Korea, North

Despite all the attention around the upcoming second summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, we in the United States still know very little about North Korea, its people, and…

2018 has been an incredibly eventful year for both the Koreas and the U.S.-Korea relationship: from North Korea’s participation in the Winter Olympics at the start of the year to…

Interest in the Korean peninsula is generally very narrow in the United States – it tends to be focused on North Korea and security issues, particularly the country's ballistic and…

What does a unified Korea look like? Beyond the question of whether the government of this new country will be a unitary or federal one, how will the people –…

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…

There is a long tradition of considering North Korean leaders’ public appearances as a potential source of information on the regime’s priorities (see for example: Haggard, Herman, and Ryu; Pyo and Hur; Kim and Lee).  We now have ten full years of this data for Kim Jong-un through the South Korea Ministry of Unification portal,…

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