North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Lonnie Edge: How North Korea fosters legitimacy during times of crisis

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

This week, Lonnie Edge of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies joins the podcast to discuss North Korea’s strategies for portraying itself as a legitimate government both inside and outside its borders. According to Edge, the Kim regime has become adept at changing its narrative or policies to address crises or changes in circumstances, such as […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the private podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NKNews website at nknews.org slash private-feed. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jacko's Wetsuit, and today it is Wednesday, the 29th of October, 2025, the day that President Donald Trump arrived in Korea for the APEC meeting. but I'm not here to talk about that.

I'm here to talk to a first-time guest, and that is Dr. Lonnie Edge, who's an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at the Hanguk University of Foreign Studies, also known as Hafts or Werdé, and the longtime managing editor of North Korea Review, a leading policy-oriented journal on the DPRK.

He is also the managing editor of the Journal of Territorial and Maritime Studies and an advisory board member for the Korean Literary Library. Translation Association. His work explores how power, legitimacy, and everyday life interact on the Korean Peninsula, and he spent years curating and editing research that helps people make sense of North Korea. Okay, welcome on the show, Lonnie. Thanks, Jacqueline. I'm happy to be here. And today we'll be talking about some of the themes from papers that you've written on North Korea as well as your work in editing the North Korea review. So let's start sort of opening by setting

the frame a bit. You've spent years reading and editing work on North Korea and writing your own work. For a general listener, what's the single biggest misunderstanding that outsiders or researchers have about how North Korea just seems to keep going, despite all predictions to the contrary? I think, I mean, that's a tough question. There's many different narratives about North Korea, but I think probably the biggest one would have to do with how inevitably in whatever media format you hear about North Korea, North Korea is portrayed in a very negative light as almost like a bond-like villain in international relations. And that kind of ignores that North Korea has existed for a long time and survived many difficult situations. And it's not

simply at gunpoint that they held the North Koreans there to continue to support this government. there are forms of legitimacy that tend not to be spoken of in a lot of mainstream media or I would say even orthodox North Korea scholarship tends to ignore that fact. Well, that's a good point for me to jump in and say, okay, we need to explain in plain English how we understand or how we are to understand the word legitimacy in this context when we're talking about what keeps the state going. I remember going back 30 odd years, I studied contemporary Russian and East European politics in Australia, and that was all about the narratives that explained why the Soviet Union collapsed,

and legitimacy crisis theory was one of the major explainers for that. What I understand it is that a legitimacy can be a narrative that the government tells the people and the people tell themselves about why that government should remain and continue. but how would you explain it? Well, I think you're kind of on the right track. Definitely the government does play a role in proliferating some sort of narrative that, yes, we are legitimate and we're doing a good job and we're taking care of you. But at some point, there's a point where the rubber meets the road.

And if that narrative is not backed up in facts or by some demonstrated effort to actually do something that fits the reasoning of that narrative, the messaging of that narrative, people will experience almost like a cognitive dissonance and start to view the government as not doing what they say they're doing and illegitimate. Now the difference with North Korea would be is that they have almost total control over all forms of communication and messaging within society. So they have a lot of levers they can pull in terms of legitimacy that a democratic state might not have. And And for that reason, I think an outsider, when they look at North Korea, they automatically just

assume bad actor illegitimate. Before we get into North Korea, sort of what are the main ingredients in, let's say, a Western liberal democracy that matters most in terms of legitimacy? Is it economic performance or having regular elections? What are the key ingredients to how Westerners would see a legitimacy? So again, going back to what I said earlier, the key is the government. messaging something and then following through with it. So when it comes to a democratic country, we expect to have, as you just said,

free and fair elections at regular intervals, maybe some sort of economic performance, maybe freedom to participate in the economy, maybe not barriers to acting within the economy to make money and spend it. So as long as those things are in place, people tend to view, oh, what the government's telling us is true, therefore they're legitimate. Now, my initial interest in legitimacy goes back to my master's thesis. I was looking into whether my master's thesis was about something completely unrelated. It was about terrorism. But my interest was whether democracy actually deters terrorism because the Bush administration was pushing for democratic regime change in

the Middle East. And my analysis showed that, yes, democratic country, tended to have less terrorism because they were viewed as legitimate so people didn't feel the need to go to those extremes to try and change their government or coerce their government into doing what they wanted them to do. But within the analysis, I also noticed that Singapore was a very extreme outlier. And a little bit more digging for me found that they rely on a form of legitimacy that is mostly derived from just economic performance. Oh yeah. Yeah. Which to me started started me down the path to thinking, well, wait a minute, I've learned my whole life that legitimacy means basically democracy and liberal values. But from

that point on, I started to really reconsider what legitimacy meant. And the more research I did, I found that there are scholars out there that research what they call soft authoritarian regimes. Like Singapore. Like Singapore. And that type of research kind of shows that there are just so many shades of gray when it comes to legitimacy. So, and then I decided, well, what if we look at the quote unquote least legitimate regime we could.

