earticle

영어

The scale of human rights issues in North Korea (NK) is large, including workers’ rights, freedoms of expression, religion, movement, access to food, public executions, massive prison camps, abductions, secret trials, torture, and sexual violence. Experts have called these violations the worst in the world, and they have been condemned by many international human rights investigations. What can be done to better address this situation? The main questions of this research are, how this human rights situation can be raised in global consciousness so more pressure is brought to bear on it, how applied anthropology can help, and how education can play a positive role in helping to bring attention to the issue. First, the paper reviews seminal anthropology and social science perspectives on human rights, new concepts of global and collective rights, anthropology and globalization, and their relevance for the North Korean case. Next, the paper explores the rights issues of the global NK diaspora, and anthropological research on NK human rights, including migration, gender, religion and famine. Third, the paper reviews the historic roles of anthropology in human rights, current opportunities for anthropology in NK human rights activism through education and university-based research, visual ethnography, film, documentation of human rights issues, and exciting examples of activism by students, global NGO networks, and anthropology activists/advocates on this and related issues. The paper finds that anthropological concepts are useful to help spread awareness that the NK human rights situation, the worst in the world, is now global in scope, and that anthropological research on the issue is broad, detailed, and has a key role in documenting the situation and mobilizing significant action and activism for it. Global activism of a persistent, long-term nature, coupled with key anthropological input, can accomplish much. Just as the Soviet Union eventually freed its Jews to emigrate, the nightmare of North Korea’s human rights will eventually end.