Despite the common perception that North Korea is unknowable due to limited access to information, both books under review are excellent examples of taking full advantage of resources that are available to produce engaging scholarship on contemporary North Korea. Indeed, the two books are able to tap into entirely different sources of information: Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland rely on quantitative survey data from North Korean refugees while Patrick McEachern makes extensive use of official North Korean media for a qualitative content analysis. I review each in turn before bringing them together at the end.

Rather than a full monograph, Witness to Transformation can best be described as a follow-up report to the authors' previous publication, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). And like their previous work, this one is also based on an implicit faith in markets to solve not only economic problems, but political and social ones as well. The difference from the previous book based on secondary sources is the presentation of findings based on two surveys of 1,346 North Korean refugees in China between 2004 and 2005, and 300 refugees in South Korea in 2008.

Their survey data indicates that an overwhelming number of refugees in China (95 percent) cite economic reasons for leaving North Korea and that many within North Korea rely prodigiously on markets for the procurement of food and household earnings regardless of government policy. Based on these findings, the authors conclude that “the emergence of markets has acted as a kind of safety valve most acutely felt in the worst conditions” (p. 74) despite the fact that marketization has also increased criminalization of market activities, hence the rationale for the book to be addressing what might seem to be two somewhat divergent issues: marketization and human rights. Not only are they linked in terms of actual conditions in North Korea, but the authors offer marketization as the ultimate solution to the human rights problem in North Korea (despite criminalization in the near term) by creating a civil society that can challenge the state in the long term.

Curiously, a public sphere that was once conceptualized as independent of both the state and the market is now seen to be constituted by the market itself so that “[t]he nonsanctioned market economy has the potential to develop into an autonomous social space—a civil society—through which not only income and consumption but also alternative sources of information can flow” (p. 102) offering “opportunity for cooperation and collective action” (p. 115). Growing cynicism and disaffection are considered results of engaging in market activity, and such activities are seen as providing “the basis for a more robust and independent civil society,” since independent businesses like restaurants can “provide the space for communication outside of heavily monitored official work units” (p. 116). Ultimately, the authors extol the “‘market syndrome’ in which participation in market activities is associated with higher arrest rates, more consumption of foreign news, more negative assessments of the regime, a greater willingness to communicate those views to one's peers, and a greater propensity to cite political motives for emigration” (p. 117).

Incongruities between such conclusions and survey responses show clear limitations on relying exclusively on quantitative research. For example, when asked about the best way to get ahead in North Korea, respondents pointed to the officialdom (government and party) with more than 70 percent of them citing it over the military (less than 10 percent) and engaging in business (less than 20 percent). (pp. 75–77). However, when asked about the easiest way to make money in North Korea, over 65 percent responded that engaging in market activities was the easiest way to make money with corruption and criminal activity placing a distant second (less than 30 percent). What is interesting about these results is that getting ahead is clearly not equated with making money. But rather than examine what it means to “get ahead” in North Korea, acknowledging divergent social systems that place value on things other than monetary profit, the authors point to the rise in corruption among the officialdom as a way to bring together “getting ahead” with “making money” as commonly associated in marketized societies. Indeed, survey results are even clearer about the respondents' own assessments of marketization, which they associate with materialism (92 percent), corruption (89 percent), and inequality (84 percent)—a critical point that the authors fail to discuss in light of their positive assessment of marketization.

The authors may have a point that “the development of more market-oriented institutions…would lessen the pervasive control over people's lives,” (p. 125) but they never seem to consider why the control of people's lives by the market would be any less pernicious. In that sense, even while the authors disavow a “single model based on the Washington Consensus” (p. 126) the policy recommendations in the concluding chapter do not depart substantially from its market fundamentalism that privileges private businesses, foreign trade, and the world market.

While Haggard and Noland's recommendations that rely on foreign investment and international instruments such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO seem to disregard real concerns of sovereignty expressed by North Korean officials as purely rhetorical, Patrick McEachern's Inside the Red Box takes North Korean official pronouncements seriously enough to read subtle institutional differences between the cabinet (government), the party (Korean Workers' Party), and the military (Korean People's Army) articulated through the official media.

