The existential dimension of development

The early twenty-first century sits at the apex of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch that has come into being over the last century. The Anthropocene is marked by what Christopher Chase-Dunn (2013) has called a converging set of social and environmental catastrophes, ranging from climate crisis and mass extinction events to sharp increases in social inequality, and the re-entrenchment of authoritarianism in response to global precarity. The Cenozoic Era in which the Anthropocene more broadly is placed is known as the Age of Mammals, and given the demise of large mammals and birds occurring now, the climate scientist Roger Barry (2020) suggests that Cenozoic may be ending.

Unlike previous mass extinction events, however, ours has been induced by human activity, wrought by our dependency upon fossil fuels and more than 4,700 forever chemicals, comprised of per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) that do not occur in nature (Chambers et al, 2021). Introduced in the 1940s, PFAS now are found in everything, from food packaging and cookware, to cosmetics, electronics, cleaning fluids and fire-fighting foams. PFAS have been found in every ecosystem on Earth, including in the blood, breastmilk, and umbilical cords of humans and other species, and magnifying across recent generations via a process of bioaccumulation (Kempisty and Racz, 2021).

Latvian folk song

Latvia’s cultural and linguistic heritage

Baltic moral philosophies perceive a participatory universe where dynamic flows of energy interweave material existence. Drawing from archaeological and linguistic sources, Endre Bojtár (2000) finds that ancient Baltic societies developed in accordance with an animist ontology and a matriarchal axiology. Like many other Indigenous societies around the world, precolonial Balts inhabited a cosmological realm where humans, trees, and animals transmuted into one another through cycles of reincarnation. Not only did people worship sacred forests and make daily offerings to Mother Earth, but they also maintained intimate bonds with all living beings, from flora and fauna to hills, rivers and stones. Cultural customs, such as seasonal festivals, encouraged people to view non-human forms of life as kin, and to nurture biodiversity as one would care for children.

When German crusaders colonized the Baltics, proto-Latvians responded by enfolding their pagan spirituality into Christianity. Although colonizing forces have fragmented Indigenous Baltic knowledge systems, obscuring their contributions to global science, their lessons are encoded in linguistic and oral traditions, as well as in folk symbols that transmit the wisdom of an archaic Baltic science.

Song is central to cultural identity across the three Baltic sister states, where Latvian Dainas, Lithuanian Dainos, and Estonian Runo song traditions house ancient moral philosophies. Latvian Dainas are quatrain-based poems, composed of four lines that alternately rhyme and typically are sung at gatherings. There are more than 1.2 million poems in existence – many of which are more than a thousand years old – making Dainas one of the largest recorded bodies of oral knowledge in the world (Bula, 2017). Dainas share linguistic ties to Lithuania’s non-rhyming songs, but they employ a similar rhythm as ancient Liv and Estonian songs; indeed, Latvian Dainas are culturally unique (Stepanova and Stepanova, 2011).

This is a comparative historical tale of agrarian resistance and change, as it has occurred over the longue durée in two lands situated at opposite ends of Earth. In the deep forests of Northern Europe, ancestral Latvian tribes lived in egalitarian societies far from the slave-owning empires of the ancient Afro-Eurasian world-system. This changed when German crusaders invaded the Baltics in 1195, beginning a period of colonization and imperial rule that would culminate in the Soviet occupation of the twentieth century. In sunbaked Southern Africa, South African tribes likewise maintained egalitarian societies apart from the ancient imperial world. Dutch merchants invaded the Western Cape in 1652, engendering a trajectory of colonialism that would result in the formation of a White supremacist apartheid state in 1948.

In both countries, peasants resisted the alienating yoke of authoritarian rule by maintaining Indigenous knowledge systems grounded in social and ecological connection. Imparting life-affirming values, these intellectual and cultural currents succoured communities through desperate times, empowering people to mount collective resistance to state repression. When the Soviet and apartheid regimes collapsed at the end of the twentieth century, farmers took advantage of democratic reforms by investing in organic production technologies and establishing alternative trade networks. In Latvia, farmers have established a vibrant local and slow food movement to restore small-scale production and revitalize this nation’s precolonial agrarian heritage. In the Cederberg Mountains of Western South Africa, small-scale farmers have worked to secure their heritage as artisanal producers of Rooibos tea by establishing fair trade partnerships with international buyers at the heart of its geographical origin.

