Propaganda photographs as a tool of North Korean public diplomacy: an experimental analysis of the Kim Jong-un effect

Abstract

A growing body of research shows that the pariah regime of North Korea—as other countries too—cares about how it is perceived internationally. However, so far, we know very little about how effective North Korea’s strategic efforts are in improving its image among foreign audiences. As a first step toward addressing this gap, we employ a rigorous survey experiment among a representative sample of US adults (N = 800) to demonstrate that propaganda photographs of Kim Jong-un—produced and distributed by the regime’s official mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)—succeed in improving perceptions of North Korea, albeit only among audiences with limited political knowledge. By providing evidence that news photographs are effective strategic communication instruments, our paper also makes an original and significant contribution to general scholarship on mediated public diplomacy, which has until now paid little attention to visual media as a tool of image management.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This may partly be due to the fact that digital photography only became a key instrument in North Korea’s public diplomacy amidst a recent KCNA internationalisation drive. Since 2009, the KCNA has been publishing English-language news from a server in North Korea (rather than Japan); in 2011, the KCNA signed cooperation agreements with the Associated Press and Reuters.

2 On the origins and early evolution of the concept of public diplomacy, see Cull (2006).

3 The bulk of 'visual turn' work in IR is based on the concept of 'discursive causality' and the assumption that images work gradually and across time and space, 'by slowly entrenching—or challenging—how we view, think of and thus also how we conduct politics' (Bleiker 2018, 20).

4 Guidance tours became routinised and institutionalised in the 1970s. They are meticulously planned and typically scheduled one year in advance (Yonhap News Agency 2002, 164).

5 For example, at the time of writing, AP stocked 2,522 KCNA photographs, Yonhap 946 and Getty 898. Other distributors of KCNA imagery include Imago Images (1,614) and Alamy (699).

6 In reality, these number are likely to be higher, as we only counted photographs where the KCNA was explicitly identified as the source. As already explained, the KCNA relies on international news agencies to distribute its imagery to global news media. Often it is these agencies that are referenced as the source, not the KCNA.

7 Measuring political knowledge through general questions about politics is also common practice in other fields, such as election marketing (for example, Ahler et al. 2017).

8 ‘Don’t know’ responses are fairly equally distributed across the two treatment groups. 7.5 per cent of participants in the visual treatment group responded with ‘don’t know’, 8.3 per cent in the control group.

9 We labelled this sub-group ‘limited political knowledge’, as it must be assumed that even respondents who answered all of our knowledge questions incorrectly have at least some degree of political knowledge.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies, grant AKS-2018-R-11

Notes on contributors

Olli Hellmann

Olli Hellmann is Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. He has published on questions of non-democratic regime resilience and autocratic relapse—including a special issue of International Political Science Review (2018) and a co-edited volume on Stateness and Democracy in East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Olli also has an interest in visual forms of political communication. Recent publications from this latter research agenda include papers in Democratisation (2021), Media, War & Conflict (2020) and Third World Quarterly (2019). [email protected].

Kai Oppermann

Kai Oppermann is Professor of International Politics at the Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. His research expertise spans foreign policy analysis and the role of narratives and discursive conflict in international politics. Kai’s latest publications include articles in the European Journal of International Relations (2018) and the Journal of European Public Policy (2020) as well as co-edited volumes published by Manchester University Press (Foreign Policy as Public Policy? Promise and Pitfalls, 2019) and Palgrave Macmillan (Political Mistakes and Policy Failures in International Relations, 2018). Kai is also a co-editor at German Politics and an associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis (2018). [email protected].