North Korea and South Korea: Monopolizing Nationalism in a Divided Peninsula (Bloomsbury Studies on Korea's Place in International Relations)

The autocratic regimes in both North Korea and South Korea attempted to legitimize their rule through efforts in nation-building but achieved different results.North Korea and South Korea: Monopolizing Nationalism in a Divided Peninsula seeks to answer: How did these regimes’ nation-building strategies through a variety of tools and venues differ in the process of regime development?How was nationalism utilized to construct a regime-legitimizing founding myth?What implications did these varied efforts have on authoritarian legitimacy and state-society relations under authoritarian rule?Focusing on the period from the end of the Second World War and the start of the Korean War to South Korea’s democratic transitions in the 1980s and North Korea’s crises in the 1990s, Qingming Huang examines the authoritarian regimes’ efforts in monopolizing the narratives of nationalism and constructing the founding myths of the regimes through textbooks and other myth-making venues.Huang argues that th