Contested Maritime Ecologies of Peter the Great Bay and the Sea of Okhotsk: North Korean and Russian Struggles over Maritime Stocks and Salmon Conservation

Environmental histories of North Korea remain rare, and rarer still scholarly engagements with North Korean maritime matters, yet the sea has historically been vital to North Korean politico-developmental narratives. Building on previous work outlining Pyongyang’s fishing histories, and the complex relationships North Korea and Soviet Union shared at sea in the 1960’s and 1970s, particularly in the Sea of Okhotsk, in the waters off Kamchatka and around the Commander Islands the paper draws upon on archival material from the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Fisheries Archive and contemporary writing and interviews with the Coast Guard of the FSB Border Service of Russia. The presentation considers the historical and lived reality of such encounters in both present and past, and explores the response of the Russian Coast Guard and the efforts of Russian marine scientists and conservationists to mitigate these impacts and maintain important and long standing relationships with North Korea’s fisheries research institutions and institutional frameworks.

Dr. Robert Winstanley-Chesters is an AKS Teaching and Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. The author of four research monographs including Vibrant Matter(s): Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Her Neighbours (Springer, 2020), Robert is the managing editor of the European Journal of Korean Studies and an Editor of Bloomsbury Publishing's Foodscaping Asia monograph series.