Their efforts join a broader global justice movement that is constructing bottom-up approaches to development and social change; and, within this manifold movement, food and trade justice activists are confronting a global agro-food regime dominated by large multinational firms whose interests are backed by powerful states. While the rationalization of agriculture has enabled the capitalist world-system to produce cheap food at an industrial scale, the exploitative production and trade systems that rationalism has produced are a key driver of the current existential crisis in development.

Introduction

As suggested by Kotef (2015, pp 13–14), we should think of politics as movement, as collective action to subvert the status quo and turn the seemingly impossible into reality:

When faced with a regime like the DPRK, such optimism seems vital. Having examined North Korean women’s stories of human rights violations in Chapter 3, in this chapter I focus on their activism. These activists’ narratives suggest that their harrowing experiences during their escapes and subsequent lives in China initially made them feel ashamed, especially as women, and therefore they managed their pain and trauma in silence. However, for each of them there had been a transitional phase, from victimhood to activism, although the extent of their involvement in activism could vary, contingent upon various factors. As demonstrated by Thalhammer (2001), individuals’ participation in human rights activism is heterogeneous, depending on variegated circumstances, such as whether they have been directly affected by the regime’s violence.

Such heterogeneity can also be found among my participants, deriving not only from the extent of their engagement but also from whether they have clearly articulable ideas and plans for the future. This is also influenced by their educational level and intellectual ability, alongside their commitment and dedication. By the same token, individuals’ participation in political activism is shaped by their education, occupation and income, which are interrelated with their gender and ethnicity (Norris, 2009). Similarly, some researchers have observed that a high educational level is an important contributing factor to becoming an activist (Ducan, 1999; Hall, 2019). However, this is not always the case for North Korean defectors’ activism. The educational levels of North Korean activists in the UK vary from those who are highly educated to those who have received middle- to high-school level qualifications.

If North Korea figures in the imagination of inhabitants of the Western world at all, it is only dimly perceived and little understood. The little that most of us know is that it is a secretive country with an impoverished population, that it is governed by an ostensibly communist regime led by the autocratic Kim dynasty and is bent on developing nuclear weapons. Occasionally, we hear stories of those who have escaped its closely guarded borders. In this book, Hyun-Joo Lim provides us with a deeper understanding of living in and escaping from North Korea – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). In particular, she demonstrates that North Koreans’ experiences of deprivation, human rights violations and defection are highly gendered. She lays bare the oppression and abuse suffered by North Korean women both within the DPRK and during their escape through China.

The book is based on narratives of women defectors/refugees from the DPRK resident in the UK and who left the DPRK between 2016 and 2022. Lim initially interviewed North Korean human rights activists, both male and female, through which the gendered character of human rights abuses came to the fore. She then focused her attention on North Korean women in the UK, including a minority who were engaged in activism. Lim faced numerous challenges in gaining access to this group of women and researching their lives. In a context where the DPRK’s embassy monitors the activities of defectors, most keep a low profile lest they risk harm to their families back home. Winning their trust and establishing their willingness to participate in sensitive research was by no means easy. The vulnerability of participants and their families still in the DPRK raised particular ethical concerns in safeguarding anonymity and confidentiality as well as ensuring support for those who needed it. Lim also discusses the impact on herself of hearing distressing details of women’s experiences and her sense of helplessness in the face of the suffering they described. Additionally, Lim’s South Korean background presented barriers; she may have shared a common language and ethnic heritage with her participants, but her cultural and social experience differed greatly from theirs.

Introduction

Researching North Korean refugees raises numerous methodological questions due to their acute vulnerabilities and the extreme conditions they face. Fundamentally, it challenges the ontological and epistemological approaches of positivism. The contestation over what is considered to be ‘truthful’ and ‘valid’ data in association with North Korean defectors’ stories is an indication of such a condition. In light of these concerns, in this chapter I discuss methodological considerations in depth, focusing in particular on the challenges of studying North Korean women defectors and their human rights issues.

I start with a discussion on phenomenology, which is a foundational philosophical underpinning of my research, especially hermeneutic (or interpretive) phenomenology. Next, the discussion progresses into life history in connection with phenomenology. After establishing the philosophical foundations and method, I examine access to and recruitment of the participants during different phases of the research. In the ensuing section, I present the feminist approach that I take to this research in order to centre the voices of the participants, while reducing the distance between researcher and participant. Additionally, I discuss some of the challenges that I experienced as a researcher of South Korean heritage researching North Korean women defectors, applying critical reflection. This is followed by an exploration of the social construction of truth and validity in the final part of the chapter.

