Lecturer: Michael Seth
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2021. 07:30PM

We are inviting RAS members and friends to the RAS online lecture via Zoom.

Zoom Link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83208474484?pwd=UzcyVlFLK2IyeHFWSUxzVkdkWlV1Zz09
Meeting ID: 832 0847 4484
Passcode: 999813

North Korea – A Failed Revolution if not a Failed State

One way to understand the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is to see it as a failed revolution, chronically on the verge of being a failed state.   A revolutionary state which once carried out a radical egalitarian agenda has developed into one of the most inequitable societies on the face of the earth, a land where most led desperate lives of hunger, darkness and deprivation while a tiny elite lived in luxury.  A state founded on the universalist belief of Marxist-Leninist socialism has become a cult society based on an ideology of racial-nationalism.  A revolutionary regime that sought to be in the vanguard of human progress presides over an impoverished society.  A revolutionary state whose aim was to achieve national unity became the chief obstacle to that unity.  A regime that once sought international respect was now universally reviled. Seven decades after its founding, the main accomplishment of the Kim Il Sung’s state was that it had manage not to disintegrate into chaos as some outsiders had expected.

Michael J. Seth is a Professor of History at James Madison University. There he teaches East Asian and World history.  His research has focused on South Korea’s economic, social and educational development, and placing Korean history into global perspective. Seth is the author of Education Fever: Society, Politics and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (2002), A Concise History of Korea (third edition, 2020), North Korea: A History (2018), Korea: A Very Short Introduction (2020) and editor of The Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History (2016). His forthcoming book is Not on the Map: The Peculiar Histories of De Facto States.