Korea, North

On this week’s episode, we welcome back Victoria Kim, a researcher and multimedia journalist. When she last joined us in 2016, Victoria discussed her project “Lost and Found in Uzbekistan:…

On August 1, the remains of what are believed to be 55 American servicemen lost during the Korean War finally returned home, arriving in Hawaii to begin the long process…

Now that Trump has met Kim, and with the Singapore Summit laying out the beginning of a path to denuclearization, analysts are still trying to figure out if Kim Jong…

With the world's attention on Singapore on June 12, U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un walked across a stage flanked by American and North Korean…

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…

After the first U.S-North Korea summit held in Singapore in 2018, President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un vowed to “establish new U.S.–DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity.” Although an end of war declaration has been identified as one way for both sides…

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