During and after the famine of the mid-1990s, in the absence of state capacity, local administrative units and workplaces in the DPRK improvised, using their own resources, political, and historical relationships as well as a principle of self-reliance inherited from the long-gone socialist period. Smith will explain how physical, social and political capitals intersected with market opportunities, thus providing a framework for understanding the various survival opportunities and reconstruction paths that became available for different social groups. This explanatory framework functions to explain inequality for all social groups in the post-famine DPRK, whether defined by age, gender, occupation or regional provenance. In this presentation, she will focus on geographical location and use the province as the main unit of analysis.

Hazel Smith is a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick, UK. Smith has recently directed three research projects that have each resulted in edited publications: Humanitarian Diplomacy: Practitioners and their Craft edited with Larry Minear of Tufts University; Diasporas in Conflict: Peace-Makers or Peace-Wreckers? edited with Paul Stares of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Reconstituting Korean Security: A Policy Primer. Her most recent monograph is Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance and Social Change in North Korea. Between 2000 and 2001, Smith worked for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), leading the team that designed and implemented the monitoring system for the WFP’s aid distribution in the DPRK. Since 1990, she has traveled widely in North Korea in her capacity as a consultant and program adviser to private humanitarian organizations and UN agencies such as the UNICEF, UNDP and CARITAS. Smith received her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and was a visiting Fulbright scholar at Stanford University.