McEachern acknowledges his debt to earlier analyses by such long-time North Korea watchers as Leon Sigal and Selig Harrison in observing a more complicated North Korean political process with different interests and turf battles between pragmatists and hardliners. But McEachern traces institutional differences based on different institutional motivations that go beyond the vagaries of politics based on specific personalities or amorphous groups so that North Korean politics is seen to be rational and predictable rather than arbitrary and erratic. In other words, what may seem to the outside world as contradictory policies are in actuality conflicting positions of different institutions on a specific issue within a particular context.

Challenging conventional views about North Korean policies as a result of one man, McEachern argues that restrictions against cross-institutional communication to prevent internal challenges to Kim Jong Il's power have led officials to debate policy publicly, albeit cautiously, in the North Korean press. Critiquing the “rogue state” depiction of North Korea as a failure of theory to properly explain its behavior within a comparative framework, McEachern's approach refreshingly takes North Korea's media as “a useful window into the state's functions precisely because it is controlled” (p. 12). His careful reading of the press for the years since 1998 leads him to conclude that economic liberalization, and engagement with South Korea and the United States were largely thanks to the role of the cabinet in advancing more pragmatic policy options while the party was ideologically driven, advocating socialist orthodoxy, and the military opposed reform and opening as threats to security. Each of these positions reflects institutional interests rather than positions of specific personalities, allowing observers to predict which of these institutional positions would win out under different scenarios.

Looking at just the theory of what McEachern calls “post-totalitarian institutionalism,” one is struck by its simplicity and truism that institutions matter even in post-totalitarian regimes. But this goes to show just how much traction the totalitarian thesis has had in political theory, polemically and unrealistically branding certain societies as monolithic with atomized individuals and no institutions to mediate between them and the state.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, despite McEachern's sophisticated analysis of North Korean politics under Kim Jong Il's rule since 1998, he commits the same mistake he charges others of making by lumping North Korea under Kim Il Sung from its founding in 1948 until his death in 1994 as totalitarian. This is the weakest part of the book because the author has done no actual research into the pre-1998 period to make his claims reliable or convincing.Footnote ¹¹ Had he carried out a similar kind of content analysis for the 1948–94 period (no doubt a daunting task in comparison to the 1998–2009 ten-year period), he may have found some interesting parallels to his current thesis. His major tenet—that while authority is centralized, power is diffuse under post-totalitarian regimes—may turn out to be equally true under Kim Il Sung. McEachern's contemporary challenge against the totalitarian thesis should be extended into North Korea's past, an endeavor that may not serve contemporary analysts but is worthwhile nonetheless in order to critique how past mistaken judgments continue to (mis)shape views and policy choices today.

While the author claims at the outset to be “agnostic on the normative question of selecting between policy options toward North Korea ranging from accommodation to pressure strategies,” it is clear by the end of the book that McEachern is an advocate of engagement (as are Haggard and Noland) because costs associated with regime change are simply too high, both in terms of military calculations and humanitarian costs. (p. 192) He unequivocally states, “[T]he United States…has more power over [North Korea] in terms of inducements than it usually recognizes and less power of coercion that it often assumes…Empowering the cabinet's agenda (of reform) is a more effective way to achieve American and South Korean policy goals than is trying to strong-arm a country that is deeply entrenched against military moves and has an isolated economy relatively immune to sanctions.” (pp. 230, 252) Rather than coercive policies that may provide fodder to claims about American hostility, he advocates soft power strategies such as providing information by radio broadcasts, increasing access to cell phones with capacity for international calls, encouraging business interests, and supporting people-to-people exchanges through foreign travel and non governmental initiatives.

Both books provide material for comparative research with distinctive explanations of North Korea's reforms and policy changes in the last decade, including useful quantitative data based on surveys of North Korean refugees (despite acknowledged problems with their reliability) and close qualitative readings of the North Korean press.Footnote ¹² Those in policy circles seeking specific recommendations would certainly find the books helpful as they seem to be written with them in mind. However, both books must seriously engage with McEachern's observation that marketization resulted in “an unsavory side effect of rewarding those who violated the law and put vulnerable populations at greater risk of starvation” (p. 184). Moreover, the lack of deeper reflection about potential translation and language issues in both works leaves them open to theoretical and empirical critique.Footnote ¹³