The Rise and Fall of Cold War Discourse in North Korea, 1945-1961

Talk Abstract
How did the North Korean regime understand the Cold War — and why did it eventually stop talking about it? This talk traces the rise and fall of Cold War discourse within the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) from the years 1945 to 1961, arguing that Pyongyang never treated the concept as a fixed ideological given but as a strategic tool reshaped by shifting domestic priorities and foreign alignments. Drawing from North Korean primary sources such as dictionaries, newspaper articles and satirical cartoons, the talk explores how the Cold War was represented in North Korean popular culture and the public sphere. Cold War language entered North Korean public life in earnest only after the Korean War, and by the late 1950s state media was explicitly linking Cold War dynamics to Korean unification, depicting the conflict as a temporary condition whose resolution would open the path to reunification.

After 1961, however, Cold War discourse virtually vanished from North Korean public life for nearly three decades. The talk offers two explanations for this silence. Domestically, acknowledging the Cold War's persistence would have contradicted Kim Il Sung's earlier predictions, undermining his image of infallibility. Diplomatically, continued use of Cold War framing risked forcing the DPRK to signal a preference between Moscow and Beijing at the height of the Sino-Soviet split. The disappearance of the Cold War from DPRK discourse was, in short, itself a deliberate political act.

 

Bio
Dr Peter Han is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. A political and diplomatic historian of modern Korea, his research focuses on the Korean unification question, with particular attention to Pyongyang’s strategic thinking on the issue. He is currently working on his first monograph, which examines the evolution of North Korean statecraft and diplomacy during the final decade of the Cold War. Peter was a Gates Cambridge Scholar (2020–2024) and a Junior Fellow at Seoul National University’s Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies (2022–2023). He also has professional experience in Track II diplomacy involving South Korea, North Korea, and the United States. He holds an MPhil in Planning, Growth and Regeneration from the University of Cambridge and a BA from the University of Hong Kong.

This talk is part of the Ra Jong-yil Forum in Korean Studies.