Principal Investigator: Angie Heo, Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion

What forms and frameworks of knowledge are generated about closed societies? How does knowledge about "secret regimes" and limited-access states give rise to various moral projects and political interventions? Heo’s project focused on sites and practices of knowledge production about North Korea among Protestant Evangelicals in South Korea.

Technically locked in a state of war since 1950, the divided Koreas are widely regarded as the world's last Cold War zone. From the 1960s-1980s, South Korea witnessed rapid economic development paired with the explosive rise of Protestant Evangelicalism nationwide. Forged during the global heights of the Cold War, South Korea's intertwined histories of capitalism and Christianity resulted in moral and economic forms of knowledge about North Korea - its refugees (or "defectors"), missionary-hostages, and impoverished standards of living. Such widespread imaginaries of North Korea are deeply inflected by ideological values of freedom, security and unification that lie at the nationalist heart of South Korea's self-identity and geopolitical standing as one of America's strongest allies in the Asian Pacific Rim.

Drawing on North Korea's status as "closed" and "isolated", South Korean Evangelicals, in turn, have played a key role in developing "secret" initiatives toward promoting religious and market freedoms across the divide. Exploring the forms of knowledge about North Korea entailed in such initiatives, Heo’s research investigated the Christian Business Men’s Committee (CBMC), a Cold War institution of American military origin founded in 1950 and currently headquartered in Seoul.