@article {Hong:2013:1467-2715:511,
title = "REFRAMING NORTH KOREAN HUMAN RIGHTS",
journal = "Critical Asian Studies",
parent_itemid = "infobike://routledg/rcra",
publishercode ="routledg",
year = "2013",
volume = "45",
number = "4",
publication date ="2013-12-01T00:00:00",
pages = "511-532",
itemtype = "ARTICLE",
issn = "1467-2715",
eissn = "1472-6033",
url = "https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/rcra/2013/00000045/00000004/art00002",
doi = "doi:10.1080/14672715.2013.851154",
author = "Hong, Christine",
abstract = "ABSTRACT: Introducing the core concerns animating this two-part thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies (December 2013 and March 2014), this essay offers a historicized overview of the consolidation of contemporary human rights as the dominant lingua franca for social justice
projects today. Highlighting what the rights framework renders legible as well as what it consigns to unintelligibility, this essay examines the antinomies of contemporary human rights as an ethico-political discourse that strives to reassert the dominance of the global North over the global
South. Relentlessly presentist in its assignment of blame and politically harnessed to a regime-change agenda, the human rights framing of North Korea has enabled human rights advocates, typically beneficiaries of past injustice, to assume a moralizing, implicitly violent posture
toward a regime commonsensically understood to be evil. Cordoning off North Korea's alleged crimes for discrete consideration while turning a willfully blind eye to the violence of sanctions, humanitarian intervention, and the withholding of humanitarian
and developmental aid, the North Korean human rights project has allowed a spectrum of political actorsU.S. soft-power institutions, thinly renovated cold war defense organizations, hawks of both neoconservative and liberal varieties, conservative evangelicals, anticommunist Koreans
in South Korea and the diaspora, and North Korean defectorsto join together in common cause. This thematic issue, by contrast, enables a range of critical perspectivesfrom U.S.- and South Korea-based scholars, policy analysts, and social justice advocatesto attend to what
has hovered outside or been marginalized within the dominant human rights framing of North Korea as a narrowly inculpatory, normative structure.",
}