“Sojourn in Paradise: The Experiences of Foreign Students in North Korea”, 2021-08-11 ():
North Korea is well-known for the intense social control it imposes upon its citizens and foreign visitors [especially African]. This social control serves to circumscribe interactions between the two groups, limit the flow of information in either direction which may be detrimental to North Korea’s propaganda narrative, and maintain North Korea’s isolation from the outside world.
Foreign students in Pyongyang are not exempt from such social control. However, they are granted opportunities allowing them to experience the country more comprehensively such as freedom of movement within the city and the chance to live alongside local students and interact extensively with their teachers.
By probing the experiences of 4 former foreign students of Kim Il-Sung University to examine what their social interactions reveal about North Korean social control, its mechanisms and limitations, this article attributes agency to people living under North Korea’s system and complicates dominant paradigms of totalitarianism.
[Keywords: North Korea, social control, foreign students, Late-Socialism]
…The data and basis of this research come from semi-structured interviews conducted in August 2020 with 4 former North Korea-based foreign students who had completed their studies in North Korea and returned home [2 Russians, 2 Chinese]. All 4, whose names are rendered as pseudonyms, were recruited through my personal networks formed during my time at Kim Il Sung University from April 2018 to June 2019. In most cases, they were people I had spent time with during my time at Kim Il Sung University, and, evoking the autoethnographic dimension of this study elaborated below, much of the conversation consisted of recounting shared experiences.