rights Act.⁶⁷ President Park Geun-hye (Pak Kŭnhye) publicly signaled solidarity with the US and EU but South Korean experts argued that behind the scenes the Park administration was unsure how to pursue contentious NKHR strategies without threatening recent improvements in inter-Korean relations.⁶⁸

2015 – Liberals Acknowledge Shift in Public Opinion

The 2014 UNCOI Report ultimately compelled South Korea's National Assembly to revive the North Korea Human Rights Act. Liberals reluctantly conceded that "public opinion now favors the law, so both parties are supporting the process."⁶⁹ Moon Jae-in (Mun Chaein) unenthusiastically observed, "It is not desirable to be seen as blocking the North Korean Human Rights Act." Conservative media warned, "If the legal process fails again, anger against the North Korean regime, which does not know the value of human rights, could be transferred to Moon's opposition party."⁷⁰ Even still, in 2015 the liberal opposition was not keen to pass the bill and conservatives were preoccupied with President Park's labor reform and economic revitalization bills.⁷¹ In US-ROK relations, the issue was being eclipsed by the nuclear issue.⁷² As a result, legislative gridlock persisted throughout the 19^th National Assembly and by end of the regular session, the North Korea Human Rights Act had still not come to a vote.⁷³ Special plenary sessions were held on December 15, 22 and 29. By this point, both parties had reached agreement over the language of the North Korea Human Rights Act, but liberals leveraged the bill's passage in order to influence negotiations on Park's corporate vitality "One-Shot Act" and the Anti-Terrorism Act.⁷⁴ Then, in the middle of the final plenary sessions, the leadership of the liberal party imploded, negotiations stalled, and the special plenary sessions ended with still no movement on the bills.⁷⁵

2016 – North Korean Human Rights Act

Whether liberals ever intended to pass these bills, or whether they planned to stall until the upcoming General Election scheduled for April 13, 2016, is not clear; however, events of January and February 2016 ultimately forced their hand. In January 2016, a coalition of twenty Minjudang lawmakers led by Ahn Cheol-soo (An Ch'ŏlsu) declared their intention to break with Moon and form the Kungminŭidang [People's Party]. Kungminŭidang legislators indicated their willingness to adopt a more centrist position on the Labor Act, Anti-Terrorism Act and North Korea Human Rights Act.⁷⁶ Their negotiating power diminished, Moon's Minjudang conceded the majority of its objections to the One-Shot Act and allowed the bill to pass on February 4.⁷⁷ Even in this compromised position, commentators speculated that the Minjudang might stall the Anti-Terrorism and North Korea Human Rights Acts right up until the April 2016 General Elections.⁷⁸ This may have well happened had North Korea not intervened on February 7 by launching a rocket carrying a reconnaissance satellite. President Park described the launch as a disguised ballistic missile test and retaliated on February 10 by suspending all operations at the Kaesong Industrial Complex and withdrawing all South Korean personnel.⁷⁹ With public pressure mounting, liberals finally allowed the Anti-Terrorism and North Korea Human Rights Acts to pass in a plenary session on March 3. News headlines on the day the two bills passed read: "The Anti-Terrorism Act passed, …" and "Now the economy …", a reference to Park's pending Labor Reform Act.⁸⁰ The headlines barely nodded to NKHR and instead reflected the political priorities of the moment.

Discussion

In this study, a semantic network representation of NKHR discourse in South Korean news media provided a historical framework within which partisan viewpoints could be traced and analyzed. Let's first consider the historical gaps filled by this analysis. Prior research on South Korea's NKHR movement highlighted the emergence of human rights NGOs in the late 1990s, several of which were founded by former student activists disillusioned by the engagement policies of establishment liberals. Analysis of the 1994 network slice reveals that the ideological split on NKHR actually dates back to the Kim Young-sam administration and the early years of the North Korean Famine. At this juncture, liberals had already developed a clear position opposing contentious strategies on NKHR. Conservatives were slower to take a stance on NKHR but by August 1994 it is clear that the Kim administration had adopted the contentious strategy of naming and shaming.

