Ria Roy

About

Ria Roy is a Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a specialist in the history of modern Korea and East Asia. She leads the Northeast Asia History Working Group at Hoover, which focuses on the role of the middle powers and their alliances in the region, especially Japan and the two Koreas, drawing from new sources on both past and present geopolitical challenges. She engages with issues of national security, geopolitics, international relations and authoritarianism in the broader context of Northeast Asia, with a particular interest in ideas defining illiberal and liberal societies. 

Ria is currently writing a book about the paradoxes of power and the question of the successor in North Korea. By focusing on the invisible hands behind the personality cult in North Korea, she is exploring how the state and the elite have created a system of political succession in a professedly socialist state, pioneering an often overlooked, albeit novel, model of authoritarianism in the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the general disillusionment with socialist ideals, Ria examines how North Korea self-consciously bypassed the transience of the charisma of the leader predicted by Max Weber.  

Opposing the common view that academics in North Korea are hermetically sealed off from Western influences, she uses original North Korean sources to examine how the intelligentsia, who were in fact well versed in Western political thought, engaged in a pan-societal project of creating a ‘successor’ for over three decades before the first succession in 1994. This diverges from those treatments of the North Korean leadership succession system, which tend to see it as simply a return to a dynastic succession.

 Her mission in the Northeast Asia History Working Group is to collect, preserve, and make available important voices and materials concerning political, social, and economic changes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Northeast Asia. Her curatorial work on rare Northeast Asian books and sources has appeared at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives and the Cambridge University Library at the University of Cambridge.

Her recent papers have appeared in the Journal of Korean Studies, the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, and History's Dead-Hand Grip: Politics, Statecraft, and "Lessons" of the Past. She earned her PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Prior to that, she gained an MA at Harvard University and a BA at Waseda University in Tokyo.