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    The "Savage-Victim-Saviour" Story Grammar of the North Korean Human Rights Industry

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    Author
    Song, J
    Date
    2021
    Source Title
    Asian Studies Review
    Publisher
    Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
    University of Melbourne Author/s
    Song, Jiyoung
    Affiliation
    Asia Institute
    Metadata
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    Document Type
    Journal Article
    Citations
    Song, J. (2021). The "Savage-Victim-Saviour" Story Grammar of the North Korean Human Rights Industry. Asian Studies Review, https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2020.1764492.
    Access Status
    This item is currently not available from this repository
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/11343/258678
    DOI
    10.1080/10357823.2020.1764492
    Abstract
    The article examines how the “human rights industry” has used the narratives of North Korean human rights activists and how actors are connected through their networks from a discourse-network perspective. It focusses on the coverage of the three most-cited North Korean refugee activists in the English-language Western media in recent years – Shin Dong Hyuk, Park Yeon Mi and Lee Hyeon Seo – and analyses their memoirs, public speeches and newspaper articles. The study finds that Western publishers have followed Makau Mutua’s “savage–victim–saviour” story grammar in their portrayal of the North Korean activists’ public discourses and that politically conservative, economically libertarian, ideologically anti-communist and religiously Christian groups have influenced these activists. While the political and material environments provided similar structural conditions for all three activists discussed in this study, there were variations among them in terms of access to resources and their exercise of individual agency. The author argues that by employing the voices and performances of North Korean activists, the human rights industry has played a significant role in strengthening and legitimising the hawkish policy of political conservatives in Seoul and Washington against Pyongyang.

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