This paper aims to propose a novel approach to studying ethics and securitization of border crossing by employing middle-range theory, situating empirical cases of North Korean border crossers. Elucidating on the justification practice in legal identification of North Koreans in five states (South Korea, China, Russia, the UK and the US) vis-à-vis North Koreans’ predicaments as refugees sur place, this paper presents North Korean “border crossers” as human agents and their border crossing as a self-emancipation practice in response to the body management of the states. In this view, human agency is conceptualized as ability and answerability drawn on biopolitics and chronotope upon this paper’s theoretical foundation, Ethics of Coexistence (EoC). EoC is elaborated by the Entropy of Peace (EP) which delineates the power to restore the politics of migration against the mechanism of scapegoating, fitness of deviance for constructive social changes, and resilience of human agents to risk. This paper then develops Mobility-Identity-Security Analysis (MISA) and Biopolitical Risk Analysis (BRA). In MISA, dimension intersections and reverse of MIS are described. BRA provides, inter alia, an ecological understanding of risk, a risk transformation strategy interacting with peace and agency, and a matrix of urgency. The two sets of analytical tools, MISA and BRA are to propose ‘Neosecuritization’, a critique of traditional security discourses on migration. This paper concludes with ethical, methodological, legal and policy-relevant reflections on primarily but not limited to the border crossing of North Koreans.

Authors:
Dosol Lee, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

About the Presenter(s)
Dosol Nissi Lee is an emerging peace and mobility scholar, studying at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS) in Denmark. Her research interests include human security, migration (ir)rationality, ordoliberalism and bioethics.

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