Divorce and Family Preservation in North Korean Reality: Reassessing the Public/Private Divide in Our Style Socialism

Based on focus group interviews with North Korean refugees in South Korea, we examine divorce in North Korea to reassess prevalent assumptions about state-society opposition. We focus on the role of tradition to analyze what the values and practices attached to family preservation reveal about everyday behavior under Our Style (urisik) socialism. State restrictions on divorce have been viewed as a feature of repressive social control. However, interview results show that the lived experience of socialism as Korean tradition produced a state-society symbiosis in key aspects of daily life such as family preservation. According to refugees, (1) family values are strongly tied to traditional conceptions reformulated as revolutionary obligations; and (2) family preservation as correct socialist ethics is reinforced by the conditions of post-crisis economic survival, which have made economically empowered women working in jangmadang (markets) ironically more vulnerable to marital instability, while leaving male domination embedded in Our Style socialism uncontested. The infusion of tradition into the indoctrination of family preservation has stabilized the prevailing gender order known as namjon nyeobi (superior men, inferior women), and the political system itself.