In Brief with Benedikt Staar

20 February 2023

It was our pleasure to welcome Benedikt Staar as an associate editor last fall and our team has benefitted tremendously from his experience and editorial skills over the past few months.

We recently sat down with Benedikt to learn more about his research interests, especially his work on North Korea.

9DL: You are in the final stages of completing your doctoral research. Could you tell us a little about what you are working on?

BS: In a nutshell, I am looking at how North Korean propaganda portrays (and thereby ‘makes’) security issues and how these are connected to legitimising the regime. In other words, I am looking at how North Korea securitises. The underlying question I am dealing with is: how does North Korea portray threats, threatening actors, and referent objects of security, and what is their connection to legitimation narratives? When it comes to the question of what keeps the North Korean regime going, legitimacy has always been treated with much less enthusiasm than the use of force through oppression, surveillance etc., or the cooptation of elites — even though, when we look at the research about other autocracies, legitimacy is treated with much more professional interest than the casual rejection we see so often when talking about North Korea.

Thankfully, things are changing nowadays. I show how security issues are vital to how North Korea tries to maintain its current system. The threats that (in North Korean terms) ‘justify’ the current regime and its politics are, interestingly, not always the US or South Korea. If we take an in-depth look at what the main propaganda channels in North Korea are saying, we can sometimes see shifts away from the usual enemies like the US government or the South Korean government to more specific actors like particular politicians or parties. Conversely, we can also sometimes see shifts towards much more abstract ‘threats’ like imperialism or natural disasters. My work is about showing that these shifts are important because they reflect different ways of using security issues to maintain and justify political power. If we know how some security issues are much more important to the way North Korea’s government maintains its power, we can think of more effective ways to engage North Korea via such issues, either by emphasising or disregarding them.

9DL: Having grown up in Germany, how did you come to develop such a deep interest in such a faraway place?

BS: Originally, I simply wanted to learn a language that was unlike the languages I had learned in school. Rather by chance, I decided to see what learning Korean was like, and the interest in the language persists to this day. The crucial thing for me was the fact that the Korean alphabet is very easy to learn. Even if you are just starting and do not know the meaning of a single word, you can at least pronounce what you are reading and look it up in a dictionary. A bit later I enrolled in a Korean Studies degree and the topics I enjoyed learning about the most were political issues and international relations — which ultimately led me to the politics of the Korean Peninsula.

9DL: North Korea remains a flashpoint in international politics; despite decades of sanctions, the West has been unable to make much headway. How do you see the situation evolving?

BS: Regrettably, I do not think we will see substantial (diplomatic) developments in the near future. It is laudable that Washington has recently appointed a special envoy for North Korean human rights because it appears to signify a renewed interest in dealing with the overall issue. Still, the most important problem remains: in the short and medium term, denuclearisation of North Korea is extremely unlikely, if not impossible. Broad calls for new efforts, commitments, and cooperation may continue. However, there is little reason for anyone to make more of it because no one in Pyongyang, Seoul, or Washington seems interested in making an effort for something that will most likely lead to nothing substantial. Additionally, I do not see how reintroducing nuclear weapons to the southern side of the peninsula will make Pyongyang more willing to engage in dialogue. Besides anything else, such a move is much more likely to destabilise the region further and strengthen the Pyongyang-Beijing axis.

9DL: What do you think the US and/or Europe could do differently in engaging North Korea?

BS: Fundamental to any effective engagement with North Korea is acknowledging the fact that North Korea is, at the end of the day, an autocracy like any other. While it has its own history, it isn’t an anomaly, an impossibility, or a state-level manifestation of a contradiction that is bound to collapse any day now. This kind of wishful thinking and the connected non-action-taking course (“We just have to wait as North Korea is going to collapse anyway because of [insert current crisis here]”) has led to underestimating North Korean capacities and resilience against internal and external problems.

Engaging North Korea via diplomacy requires willing actors in Seoul, Pyongyang, and Washington. The goals need to be realistic — the time when policymakers could have solved ‘the North Korea problem’ with one big deal has, for now at least, gone. Instead, a realistic approach could be reintegrating North Korea into international structures — North Korea’s government wants to be treated like any other state and its behavioural track record in the ASEAN Regional Forum, for example, shows that Pyongyang wants to engage internationally. Of course, there are valid criticisms of such an approach: rewarding a brutal autocracy is morally questionable, if not outright reprehensible, and the human rights situation is not going to improve by allowing North Korea into the international fold.

Still, what choice do we have? If we do nothing, North Korea’s nuclear programme, for example, will continue unchecked, as will Pyongyang’s violations of human rights. If we could at least work towards North Korea capping its nukes or freezing its work on new weapons, we would reduce the danger of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. Furthermore, if basic security-oriented cooperation is in place, we can work on getting people back into North Korea as diplomatic representatives. From there, we could work on initiatives to improve the lives of ordinary North Koreans via public health initiatives.

9DL: Other than Korean politics, what else in the Indo-Pacific piques your interest?

BS: Northeast and South(east) Asia still seem somewhat disconnected, especially viewed through a European lens. It is not just Europe, however, that has ‘discovered’ the Indo-Pacific as a much larger area with the potential for more political and economic engagement. I am curious to see how South Korea, Japan, and other non-Western countries may vie with one another for influence in South and Southeast Asia in the coming years — and how the local states are going to react to this. Connected with this is the question of whether the changing role of China is going to influence the modes of international cooperation in the region. Will we see Chinese influence shrink in ASEAN member states? Can the EU, as a somewhat unified actor, or other actors substantially extend their influence in the region? Or will we see even more minilateral initiatives take hold?

Above all this looms the spectre of climate change. I fear that climate change-related crises will be much more visible in South(east) Asia than in Europe. One thing we should look out for is whether other states will be able to act more decisively in creating and enforcing effective climate change policies without experiencing climate disasters for themselves, or whether every state will need to experience their own crisis before taking substantial action.

9DL: Finally, you’ve already been with 9DL for several months now. What drew you to the platform, and is there something particular you are looking forward to in the coming months?

BS: Several things drew me to 9DL. Its accessibility — every article is free to read — is something that is impressive and important for any reader but is often taken for granted. Also, besides the platform’s independence, the stated goal is to connect both seasoned and junior scholars as well as analysts which makes 9DL stand out for me. Therefore, 9DL is able to publish articles that represent new and local voices. Given that the team has grown a lot over the last months, I am looking forward to us doing more — the Indo-Pacific holds so many important issues to discuss. If we have more hands on deck, then we can better provide a platform where we see not just current events of the region but also the underlying political currents.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Biography

Benedikt Staar is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Duisburg-Essen and an associate editor at 9DASHLINE. His research focuses on North Korean security, domestic politics, and propaganda.