Phenomenological understanding

This study takes a phenomenological approach to exploring the life stories of North Korean women defectors; in particular, I apply hermeneutic phenomenology, as originating in the work of Martin Heidegger (2005 [1994], 2019 [1962]). Phenomenology is a research method that aims to understand the subjective perceptions and experiences of the individual by exploring a phenomenon from their own perspectives (Knaack, 1984; Welman and Kruger, 1999; Groenewald, 2004; Neubauer et al, 2019). Thus, it is efficacious when challenging normative suppositions, which are largely created by dominant social groups (Watson, 1976).

Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology as a critical social scientific research method, which disputed positivism. His transcendental phenomenology was established ‘not as a science of facts, but as a science of essential Being (as “eidetic” Science): a science which aims exclusively at establishing “knowledge of essences” ‘ (Husserl, 2012 [1931], p 3).

In this chapter, I move on to a theorization of the motivations behind activism, drawing on the narratives of women activists examined in Chapter 4. As discussed there, numerous studies have explored the driving forces behind various social movements and cases of political activism. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of theorization founded on their empirical data. This is particularly the case for extant studies on North Korean women defectors’ experiences, which are largely drawn from their oral testimonies, and is due to a lack of research on women’s activism. Given this lack, social theories to encapsulate their activism based on empirical data is vital, especially to guide future research as an explanatory tool. Chibucos et al (2004, p 1) explain theorizing as ‘the process of systematically developing and organizing ideas to explain phenomena’ by connecting the concrete findings from empirical data with abstract concepts. Building on this, the theory that I develop in this chapter is an attempt to construct a conceptual framework that may be applicable to similar types of studies in the future, while forming the basis of further debate and development. However, it is not an attempt to make an overarching claim about political activism and its motivations.

The narratives of women activists presented in this book have highlighted the important roles of critical awakening, a sense of responsibility, guilt and moral conscience, reciprocity and caring for others, as well as an altruistic vision for others, all as driving forces for their activism. These findings highlight two major interrelated characteristics: relational and future-oriented dimensions. Founded on these, I present a new theoretical concept that I call ‘Altruistic Political Imagination’ (API), which seeks to describe North Korean women’s human rights activism more aptly than existing concepts around imagination and altruism. This framework is an ongoing development built on my previous work on North Korean human rights activism (Lim, 2021).

Borrowing from Goodson (2010), Collins and Stockton (2018, p 3) present theories as stories, which ‘attempt to explain phenomena logically and meaningfully, often following narrative structures’. Consistent with this, I interweave different components emerging from the data into a narrative form to create a coherent story.

This book examines the human rights abuses suffered by North Korean women and how some of these women are confronting this abuse through their activism. Based on this examination, I argue that – albeit with small numbers and slow progress – such a battle is critical for addressing North Korean women’s human rights. I further argue that tackling women’s rights issues will have a ripple effect on children and men due to overlapping characteristics that affect all North Koreans, together with their interconnected lives.

The economic crisis of the mid-1990s in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) brought some significant changes to the country. The food crisis forced women to take on the role of breadwinner, which challenged the conventional understanding of gender in North Korea and was consistent with the important role that women have played in other countries during times of famine (see Kinealy et al, 2016). This crisis also led to the exodus of many ordinary people to China, South Korea and Western countries, such as the UK, to find food and better lives; the majority of those who left were women: nearly 75 per cent of North Koreans who entered China (CRS, 2007) and 84.2 per cent who fled to South Korea (Ministry of Unification, 2022). However, despite these seemingly profound shifts in North Korean society (because of the famine and subsequent changes in the role of women as breadwinners), many would say that the human rights situation in the DPRK has not improved. Women’s human rights remain a serious concern that requires urgent and weighty action from powerful global actors and states. It is in this context that this book has been written.

When I started my research on North Korean defectors and their human rights activism in 2016, the gendered dimension emerged as a striking feature: women were shouldering the burden of feeding their families as well as being subjected to various forms of gender-based exploitation and violence. This led me to change the focus of my research to women and their lived experiences. It has not always been an easy journey for me because the majority of women understandably do not want to talk about their harrowing experiences. As I delved into North Korean defectors’ human rights activism in the UK, including women’s, I also realized that only a few individuals were involved in this activism.

