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Symbol and performance have long been recognized as crucial to statecraft. Unlike some features of modern statecraft, which tend to be understood as "Western, " the significance of symbol and performance in reinforcing state authority, reproducing state power on a given landscape, and mediating between the state and its domestic and international audiences has been observed in many broad cultural contexts. North Korea is a state whose "hermit" tendencies have produced an extreme degree of emphasis on symbolic performance as a mediating layer in the production of sovereignty. Perhaps nowhere is symbol and performance so conflated with "reality" as in North Korea. Considering some of its patterns of symbolic performance, such as those in diplomacy and foreign policy, reveals how the North Korean state remains strongly informed by pre-modern Confucian China and Korea. Considering other symbolic patterns that North Korea shares, interestingly, with early modern Europe-patterns involving the reproduction of domestic authority over territory-reminds us that historic precedents do not always denote paths of influence and may instead point to the cultural transcendence of certain symbolic practices of statecraft.
North Korea. The common name of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), that truculent little pariah state, conjures an Orwellian image of grim dystopia where the repressed population struggles under poverty that is as appalling as the dogma is rigid. Proclaimed by the United States as part of an "axis of evil," North Korea in the past decade has garnered international attention for such paradoxical occurrences as a devastating famine and alleged nuclear weapons development. As it is a "failed state" in a number of rather obvious ways, one wonders whether there is any particular reason to give any scholarly consideration to North Korea whatsoever, unless it is to scrutinize its continued threat as a weapons proliferator or to plan for the aftermath of its ultimate collapse. But a range of practices that are arguably not found simultaneously in any other contemporary state not only coexist in North Korea, but coexist to an extreme degree: its deep concern for territorial integrity; its determination to conceal its territorial space from an international gaze; its near quarantine of its population within the fortified borders of a garrison state; its personality cult that has sustained a deification...