And I think North Korea is in the running for that title. Right. So. And my research, I think, has been really interesting from that point. Well, do you see a single legitimacy now? narrative as being key in North Korea or are a couple? Are there a couple that work together in tandem? And have there been any big shifts in the DPRK's regime story about itself? I mean, shifts in its legitimacy tactics? I think there have been a lot of shifts in the narratives of

legitimacy in the DPRK. Initially, just the overall, you know, performance of Kim Il-sung is the father leader and this wonderful leader that is going to lead North Korea to prosperity and becoming this socialist paradise, which eventually with the end of the Cold War, when North Korea lost all their trade partners and he passed away, definitely presented a crisis of legitimacy to the North Korean regime. In the mid-1990s. Right.

But his son had had almost three decades to kind of prepare to step into the leadership role. So he was kind of the one that pushed the cult of personality, which by virtue of being his son also legitimized himself. Right. So cult of personality mainly pointing at the father, but extending almost, I don't know, like sun rays in a way to embrace the sun as well. So he had a long runway to launch his own leadership of North Korea. and then he was immediately hit with the arduous march. And at that point, they couldn't, when the public distribution system collapses, you can't tell people that you're doing a good job of taking care of their material needs

when the reality around them is starvation. Right, the three bowls of rice and meat soup per day, that narrative can't work anymore. Right. So at that point, you see a shift towards the sun, policy where the only source of legitimacy is that we protect you from the American imperialists and their puppet regime up to the south. And each time, if just from that simple little snapshot, you can kind of see whenever North Korea is presented with a crisis or maybe a moment where there's a change in

material circumstance, you'll see them try and change their narrative. to fit that moment. And this is to bolster up their legitimacy? Yes, I believe so. So when you get to the Pyongjin line, which is the line that we will now pursue in parallel nuclear defense and economic prosperity. Right. So under Kim Jong-un, the Pyongjin line, I think it may be a little bit of a product

that he was educated overseas and saw what prosperity was. I don't think anyone would say that there's a lot of poverty in Switzerland, although I, maybe, maybe. Well, but it could also be, because by that time, that narrative that South Koreans lived in poverty and were begging for scraps from the American soldiers, I think by the time Kim Jong-un became leader, that narrative was no longer really believed by those who had access to information, and he's certainly at the top of the information tree, right? Definitely, that's also a possibility. But I also think that as much as narratives on like CNN might have said, oh, yes, they're a, they're a poor starving nation. They had modest trade with enough trade with China to have modest economic growth and probably be able to put some money behind a few projects. You saw them developing their tourism and building apartments and things like that, bringing in cell phones. So I, you know, they, they recognize that there needed to be.

some attention to the material conditions, I think, of North Korea and the people. So I think that's where the Pyongjin line came in was that recognition that that shift would also help legitimacy. Now, remind me, when did you write your chapter, Legitimation Shuffle sources of North Korean legitimacy? When that came out, oh, 2003, looking at my PDF file here that you sent to me, thank you, which is before Kim Jong-un announced no longer interested in peaceful unification with the South. So my question to you is, where do you see the end goal of unification as fitting into that legitimacy narrative?

I think for me, it's always been part of it from Kim in the Song's time that we will bring this nation unification through our means. And that was a legitimation strategy. How do you see that? So in terms of that, I know you just referenced that one book chapter, but I think my answer to that I have to take from, I think it was a different book chapter that I wrote on inter-Korean relations that talks about Han as something that governments on both sides of the parallel have to take into consideration, like the feeling of an unresolved grudge that Han? That's kind of a simplified version of it. I would say the, I think the way that I, that I defined it in that, in that chapter had more to do with the loss of agency or self-determination in the face of being colonized by Japan or national division by the superpowers, which led into the Korean War and millions of them dying and the families being separated. So it's, it's also an interesting point that a lot of, inter-Korean relations, there was always a focus on the separated families issue and having reunions.

And I think that's kind of a, without that, their policy towards each other could not have been viewed as legitimate by citizens on either side because it's a outstanding wound to the nation that needed to be addressed by their people. So if you think about it that way, at this point, most people who were separated have died. have died. So it's not the same top-tier issue that it once was. Definitely in South Korea, the youth. I forget who told me this the other day. Obviously, I think it was one of my interns, but she told me that there was a poll in one of the newspapers, and this is the first year where more Koreans don't want unification than do.

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