University of North Korean Studies

The housing policy under Kim Jong-un’s regime is characterized as a political project to stabilize and strengthen the personal dictatorship, due to the following three reasons. First, the housing allocation system composed of three special allocation modes (SAMs) and one general allocation mode (GAM) is arranged hierarchically according to the relative degree of political allegiance and functional necessity for the regime. SAMs serve to enhance the security of the regime. GAMs play roles as a social security apparatus. Second, public housing construction projects in themselves are utilized as ‘political works’ to strengthen the social cohesion of the cadres-masses relations and enhance the cadres’ allegiance to the regime. Third, the regime uses the double strategy to control the unofficial housing market (IHM), The regime connives at the illegality of the private housing construction (PHC) in order to increase the housing provision while intervening IHM to suppress the potential threat to the regime with several means, such as denial of property rights associated with a house traded through an unofficial housing market, control of PHC, supply of the public housing by the government and severe punishments of private housing developers. In view of these characteristics, it is said that Kim’s regime controls the housing provision system to induce the people

In post-colonial Korea, social movements were the main impetus for overcoming various political, economic and cultural contradictions and conflicts triggered by the nationalization and capitalist modernization that followed the nation-state formation process. Social movements were also the means for achieving a democratic transformation of social relationships in a diverse number of social sectors. Yet the successive authoritarian regimes in post-colonial Korea had stifled freedom of assembly and association; thus social movements had to become clandestine underground organizations that required the individual sacrifices of committed activists. This historical background inscribed an important characteristic to the history of social movements, which is the explosive outbreak of the masses in spontaneous insurrections that subsequently triggered the formation of social movement organizations.

Abstract The goal of this paper is to grasp the relationship of coexistence, and at times, discord, between anticommunism and popular culture through a historical and chronological survey. To do this, this paper will first seek to understand anticommunism as an ideology with consistent logic, but a as a diverse and multilayered, mutable and contradictory affect. This gives the advantage of viewing anti-communism not from the aspect of its production, but of its acceptance. This can provide a clue as to why anticommunism, which wields unsurpassed power at present in the world’s only divided nation, Korea, compulsively defends itself while constantly in a state of insecurity and ambiguity while facing challenges and resistance, and endless cracks form in its logic. This paper consider the influence exerted by anticommunism on “anticommunist films” and the reconstruction of the conditions of “anticommunism” by “anti-communist films” as two dimensions of the changing face of anticommunism circulating in popular sentiment through an analysis of the honeymoon/conflict relationship between anticommunism and popular culture.

Contemporary Buddhist monastic communities often find some of the traditional Vinaya regulations to be outdated, insufficient, difficult to follow and counterproductive to the practice and propagation of the religion in the modern world. Focusing on the Korean Chogye Order, this paper will illustrate the manner in which monastics today negotiate between their historical disciplinary codes and current social values to formulate new Vinaya-related literature. It will demonstrate how the Order’s emerging legal system democratizes the monastic bureaucracy, objectifies financials and establishes a neutral punishment-based judicial system in line with the political values of secular society. In addition, it will introduce the recent creation of new Chogye Order Pure Rules, which update the Vinaya with original codification of modern consumerism, environmental ethics and technological use. Particular attention will be given to the way this new Vinaya construction represents explicit attempts to improve the reputation of the sangha in face of social critique.