Jung-eun Kim
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Contact Information Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg E-Mail: jung-eun.kim@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de
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Vita
Jung Eun Kim (personal homepage) studied German Language and Literature (Bachelor of Arts) at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Republic of Korea and Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. In 2015, she spent nine months at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as a research intern funded by the Korea Foundation. She received her Master’s degree in North Korean Studies from Ewha Womans University in 2016. From August 2016 to April 2017, she worked as a Global Asia Fellow at East Asia Foundation in Seoul.
Since October 2017, she is pursuing her Ph.D. degree in Political Science at Heidelberg University as a DAAD scholar under the supervision of Professor Aurel Croissant.
Jung Eun’s main research interests include North Korea, authoritarian regimes, state repression and authoritarian survival.
Doctoral research
Working title: Maintaining an Autocratic Regime: A Study on the Social Control System in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
This study aims to find out how the North Korean regime has been relatively successful in maintaining itself and has survived various crises despite the fact that several other autocratic regimes have failed to do so. I plan to explain the regime’s “stability” with the concept of social control system, which is a very powerful repression mechanism functioning at ideological, physical and daily life level in the North Korean society to prevent hostile acts towards the regime, indoctrinate ideas and restrict information. Social control system, which has elements of legitimation, repression, and co-optation, integrates the so-called three pillars of stability in autocratic regimes. In this Ph.D. project, I attempt to explain the origin of the system, how it works, what is the variance within the system over the generation of the three Kims and why it is effective.
