Legitimacy and Regime Security in North Korea: Pyongyang’s Slogan Politics

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The paper attempts to approach the survival of the North Korean regime in the perspective of changing legitimation modes and ideological management by the leadership to fill in possible ‘identity vacuum’ which could possibly lead to system collapse. With a content analysis of Rodong Sinmun, the representative North Korean newspaper, this paper follows the trajectory process of legitimizing values and ideological rationality in North Korea between 1985 and 2004. In so doing, this paper will address the question of when and how new slogan was shifted, reformulated, and produced for regime security toward audiences at home and abroad. This paper argues that, unlike its conventional images of North Korea as an anachronistic, static communist country, North Korea actively seek to respond to internal and external challenges they faced, which heightened in the 1990s, by formulating new slogan to rationalize its existence. In the perspective of legitimation crisis, this paper further argues that the process of shifting legitimation modes, through ideological manipulation or propaganda management, has served the purpose of filling in the possible ideological vacuum, therefore, preventing identity crisis and helping sustain the North Korean regime thus far.

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