Varieties of Everyday Resistance in North Korea

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the theoretical puzzle of everyday resistance in North Korea. It reviews the literature on resistance studies, everyday life in North Korea, and social movements and then explores acts of resistance in the everyday lives of ordinary North Koreans within shifting structural and ideational conditions. The research aims to develop a foundational theory of everyday resistance in a totalitarian state, as a 'building block' for the development of a more comprehensive typological theory. This research adopts a qualitative approach and uses a case study methodology. The cases were constructed from a blend of documentary and interview data collected between August 2015 and May 2018. Purposive and snowball recruitment and data sourcing methods were used to produce a triangulated research sample comprising documentary data (official North Korean documents, media), digital testimony (defector testimony, reporting from inside North Korea), archival data(material from governmental organisations, non-governmental organisations [NGOs]) and interviews (four defectors, six experienced NGO workers). Data analysis involved within-case analysis and cross-case comparison. The case studies present instances of diverse types of everyday resistance and classify them into categories based on a three-part framework of everyday resistance as reflexive, discursive and biopolitical. A set of possible causal explanations for each category of everyday resistance is distilled from the structural and ideational paradigmatic traditions of social movement theory and tested against each case. The research results support a three-part framework of everyday resistance in North Korea for further development of a more comprehensive typological theory. The theoretical and practical implications of this research extend to the broader fields of political anthropology, comparative and contentious politics. From a practical perspective, the research gleans new insights for researchers and practitioners by discretely categorising varieties of social behaviour potentially experienced by defectors and the broader conditions underpinning them.