Our new NK News feature dedicated to shining a light on innovative, new, and lesser known authors continues, this week presenting four names which have published a number of valuable North Korea-focused studies in recent years.

From the DPRK’s relations with eastern Europe to North Korean conception of human rights, this week’s scholars have all shed light on previously unexplored topics, helping to expand the focus of North Korean studies well beyond the usual paradigms of security and traditional international relations theory.

Note: This list is not meant to be exhaustive and there may be many good names left out, because we do not know them yet and did not have the chance to review their work. There are also scholars who publish in languages other than English, therefore their work is not available to the wider field of North Korea followers. The ones we present here are those we are familiar with, who have published in English or Korean.

Balazs Szalontai is an Assistant Professor at the School of International and Area Studies at Kookmin University, in Seoul. His current research projects are focused on the Korean War and DPRK-Middle Eastern relations.

Born and raised in Hungary, Szalontai started to develop a curiosity in North Korea as far back as the early 1990s, in tandem with his interest in Soviet Stalinism and the Vietnam War. The Polish documentary film Defilada, which smartly revealed the monstrosity of Kim Il Sung’s cult by refraining from any commentary and allowing the North Korean hagiographers to do all the talking, was a turning point in his life.

Szalontai graduated from Central European University, an English-language international university in Budapest, where he wrote his PhD dissertation on North Korea’s political and economic development between 1953-1964. Written on the basis of Hungarian archival documents, his dissertation was later published in book form: Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-1964 (published by Stanford University Press in 2005).

Comparing the North Korean political system with Soviet Stalinism, North Vietnam, and the East European “people’s democracies,” the book concludes that the unusually repressive nature of the North Korean regime was not predetermined either by Korean traditions or the influence of Stalinist models, but rather resulted from the combination of several factors, including Japanese rule, the Korean War, and Kim Il Sung’s xenophobic nationalism.

In later publications, Szalontai paid particular attention to specific aspects of North Korean domestic and external policies, such as the prospects of economic reform and socio-political resistance; the problems of resource dependency, trade deficit, and partial self-exclusion from Northeast Asian regional economic cooperation; the use of nationalist propaganda and cultural policies for diplomatic purposes and the influence of external factors on Pyongyang’s confrontational actions toward South Korea..

Ju Hui Judy Han cannot be defined a ‘North Korea specialist’ in the classical sense, and yet her name is linked to one of the most interesting research efforts about North Korea seen in recent years, posing questions that intertwine migration, religion, gender issues and geography.

Han is a human geographer, with interests in religion, mobilities, and gender and racial differences. She currently teaches social and cultural geography at the University of Toronto, where she is also affiliated with the Women & Gender Studies Institute and the Centre for the Study of Korea.

Judy received her PhD in geography in 2009 from the University of California at Berkeley. Her teaching and research interests are structured within interdisciplinary frameworks of cultural geography, post-colonial cultural studies, and critical race, sexuality and gender studies.

Last year Judy started ‘On the Move: an undergraduate journal of creative geographies,’ and if that wasn’t enough, she also runs a personal blog, where she posts links, articles and other news on topics of Korean studies, queer culture, religion, technology and society.

Judy defines her doctoral work as “a multi-sited and multi-scalar critical ethnography of South Korean and Korean American evangelical Christian missionaries engaged in purpose-driven travel, i.e. religious, humanitarian, and development projects throughout the world”.

This is where her contribution to the field of North Korean studies is best exemplified: earlier this year, Han contributed to to a special edition of Critical Asian Studies, where she published an illuminating paper on the relationship between religious groups in South Korea, the U.S. and China (part of what is now known as the ‘underground railroad’), and North Korean defectors.

Due to her research Judy has conducted field work in China, Uganda, and Tanzania, in addition to South Korea and the U.S, and is interested in building transnational Korean studies—including transnational North Korean studies—in and beyond the Korean peninsula and the diaspora.

She also worked for many years as a social justice activist for racial justice and immigrant rights, and as an information designer in the non-profit sector. NK News recently spoke to Dr. Han about her work, so stay tuned to read more about it in the coming days.

Daniel Jong Schwekendiek is another name in North Korean studies that certainly deserves more attention. Researchers and North Korea observers looking for studies based on a solid data analysis should definitely become acquainted with his work.

Schwekendiek holds a Ph.D in economics from the University of Tuebingen in Germany, where he specialized in the socio-economic and bio-demographic history of the two Koreas. He is presently an assistant professor of Korean Economy and Society at Sungkyunkwan University, Korea’s former royal educational institute and now a private university supported by the Samsung Foundation.

Schwekendiek previously held academic appointments at the University of Oxford, Seoul National University and UC Berkeley, and contributed external data analysis to the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, the United Nations World Health Organization, and the International Economic History Association. His articles have appeared in leading field journals such as the Economic History Review, Social Science and Medicine, Population and Development Review, Economics and Human Biology and Korea Journal.

Taking a particular interest in Korean living standards, he is perhaps the only current scholar to have published on North Koreans, South Koreans, overseas Koreans, colonial Koreans and pre-modern Joseon Dynasty Koreans in influential, peer-reviewed journals.

His recent books include A Socioeconomic History of North Korea (2011), Korean Migration to the Wealthy West (2013), and The Data Atlas of South Korea: Demography, Society, Economic Activity (2014). As a quantitative social science historian, his major contributions to the field of North Korean studies are his works on the statistical determinants of adult malnutrition employing refugee survey data, on anthropometric gaps among children living in the two Koreas (including height, weight, body-mass and mid-upper arm circumference) employing household survey data, and on the estimation of famine deaths (together with T. Spoorenberg) employing DPRK census data.

Jiyoung Song is an assistant professor of political science in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University and Global Ethics Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Her curriculum is nothing short of impressive.

Prior to her current position, she was a fellow/lecturer of political science at the National University of Singapore, associate fellow of Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) in London, UN Consultant for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, post-doc Researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society of the University of Oxford and Supervisor at the Department of Politics of the University of Cambridge.

Song holds a Ph.D in Politics and International Studies (Cambridge, UK), LLM in Human Rights (Hong Kong) and BS in Mathematics (Seoul, Korea). Her current research focuses on irregular migration and human security in East Asia, using Complexity Theory.

Of particular interest for readers of North Korean affairs is her 2010 book Human Rights and North Korea, in which she explores a vast array of primary sources related to the DPRK’s conceptions of human rights. Her main publications include: “‘Smuggled Refugees’: the social construction of North Korean migration”, published on International Migration (2013), “The Invisible Refugees: North Korean asylum seekers in China”, in China Rights Forum (2002) and “The Right to Survival in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”, in The European Journal of East Asian Studies (2010).

Click here for part one of our profile of lesser known North Korea specialists

Picture: Eric Lafforgue