North Korea Demystified By Han S. Park

mid-1990s; the transformation of the North Korean political economy from state to market was a bottom-up process and was not accompanied by political liberalization from the government downward. Outsiders have little understanding, however, of how that economic transformation has been sustained domestically since the mid-1990s—for over a decade now. Smith focuses on provincial differences in order to illustrate the differential way in which marketization became embedded in North Korean society, as well as the consequences of postfamine marketization. This approach takes issue with the common-knowledge approach to studying North Korea, which assumes that the state and society are homogeneous and unchanging. Provincial differences in, for instance, the areas of agricultural productivity and of the population’s nutritional status are quantified and demonstrated, as are their changes over time. The chapter sheds light on North Korea’s processes of marketization—a process itself not commonly identified with the country—and does so at the subnational level, a perspective not often examined.

Shifting from economics to politics, chapter 5 discusses the issues surrounding the army’s role in the political processes of North Korea. In particular, Alexander Zhebin details the importance of the army with regard to the political behavior of the DPRK and then explains the constraints under which senior military officials operate. The chapter highlights the increased role of the armed forces in North Korea as an extension of the traditional, centuries-old rivalry of the two main branches of the ruling elites in Korea—civil and military.

Chapter 6 covers the concept of good governance as a precondition for international aid to developing countries and argues that this notion of a prerequisite is a barrier to the sort of change the international community would like to see in the DPRK. Geir Helgesen chronicles the development of the concept of good governance as a politically neutral, nonideological basis for development assistance and concludes that it was largely a consequence of and reaction to the collapse of Soviet-style communism. A cultural sociologist, Helgesen discusses the content of the phrase