Korea, North

North Korea recently experienced one of the worst natural disasters in its history, as flood waters swept through towns in the northeast part of the country. Up to 600,000 people…

With the goal of supporting the next generation of scholars interested in Korea and Northeast Asia, the U.S.-Korea Next Gen Scholars Program brings together young professionals from various backgrounds to…

Last week, the news of a high-level defection by a North Korean diplomat stationed in London captivated North Korea watchers. For the next few says, analysts and the media speculated…

In early July, the United States and South Korea announced that they had come to an agreement to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system near the city…

A few months ago, the New York Times reported that North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong-un, had called K-pop a ‘vicious cancer.’ Rather than see this pronouncement as an exceptional step taken by a totalitarian regime, one can think of this as yet another expression of an ongoing struggle to control information entering North Korea. In…

In the last two posts, we have provided data on the share of military personnel in the Politburo and analyzed in more detail the diversity of military backgrounds, some tied to the weapons program, but others linked more clearly to the military-industrial complex, technology and internal security. Here, we consider several intepretations of these developments,…

In a previous post, we provided data on the shifting composition of the Politburo, based on a classification of personnel into six different career paths: military, diplomatic, party, state, economic and provincial. We showed that since the failed Hanoi summit of 2018, the share of military personnel has returned to levels not seen since the…

One prominent strand of North Korea watching takes the form of tracking individual personnel movements: the ups and downs associated with retirements, purges and the promotion of new favorites. Yet there is persistent doubt about whether these movements are really consequential, particularly in a highly personalist political system. We can get a somewhat more rounded…

Please join KEI for a discussion on North Korea’s potential incorporation of AI into its cyber arsenal.