North Korea Human Rights: An Annotated Bibliography

North Korea Human Rights: An Annotated Bibliography

Collins, Robert M. Marked for Life: Songbun, North Korea's Social Classification System. Washington, DC: Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2012. Print.

This book offers readers an in depth look at the three social classes that exist and that citizens are born into in communist North Korea. This classification system is called the “Songbun” and has been in place since the founding of North Korea in 1948. The three classes that make up the system are the core, wavering, and hostile. People that belong to the core are the ones that are considered the most loyal to Kim Jong-un’s regime, and they are also the wealthiest. Members of the wavering group are “average” North Koreans who the

This is a current source because the information that was found on the report was released last year and shortly after this article was published. It is a reliable reference since the author Lamont Colucci is both a professor and the chair of politics and government at Ripon College in Wisconsin. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin and also a doctorate in politics from the University of London. The goal of the source is to let the reader know how bad life really is in North Korea and to relay the facts found surrounding the North Korean human rights report. The research is factual as it is based on a report that is documented and that was conducted by one of the biggest organizations in the world, the United Nations. The material is scholarly because it is published specifically for college students. The source is not as lengthy as my other sources, but the information in it is just as

The author reasserts what was stated in the book about how North Korea is a failed Stalinist state and that they miraculously survived the Cold War. The author writes about how North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un will never open up his country’s economy or normalize realize relations with the United States because that would expose the huge gap between North Korea’s poverty and South Korea’s prosperity, which as a result will make more North Koreans Flee to the South. He then says that the only way Pyongyang will stay afloat is by begging other countries for assistance. He adds that North Korea will have the same fate as the Soviets and will cease to exist by 2030. He ultimately suggests that Washington D.C. should work to make peace with North Korea to avoid another Korean