Korea, North

With Election 2016 well underway, KEI's very own Phil Eskeland has been closely following how both the Republican and Democratic parties have been talking about foreign policy and Asia. He…

In the late 1930s, nearly 200,000 ethnic Koreans were forcibly removed from the Soviet Far East, packed into trains and sent to Central Asia. More than 70 years later, their…

With no shortage of North Korean news in 2016, we look back at one of our interviews with Ambassador John Everard of the UK. He provides an inside perspective of…

After North Korea launched its fourth nuclear test in January 2016, an outraged international community once again cracked down, passing tough sanctions both at the UN and domestic levels. While…

Over the last half decade, the Korean Peninsula has seen the prospect of war during Donald Trump’s period of “fire and fury,” but also a period of negotiations that resulted in a series of North-South and U.S.-North Korea summits. While war was avoided, those efforts at negotiation ultimately failed. The aftermath of those failed negotiations,…

After more than two years since the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 has finally been detected in North Korea. Despite strict border controls limiting the movement of people and goods to prevent entry of the novel coronavirus, state media reported on 12 May that the Omicron BA.2 variant had been found in a sample taken…

North Korean officials confirmed the first deaths in the country from COVID-19 on May 13, and the latest North Korean news media reports state that well over a million North Koreans are suffering “fever symptoms.” (See reports in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Guardian, BBC, CNN, Voice of America.) Kim Jong-un appeared…

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Council have begun the process of selecting a new Special Rapporteur to focus on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).  Special Rapporteur Tomás Ojea Quintana has held the mandate for DPRK human rights for the…

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