Korea, North

In this special episode of Korean Kontext, KEI's Juni Kim sat down with three North Korean defectors who have settled in South Korea. Each of them has a different story…

The upcoming presidential election in Korea on May 9th will place many key issues under the microscope. One meriting serious consideration that has featured less prominently in the political discourse…

After the closure of the Kaesong Industrial Complex last year, economic ties between North and South Korea have all but ceased. And as sanctions measures continue to tighten, the international…

Ever since last summer, when South Korea and the United States announced they would be deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system to the peninsula, China…

In the last two posts on Korea and the war in Ukraine, I showed that Moon administration moved relatively quickly to join the international sanctions regime and was rewarded by inclusion on Russia’s  "unfriendly nations" list. I also argued that the costs of standing on international legal principle were softened by the fact that the…

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…

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