Analysis of prominent network components between 2002 and 2004 suggests that the greatest initial growth of conservative human rights discourse predated the Lee administration by five years. Years before Lee took office, South Korea's human rights NGOs were fueled by the rapid mobilization of contentious strategies by the Bush White House and foreign human rights NGOs. Although South Korean conservatives were eager to participate in this movement, liberals were able to stonewall the 2005 North Korean Human Rights Act and ignore international NKHR initiatives due to the Korean public's associating NKHR with the unpopular war in Iraq.

Analysis of partisan discourse also helped unravel the complex balancing acts undertaken by both camps on the issue of humanitarian assistance. Conservatives argued in favor of resettlement funding as it aided defectors and encouraged defection; however, they opposed economic engagement on the grounds that it propped up the regime. By contrast, liberals favored economic engagement as it aided North Korean citizens and strengthened inter-Korean relations but opposed resettlement policies which might encourage defection. For liberals and conservatives alike, their respective partisan commitments generate instrumental empathy towards some subpopulations of North Koreans and neglect towards others.

The UN's adoption of the UNCOI report in 2014 sufficiently swayed South Korean public opinion enough to worry liberals about electoral backlash if they failed to pass the North Korean Human Rights Act. Minjudang negotiating power was further weakened by a leadership crisis and splintering off of the Kungminŭidang. Even still, Moon Jae-in's Minjudang stalled the North Korea Human Rights Act and may well have mothballed the bill during the 19th National Assembly Session had North Korea not conducted a missile test at a critical moment in the legislative process. Even as contentious NKHR strategies achieved its pinnacle of international consensus during this period, the issue remained a low priority for South Korean conservatives as well as the Obama White House, in comparison to national security and the economy.

In addition to tracing the history of the discourse, this study aimed to clarify the underlying logic of partisan division over NKHR. Do the differences between South Korean liberals and conservatives hinge on particular human rights bundles (i.e., CPR vs. ESCR), strategies for attaining those rights (i.e., conflict vs. engagement), or some other third factor? Neither camp's values nor strategies have remained static over time. In the 1980s, liberals pursued CPR by contentious means against an authoritarian South Korean government but since the 1990s have adopted a strategy of engagement to achieve ESCR in an authoritarian North Korea. Over these same periods, South Korean conservatives did the opposite. Under South Korea's authoritarian governments, they eschewed contentious political movements; however, following democratization in the South, they suddenly favored contentious strategies promoting CPR in the authoritarian North. A notable exception to these general trends are the handful of student activists-turned-neoconservatives who, whether speaking of the North or South, have never wavered from their commitment to achieving CPR by contentious means.

This historical evidence suggests that establishment liberals and conservatives in South Korea are not defined by their valuing a particular package of human rights or movement strategies. Rather the public discourse points to partisans' attitudes about US hegemony and intervention on the Korean peninsula. As I stated in the introduction, I define US hegemony as the United States' projection of economic and military power to shape the international system. Throughout the 1980s South Korean liberals vigorously opposed pro-US partisans in the South who would compromise South Korean CPR. Since the 1990s they have continued to oppose US and South Koreas' contentious approach to NKHR by promoting ESCR and engagement with the North. By contrast, South Korean conservatives have consistently aligned with the US, first in support of South Korea's military dictatorships during the 1980s, and more recently, to oppose North Korea on the issue of NKHR.

South Korea's NKHR discourse reveals paradoxes in both values and strategies which further support this assessment. For example, in terms of the costs associated with promoting NKHR, the discourse confirms that liberals are consistently willing to fund economic cooperation and humanitarian aid to the North but reluctant to shoulder the costs of defector resettlement in South Korea. In terms of controversial legislation, liberal lawmakers of the 19^th National Assembly Session were reluctant to pass the NKHR Act on grounds that it pursued CPR too aggressively but were reluctant to pass the Anti-Terrorism Act on grounds that it would violate the CPR of South Korean citizens. These inconsistencies are puzzling when viewed through the lens of human rights values or movement strategy, but they are perfectly consistent when viewed through the lens of liberal distrust of US and South Korean aggression against the North.

