History between North and South Korea is very complicated and difficult due to the reasons of inclination of politics with different ideologies of two countries; Democracy and Communism. This circumstance being more complicated because of Korean War. Before the war, Korea was one nation and illegally occupied by Japanese for 35 years until the end of the World War II. At that time the superpowers such as United States and Soviet Union have been involved in Korean government. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or North Korea is a sovereign nation in East Asia bordering China, Russia, and South Korea. The culmination of World War II divided the Korean Peninsula into two distinct zones including North Korea and South Korea. The United States occupied and influenced South Korea, but the Soviet Union had control over the North Korean territory. (Stueck, 1995) The occupation and effects of the Capitalist and Communist superpowers significantly influenced and shaped the cultures of the two countries. North Korea has a communist or socialist culture with a military dictatorship under the regime of supreme leader Kim Il-Sung. North Korea is one of the most concealed or secluded societies in the world primarily due to the policies of the government. For these reasons, North and South Korea still divided into two countries for 71 years.

Economy and present situation of North Korea

North Korean culture is distinct and disconnected from almost all cultures of the world primarily due to the lack of western influence. However, the communist ideologies provide an excellent commercial potential for business persons from China and Russia due to similar cultural or ideological backgrounds. On the other hand, the revised policies of the government also opened business prospects for business persons from western nations. This would allow international players to invest in the market where they can proper with the advent of time. However, organizations have to comply with the strict policies of this nation. Although the country has a closed society, the capital city of Pyongyang resembles some of the most developed metropolitans in the world. Pyongyang offers a considerable amount of business opportunities for foreigners, especially in the context of tourism, food, and transportation. The Mountain Kum-gang resort in the special tourism zone is the perfect example of business opportunities for foreign organizations in North Korea (Lee, Bendle, Yoon, & Kim, 2012). The recent economic growth of the country, especially in the capital city, increased the business potential for many organizations. However, foreign companies have to consider and acknowledge the culture, traditions, customs, and beliefs of the local population and government.

The cultural disparities and inhospitable policies of the government discouraged most foreigners to consider business opportunities in North Korea. Different organizations planned investments in this region, but they backfired because of the strict local policies. However, the revised policies of the government since the 1990s and economic or commercial relations with neighboring countries improved the business atmosphere. The government established Special Economic Zones to facilitate foreign companies and organization in the country. The Special Economic Zones played a vital role in attracting foreign investment in the country due to the flexible policies of the administration (Weston, 2013). The liberal policies, attractive business opportunities and developed infrastructure of urban areas provide excellent business for foreign investment, especially in tourism and transportation. The lack of Western-style fast food restaurants in the country offers good business prospects for international fast food chains. However, the political conflicts with several countries, including the United States, South Korea, and other Western nations considerably dissuade the economic ambitions of North Korea.

North Korea started a regime through which they focused on different international investors so that they can invest in this region and attain beneficial returns. The regulations were relaxed to a considerable level mainly to benefit international investors. After developing an open-door policy, North Korea developed a legal economic framework for external cooperation of economic development. Revision of the laws is a blessing for different governmental decision makers and international vendors because this would enhance the overall economic flow in the region. The laws of DPRK changed with the advent of time, but the decision makers did policy making on every business-oriented scenario (Yong-Joong, 2000). The revised the laws for joint ventures and franchising systems too.

Decision makers focused on the ideology that local people and the core culture of this region should play an important in different business scenarios of North Korea. Business opportunities in this region are humongous and it all depends upon the policies through which they can attain beneficial returns in the longer-run. The lawmakers in the current era begin to realize that globalization changed the overall business scenario of different regions. However, people should also accept the fact that they must incorporate cultural values in different business scenarios.

Conclusively, business opportunity in North Korea was initially a difficult scenario for different foreign investors, but due to the relaxation of numerous laws, several international investors entered this region. The policy makers realize the fact that they have to stay abreast with the changing ideologies of the world and they cannot continue to isolate them with the rest of the world. However, supreme command of the government still holds the right to take decisions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Lee, C. K., Bendle, L. J., Yoon, Y. S., & Kim, M. J. (2012). Thanatourism or Peace Tourism: Perceived Value at a North Korean Resort from an Indigenous Perspective. International Journal of Tourism Research , 14 (1), 71-90.

Weston, C. (2013). North Korea and its Special Economic Zones: Re-Establishing Networks with the World Economy? Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics (295), 93-108.

Yong-Joong, L. (2000). Development of North Korea’s legal regime governing foreign business coorperation: A revist under the new socialists constitution of 1998. Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business , 21-199.

Stueck, W. W. (1995). The Korean War: An international history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Main argument: The conflict in Darfur has historically involved a complex confluence of regional and global factors that have not only contributed to the violence, but have also prevented many in the United States and other Western countries from truly understanding the conflict. Thus, it has been labeled, inaccurately, a genocide committed by Arabs against Africans. Rather than understand Darfur in this simplistic way, a focus on the historical creation of racial identities in British-ruled Sudan and the near forty-year Sahelian drought that has displaced countless tribes challenges the misperception of this conflict as a racially motivated genocide.