North Korean women’s human rights

As examined in this book, North Korea is at an interesting crossroads where ‘old’ and ‘new’ meet. Kim Jong Un has inherited a legacy of totalitarianism, built on a pseudo-religious and familial imagery with a clear hierarchy, along with a failed economy and widespread human rights violations. There have been some signs and suggestions that the DPRK is experiencing cultural shifts, especially in gender relations, mainly due to the development of a market economy and women’s newly obtained role as breadwinners. This advancement has strengthened the status of women and their bargaining power in the household (Kang, 2008; Haggard and Noland, 2012; Schwekendiek and Mercier, 2016). In addition, there are indications that young women have begun to express their identity and freedom by using fashion and make-up, which is regarded as a form of resistance that challenges the oppressive system (Saucedo, 2020). Given that almost every sphere of life is controlled, wearing jeans when women are required to wear skirts can be an act of ‘rebellion’. Reflecting this development, Radio Free Asia (RFA) (2020) reports that Kim Jong Un’s war on the growing impact of South Korean pop culture is a result of the ‘illegal’ infiltration into the DPRK of the latter’s dramas, movies and pop music, which are reportedly watched by 70 per cent of the 25 million North Korean population. According to the RFA article, the DPRK government has taken a strict approach to the cultural influence of the South through video lectures that contain a warning of more severe legal punishment for speaking or writing in the South Korean style, in combination with ideological education projects, to prohibit the further percolation of South Korean culture.

As illuminated by this recent development, the DPRK has not undergone profound changes, despite the high expectations of transformation and modernization under the reign of Kim Jong Un. While some women have made small gains in power and freedom at home, the deeply entrenched patriarchal culture and structures have not been dismantled (Jung and Dalton, 2006; Hosaniak, 2013). Women continue to play the role of main carer in the household on top of their economic responsibilities, with implications of even greater workloads (Park, 2011; Cho et al, 2020).

Introduction

As discussed in Chapter 1, testimonies provided by those who have fled North Korea have exposed a plethora of human rights abuses against women, both within North Korea and in China, as well as during the process of either crossing the border to China or being repatriated to the North. The life history interview data I collected revealed a continuous cycle of appalling maltreatment of women beyond the physical boundaries of the regime. Drawing on these findings, this chapter examines the human rights abuses experienced by North Korean women both inside and outside the regime. Topics that I discuss are: domestic violence; sexual harassment in the workplace; women’s hygiene and health issues; human trafficking and smuggling to China; and gender-based violence against women during the process of forced deportation and in DPRK prisons.

These topic areas have previously been investigated and widely debated by scholars and human rights organizations. While these studies have revealed a range of gender-based rights violations faced by North Korean women inside the DPRK and China, most of the focus has been on women’s experiences within a particular country: for example, gender issues in the DPRK (Lim, 2005; Jung and Dalton, 2006; Kang, 2008; Park, 2010; Park, 2011; Haggard and Noland, 2012; Hosaniak, 2013; Kim, 2014; Eom and Kim, 2016; Gooptar, 2017; Yang, 2018; Cho et al, 2020); women’s experiences during the process of migration to China and/or in China (Charny, 2004; Lankov, 2004; Muico, 2005; CRS, 2007; Kim et al, 2009; Chang et al, 2008; Choi, 2014; Kook, 2018; Garcia, 2019); and/or their treatment upon repatriation to the DPRK (Charny, 2004; Muico, 2005; Yang, 2018). By investigating North Korean women’s gendered experiences using a circular framework between North Korea, China and back to North Korea, this chapter seeks to bring together these debates and examine a common thread interwoven across the lives of these women throughout their circular movements. It does so while applying critical feminist perspectives on gender, human smuggling/trafficking and agency/victimhood.

Introduction

Media reporting, the focus of Chapter 4, is a widely accepted – indeed celebrated – part of the open justice process and as such certain practices are unquestioned, not least the inclusion of personal and identifying information about those involved in court cases. As Hess and Waller explain it, ‘[u] nder the doctrine of open justice, being subjected to media publicity of an alleged crime is presented as a sometimes unfortunate, but unavoidable, price of the system’ (2013, p 66). To make the court reporting job practicable, journalists accept that they will report embarrassing or humiliating details about people (Conley and Lamble 2006). But undoubtedly there is a cost and human impact to this type of reporting, whether or not it is justified as unavoidable collateral harm of the process, or seen as an unwarranted damaging intrusion of privacy. As Stacey identifies, ‘with increasing moves towards online publicizing of court decisions, it is likely that the number of people affected by the online publication of spent criminal records will only increase’ (2017, p 274). It is this territory we now explore, asking what is the human impact of justice system transparency, and are current practices fair?

