Environment, Politics and Ideology in North Korea: Landscape as a Political Project

One of the few areas of the world still divided by the geo-political status quo
of the twentieth century’s Cold War, consensus holds that since then unlike
the south (the Republic of Korea), the northern half of the Korean peninsula
has remained in a state of political arrested development. The confusing,
seemingly opaque, defiantly hereditary and definitely dynastic North Korea
currently led by “Marshal” Kim Jong Un on first glance seems to meet this
cliché. In diplomatic matters North Korea serves as a narratological thorn in
the side of international consensus, represented as both dangerous military
threat and famine ridden economic basket case. Academic narratives surrounding North Korea, its ideology, policy and functionality are equally
confused, opaque and corrupted.
This book seeks to cast light within the confusing gloom, reducing confusion and supporting the reconciliation of corrupted analytical elements
through an investigation of North Korea’s geographic and ideological environmental narratives. Utilizing tools of critique and investigation sourced
from the work of academics such as Han S. Park, Brian Myers, Heonik
Kwon, and Patrick McEachern, it analyzes North Korea’s self-professed
claim to be a geographic space in which revolutionary utopian potentialities
have been fulfilled, and the historical narratives within its institutional approach to environmental projects. Using both internal and external material,
this book will focus specifically on those narratives addressing the developmental fields of tidal reclamation and forestry/afforestation and ultimately
seek to assess both the validity and reality of the North Korea’s claims to be a
place of geographic “lived” utopia.