Despite the economic, political, and social hardships that followed the end of the Cold War in 1992, North Korea has not shown any serious signs of destabilization. Indeed, a common theme runs in the study of politics in North Korea: the question of how the country continues to remain stable where other autocracies show instability. In the present study, I draw on research into autocratic legitimacy and security to discuss the role of securitization in North Korean legitimation efforts for guaranteeing political stability. I investigate how North Korean domestic portrayals of foreign threats and security issues are connected to political legitimacy and support and I investigate how the state-led discourse about security in North Korea evolves, what exactly talking about security means and looks like in North Korea, and what this means for outside observers. By analyzing modern North Korea through its most important propaganda channel – the newspaper Rodong Sinmun – in the years from 1990 to 1994, 2000 to 2004, and 2010 to 2014, we can directly observe how North Korean actors talk about security and what kind of security narratives the North Korean state uses to garner support from its citizens.

I find that North Korea securitizes adaptively depending on the overall domestic and international political situation. In other words, North Korean propaganda is far from being totally rigid. Instead, patterns of argumentation that revolve around specific dangers to North Korea’s security (dis)appear in official sources depending on whether they fit current events. The observed patterns point towards planned securitization processes that are preemptive of certain developments and reactive to others and ultimately have the purpose of stabilizing the North Korean system, the current government, and ensure support for specific policies.

The core referent objects of security in North Korean securitization discourse are North Korea’s physical security, North Korea’s non-physical security, and nuclear issues. The relative importance of each of these referent objects has shifted since the end of the Soviet Union until today, but none of these issues have ceased to be central to North Korea’s understanding of security. Instead of being North Korea’s only concern, North Korea’s physical security is its primary security interest, which is, crucially, linked to non-physical security, as recurring patterns of simultaneous de- and increase in securitization behavior show. North Korean securitization actors understand security not as either physical or non-physical; for them, it is both. North Korea did not freeze neither its ideology nor its security thinking at the end of the Cold War – both continued and continue to evolve. 

The main contribution of the present study is twofold. First, by incorporating theoretical approaches and case-specific insights about North Korea from political science, securitization studies, and North Korea studies, I show how these research directions can benefit from each other. Given language-related challenges and tendencies to stick to large-N studies, many studies located in classical political science tend to overlook North Korea’s unique historical and cultural characteristics. Studies about North Korea that have successfully shown the relevance of such characteristics for, e.g., North Korea’s foreign and security politics, meanwhile, sometimes lack a connection to theoretical debates in the wider field of political science, especially when it comes to security studies, securitization, and connecting research from Korean and non-Korean researchers. I address this problem by linking the three factors of research into autocracies, security studies, and North Korea research within one study. Second, my study of North Korean securitization and the transported security narratives ultimately helps to understand why autocracies like North Korea pursue a specific style of politics that focuses on external threats, why it is unlikely that they will desist from this style of politics, and how outside responses designed to pressure and destabilize North Korea can be turned around and used by the regime to strengthen the North Korean system and the current government instead.