Curiously, despite the extensive jurisprudence on open justice and a rich academic literature in media and crime (see, for example: Greer 2010; Schlesinger and Tumber 1994), there is limited empirical material on which to draw to explain the ‘human impact’ of criminal court reporting and justice data sharing practices that have developed over time. Perhaps predictably, studies on court reporting written within journalism studies have tended to concentrate on the rights and experiences of journalists (Chamberlain et al 2021; Jones, R. 2021; Smith et al 2022), with rare exceptions, such as work in Australia that has questioned the role of the ‘media pillory’ when reporting minor offences (Waller and Hess 2011). In legal scholarship, analyses tend to concentrate on doctrinal argument and lack socio-legal empirical evidence (Jaconelli 2002; Bohlander 2010; Craig 2019); and most have not been concerned with the practical effects or detail of contemporary justice system data management.

Perhaps most worryingly, we have found very limited consideration of ‘human impact’ in policy developments over the past decade. There have been limited opportunities to engage in public consultation on open justice mechanisms and justice system data management, and official reports have present unevidenced and uncritical assumptions about the role and impact of open justice mechanisms.

Introduction

Anyone who has directly participated in a court trial – whether as a witness, defendant or jury member – should have been exposed to how it operates in practice, with the possibility of members of the public and media in attendance. However, given dwindling numbers of public and media court observers, it is not clear how far public knowledge extends: whether many or most of the UK population knows of the core principle that justice must ‘be seen to be done’, and whether they understand what that means in practice. Recent research by Ipsos UK (the first of its kind) indicated ‘low awareness’ on public access to justice information: 70 per cent answering a nationally representative poll said they knew ‘not very much’ or ‘nothing at all’ about the information contained in court records (Gisborne et al 2022, p 17).

That is unsurprising in the lay context – low awareness or ignorance could be claimed about many features of English law – but the principle is also under-interrogated in more specialist contexts. For Sir Bob Neill MP, chair of the Justice Committee, despite its regular use, open justice is ‘perhaps not picked apart often enough’ (Gisborne et al 2022, p 6). There has been insufficient attention paid to the mechanics of open justice: the roles of different actors, the design of the channels and platforms, the financial costs (among other features). Because of the idiosyncratically decentralised and piecemeal nature of the justice system – where legal professionals and third-party services play a key role in the data ecosystem – many practices have evolved over time, in inefficient and unjust ways, without purposive design.

Important questions also remain in regards to data management: there has been astonishingly little – given the high stakes involved – public interrogation of the governance framework for justice system data, and the implication of privacy, data protection and intellectual property law on justice data sharing and public access. It would be useful to repeat the Ipsos research (Gisborne et al 2022) on members of the legal profession, the judiciary and court service to discover the level of awareness even within the system: anecdotal reports of misinterpreted rules, confusion over the access process would indicate that public access rights and rules are not well or widely understood despite the centrality of open justice as a principle of the common law.

This book is about the principle and practice of open justice in criminal courts in what is often characterised as the ‘digital age’. By this we mean the way in which court hearings and information about cases are made publicly accessible in the context of digital and technological advances in the 21st century.

Publicity of court proceedings is deep-rooted in English and common law tradition, with the earliest articulations of open justice found in 17th century legal history (Robertson 2012). The late 18th and early 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham is often quoted to explain the rationale for open courts: ‘Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the judge himself while trying under trial’. From another perspective, however, in the words of a former criminal defendant speaking in the early 21st century: ‘publicity is a life sentence and it makes it very difficult for you to put it behind you and move on […] with your life and build a home and get on with everything, when it’s a click away from people’.

The second perspective has not been given such credence; and the impact of publicity on individuals and communities (with notable exceptions) is surprisingly under-interrogated in academic and policy literature. This book is motivated by a desire to provoke further discussion about this and other tensions surrounding open justice; and informed by the dilemmas and obstacles we have encountered in our own work when trying to access information about the courts.

These concerns include our inability to obtain basic information about cases (especially in the local Magistrates’ court during the first national lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic); our nagging concerns about the ‘human impact’ of digitised courts data (such as the impact on private lives and on the relationships between court participants) and inequality of access to the justice system (including practical issues with participation that undermine understanding and engagement); and the confusion and inconsistency characterising justice system data management within and beyond England and Wales.

It is also written to encourage law and policy makers to take a deeper and more pragmatic look at how open justice impacts human lives.