Methodological Issues in Studying North Korea

• In Event: Bias in Data Collection and Interpretation

Abstract

Studying an Area Where You Never Been: Methodological Issues in Studying North Korea

Can the subaltern speak? As G. Spivak asked this question many decades ago, the question is still valid for scholars who have been attempting to find the voices of North Koreans. This is particularly the case in research that deals with the daily lives of North Korean people and their human rights. However, while the field of North Korean Studies has been dominated by scholars who have researched North Korea from both inside and outside the country, there have been relatively few studies on the methodological issues involved in the study of North Korea (Song and Denney 2019, Yi 2008, OH and Ryu 2021, Lee and Shim 2018).

The primary challenges in studying people’s daily lives in North Korea are that most foreign researchers either cannot visit North Korea at all or are very restricted in where they can travel within the country, and that academic freedom is highly restricted in North Korea. Therefore, under such restrictive conditions, the methodologies available to scholars who study North Korea are quite limited, including: 1) relying on information from North Korean migrants who left the country, 2) studying materials published by official North Korean sources, and 3) more recently, making use of satellite images and GIS data (Son 2022).

While each method of approaching North Korea has advantages and disadvantages with regard to studying the country and its people, this paper particularly aims to focus on the first method of utilizing verbal accounts provided by North Korean settlers in other countries, mainly in China and South Korea and also with a few cases in the UK (Lee 2019, Lee and Lee 2014). This indeed is a method that is widely used, since it is North Korean migrants who can most fully describe daily life in North Korea from their direct personal experience. Various methods of data collection have also been used, including (among others) surveys, experimental research methods, and in-depth interviews, often combined with an ethnographic or phenomenological approach.

Indeed, since many scholars, research organizations, and governmental organizations want to interview them, most North Korean migrants have multiple experiences of acting as research participants. These unique experiences of North Korean migrants could be used positively in many ways if research guidelines are strictly employed in the field. Unfortunately, however, this is not always the case, and this raises ethical questions regarding the methodological approach.

This issue becomes even more challenging when dealing with human rights issues in North Korea. Because of its notoriety regarding human rights violations committed under its authoritarian political regime, North Korea has been the target of many human rights organizations, governmental organizations and researchers who have been working on that topic. Since human rights studies often have to deal with people’s deeply personal experiences that many respondents may find it difficult to share, studying human rights in North Korea calls for even more sensitive approaches. However, a number of respondents have indicated that this has not been their experience, and that their voices got lost in the process of human rights activism or research on North Korea.

What are the fundamental issues underlying this issue that is repeatedly raised by North Korean respondents? Is it due to the social environment in South Korea, where most of the studies on North Korea are being conducted? Or such phenomena the result of specific characteristics of or circumstances in the academic community? Or is it a fundamental issue that cannot be avoided in social science studies, as has been pointed out in a number of studies into methodological issues? Or is it simply caused by the capability of an individual researcher?

Author

• Jinah Kwon, University of Sheffield