In Search for Ideology: Exploring Constructed Legitimacy of the Kim Jong-un Regime

Abstract: The notion of legitimacy in North Korea can be hard to understand for Westerners with no prior knowledge about the North Korean cultural values and political history. It can be hard to understand the reasoning behind the transition of power to a young man without prior experience and achievements to become the formal leader of a population of 24 million.

This thesis looks into the construction of legitimacy attributed to Kim Jong-un and the different institutions to assess the collectively constructed legitimacy for the new regime. As earlier studies have been focusing on the Kim family in the sense of constructed legitimacy, this study aims to contribute with a new perspective on top of earlier research. In the search for the ideology, texts sampled from the Rodong Sinmun have given an understanding of how the ideology of legitimacy through discourse flows through the text to create an idea of legitimacy for the international as well as the domestic audience.