1. British colonial rule in Sudan (1899-1956) served as the first introduction of race-based identities to the region – identities that Westerners and indeed some Sudanese involved in the conflict continue to use to understand the civil war there.
2. Early colonial writers tended to describe Sudan and much of sub-Saharan Africa as devoid of internal stimuli and instead reliant on outside forces for change. In particular, British writers characterized Africa as comprised of a native African race and non-African settlers, including Arabs.
3. In the late-nineteenth century, Winston Churchill wrote of Arab-ruled Sudan: “The bravery of the aboriginals is outweighed by the intelligence of the invaders,” by which he meant Arabs.[1] Yet Churchill meant this less as a compliment toward Arabs but rather as a justification for what he considered an even more superior form of (British) colonial rule.
4. Though Harold MacMichael’s methods of genealogical data gathering proved less crude that the claims of Churchill, MacMichael nevertheless used the responses to assume that anyone who claimed an Arab identity in Darfur must be a settler and not a native. MacMichael assumed that the Arab presence in Darfur was part of a relatively recent series of migrations into the region, which ignored a much longer Arab presence in the region.

• What both Churchill and MacMichael missed, or refused to acknowledge, was that the identity of “Arab” was a cultural identity, not a racial one. One hundred years later, the Bush administration continued this strain of thinking.

1. When the British defeated the Mahdiyya (1885-1898), an indigenous resistance movement to Anglo-Egyptian rule in Sudan, colonial authorities implemented new strategies for organizing and rule the population. In particular, the British employed race as the primary identity marker through which to administer the colony, and they employed three modern techniques to realize this reorganization of Sudanese political life.[2] The result was the retribalization of Sudan for the purposes of erasing all trans-ethnic governance so successful under the Mahdiyya.
2. First, British rulers sought to shape the present through the gathering of census data.
3. MacMichael’s 1929 survey of “tribes” in Sudan produced 450 different tribal identities. Authorities then organized these tribes into “groups of tribes” not for the purposes of understanding their culture and history, but to administer colonial rule.
4. Each “group of tribes” was then classified by the British as have an identity of “Negroid” or “Arab,” decidedly racial identities that in context of colonial rule, were highly political because it determined claims to land, access to courts, and other matters of property, law, and political participation.
5. Out of these two constructed racial identities, one was assumed to be either “native” (Negroid or African) or “settler” (Arab). In essence, certain tribes were ascribed the status of outsider, foreign to the land that their family may have inhabited for centuries. In this context, those that the British claimed to possess Arab racial identity were marginalized from political life.[3]
6. Second, after an attempt to rule Sudan through direct military control was met with staunch and broad political and religious resistance, British authorities, led by MacMichael turned to a strategy of rule that set up a “government of natives through their own institutions,” followed by a policy of indirect rule.[4] The result was a new system of laws to protect the future interests of the British in Sudan.
7. MacMichael favored secular chiefs to counterbalance the authority of religious authority figures.
8. MacMichael’s reasoning was primarily based on the experience of religiously fueled uprisings against British colonial rule in Darfur. He sought to cultivate ties with secular leaders he believed could be relied on to repress such rebellions.
9. As British authorities turned to strategies of indirect rule, they implemented preliminary census reports to grant authority to certain kinds of tribes, and Darfur served as the laboratory for this type of rule.
10. In particular, British authorities sought to isolate anti-imperial elements by dividing the colony into sectors, to cut off North from South, and Darfur (in the West) from the populations along the Nile River in the center of the colony.
11. The result for Darfur was both retribalization, with certain tribes granted more autonomy and authority than others, and its isolation from the imperial urban center in Khartoum, along the Nile.
12. The 1922 Closed Districts Ordinance targeted both wandering (Islamic) preachers and West African migrants (said to be anti-colonial).[5]

iii. In Darfur, retribalization officially disenfranchised and dispossessed tribes that the British arbitrarily identified as “settler” tribes, with no historical, and thus rightful or traditional claims to the land and governance. Thus, the British sought to rewrite the history of Sudan and in particular Darfur for the purposes of colonial rule. This discrimination later wrought havoc in post-colonial Darfur, when “native” tribes attempted to preserve power, and marginalized “settler” tribes sought inclusion in the political governance of the state.

