ABSTRACT
As of 2017, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification announced that more than 30,000 North Koreans had defected to South Korea. The growing population of North Korean defectors in South Korea brings about the issue of their assimilation into a new community. Kim and Yun (2017) point out the paradoxical situation that North Korean defectors confront; on the one hand, the defectors hold the rights as citizens of South Korea, but on the other, they inevitably experience social exclusion and identity problems as the Other in South Korea due to their complex entanglement in political ideologies. Considering their peculiar social position, the South Korean government prioritizes their stable settlement. Both social and government-level interests have invoked academic research on the degrees and types of their “adaptation” to South Korean society (Yi 2014; Lee 2016; Kim and Yun 2017). The research methodologies have been refined and quantitatively increased in terms of measuring social and psychological integration alongside economic stability, policy and institutional changes.