Lastly, this study models a novel methodology for discourse analysis integrating semantic network analysis and critical reading. In a corpus containing thousands of documents, qualitative analysis may well overlook important structural features and long-term patterns. By distilling complex contextual information into a concise map, semantic network analysis is able to reveal prominent topics, connections and transitions. The network is especially helpful for identifying important documents within the corpus and for structuring the researcher's analysis of the discourse. In its current state, semantic network analysis is not yet capable of generating nuanced interpretations of the structures it reveals. Thus, for the foreseeable future, we ought to see semantic network analysis as a powerful complement to qualitative analysis rather than a stand-alone method.

Conclusion

To what extent does the diagnosis of South Korean NKHR partisans apply to the international NKHR community? South Korea's democracy movement seems to have been an especially formative crucible for partisans in both camps, but was this social movement any more divisive for Koreans than anti-war protests were for Americans in the 1970s? For many scholars and policy makers who came of age during the Vietnam War, North Korea was a case study in American empire gone wrong. To others from this era, North Korea is the textbook case justifying Western intervention. Since Vietnam, there has been no shortage of historical conflicts to polarize younger generations of North Korea watchers on the virtues or evils of American empire: Iran Contra, the Iraq War, the Financial Crisis of 2007, to name a few. The pattern of South Korean partisanship may not perfectly map onto North Korea watchers in the West. But the amazing synergy between South Korean and Western NKHR activists, especially in their efforts to bring about the UNCOI report, imply that their shared motivations run deeper than their mutual commitment to NKHR.

The existence of ulterior partisan agendas is precisely the danger that partisanship introduces into the field of NKHR. This study lays bare the paradoxical policy orientations that arise from partisan commitments for or against American intervention. It is fortunate that the well-being of North Korean citizens in the DPRK conveniently aligns with liberal interests, and that aiding defectors in South Korea happens to align with the conservative agenda. But friendships driven by partisan commitments are instrumental and fair-weather. And North Korean defectors are confused by South Korean liberals who were willing to send food to their countrymen in the North but are unwilling to greet them in the South. Equally confusing are South Korean conservatives who greet defectors with open arms in the South but are leery of sending humanitarian assistance to their countrymen in the North. Moreover, neither liberals nor conservatives have a particular incentive to assist undocumented defectors in China, which are arguably the most vulnerable of any North Korean subpopulation.

Danielle Chubb and Andrew Yeo have formulated the most pragmatic proscription for promoting NKHR: Try a little bit of everything. Specifically, they argue in favor of three approaches: the top-down legal/institutional approach, the bottom-up approach of subversive tactics, and humanitarian engagement focusing on social and economic rights.⁸¹ While I endorse their mixed strategy in principle, I fear it brushes over the deeper chasm in the NKHR community resulting from opposing attitudes about US hegemony and intervention. As we come to this realization, we ought to bring it to the forefront of our policy debates and academic discourse. It will be much easier for us to agree on Chubb and Yeo's multi-pronged approach if we can first agree on the practical costs and benefits of available strategies. Anti-interventionists will be far more likely to sit down with pro-interventionists if conservatives do not call for unconstrained aggression. And pro-interventionists will be less likely to roll their eyes at anti-interventionist calls for humanitarian engagement if liberals acknowledge the importance of North Korean reciprocity and accountability. What North Korea's role will be in promoting NKHR remains to be seen. However, we North Korea watchers in South Korea and the West will be far more effective at improving the lives of actual North Koreans if we first pause to interrogate and temper our own partisan commitments to NKHR.