1. The most disenfranchised were the pastoralists tribes (nomadic and semi-nomadic camel (Abaga) and cattle (Baggara) herders).
2. According to colonial law, based on British legal notions of land and property, these groups had no dar, or historical homeland, with which to claim political and legal rights.
3. Moreover, dar became a narrowly defined term meaning “an ethnic territory in which the dominant group had legal jurisdiction.”[6]
4. Essentially, British colonial rule had turned tribal identity into a racial identity, and used this new formulation as the basis for official discrimination against “settler” or Arab tribes, many of which were Abaga and Baggara nomads lacking any official claim to dar. This arrangement would be replicated in the post-colonial era.
5. While the race-based political arrangements of the British era subsided but did not disappear when Sudan won its independence in 1956, new struggles, including Soviet and American struggles for East African allies during the late Cold War (1975-1989) continued to complicate prospects for a peaceful, inclusive Sudan. Moreover, ongoing climate change placed intense pressure on Darfur residents, both settled and pastoral. The result has been a dire situation in which the necessities of food, grazing land, and governance so affected by race-making have become intensified by climate change.
6. In the 1960s, the Sahel, the transitional climatic zone between the southern edge of the Sahara desert and the lush grasslands of the African savannah, experienced what would become a forty-year process of drought and desertification.
7. The intensification of the Sahelian ecological crisis, a process by which the Sahara desert literary grew southward and eastward, accelerated an already emergent political crisis.
8. Desertification forced many pastoralists to migrate south in search of fertile grazing lands for camel and cattle alike, and it has brought them into conflict other tribes competing for increasingly scarce resources.
9. Most notably though, desertification and the intensification of a civil war across the border in Chad produced a flood of climate/political refugees.

• By the early 1990s, there were already half a million refugees from Chad in Darfur.

1. It was the Chadian refugees who spoke a language of “Arabization” and who provided, via their suppliers on both sides of the Cold War conflict (Soviet and American) flooded Darfur with light arms. As Mamdani argues, a region without a drop of water was awash with guns.[7]
2. The intensification of conflict coincided with the high point of the 1980s drought, primarily fought between settled and nomadic tribes.
3. This was not, as many Westerners observed, a racial conflict, as both culturally defined Arab and Zaghawa (non-Arab) nomads united in a coalition against settled tribes who possessed dar in a legal, political sense.
4. Above all others, the camel nomads, identified as darless Arabs by the perpetuated colonial system had little recourse within the system of native administration that continued to produce localized conflicts between tribes in Sudan more broadly.

Conclusion: Without a deeper colonial legacy of race-based identification for the purposes of administering power coupled with a climate/political crisis extending across the Sahel, the Darfur conflict would likely have proceeded quite differently in terms of its intensity and the prolonged nature of the fighting.

[1] Quoted in Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 79.

[2] Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors, 145-146; Lecture, “British Rule in Sudan,” April 8, 2012.

[3] Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors, 150-151.

[4] Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors, 156.

[5] Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors, 164.

[6] Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors, 168.

[7] Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors, 222; Lecture, “Understanding the Crisis in Darfur,” April 2, 2012.

Slavery and New Jersey: The Institution that Refused to Die

 On November 8^th, 2007, William Payne and Craig Stanley, state assemblymen representing district 29 and 28 respectively, introduced Resolution No.270 to the 212^th Legislature of the State of New Jersey. The bill addressed the institution of slavery, one of the most sensitive issues in American history. It called for the state of New Jersey to declare its “profound regret for its role in slavery.” The bill went even further, requesting that New Jersey apologize for any and all of the wrongdoings that ever occurred or resulted in the state with regards to slavery. Payne argued that this simply stated New Jersey is “sorry about its shameful past.”  Fellow congressman, Richard A. Merkt, voted against the bill, believing that this would be the first step towards paying reparations to the descendents of slaves. Read more

Description of adolescent sex offenders and their origin:

            Adolescent sex offenders are children or teens who commit a forcible or non-forcible sex offense. The law enforcement group classifies sex offenses as forcible rape, such as fondling, sexual assault, sodomy, and rape. In the non-forcible rape, the victim cannot give her consent, and it includes statutory rape, and incest. The early theories indicate that an event/incident causes an impact to the emotional stability of the youth. This scenario leads to anger, which eventually results to fantasies and thoughts of retaliation. Then, the youth thinks of overpowering another person thus, resulting to an assault. Discussions with the offenders reveal that they have problems in the family and at school. The risk is that at any time when an intriguing thought or feeling dominates a young one, it triggers an offending behavior. According to the information from the Center for Sex Offender Management, one of the common traits of adolescent sex offenders is mental illness. They also have difficulties in controlling their judgment at an impulse. Many of them suffer from learning disabilities and inefficiency in academics. Most of the researchers attribute the offenders’ behavior to the “learning theory” as the origin of this offense. This theory points to several factors that lead to abusive behavior of children, such as sexual victimization, family violence, exposure to aggressive incidents, increase of sexual arousal, substance abuse, and exposure to pornography and sexual advertising.  These adolescent sex offenders either commit sexual abuse to children, or take peers and adults as their victims. The young sex offenders usually have a feeling of social withdrawal and isolation. The irony is that the public treats most of them as adults and calls them pedophiles or predators. However, although they treat these offenders as adults, the law penalizes them as adolescents in many cases and not as adults. Therefore, their penalties are lighter than the ones imposed by the courts on adult offenders (Finkelhor et al, 2009). Read more