1933 Posts located
North Korea and Russia are seen as posing an increasingly dangerous military threat as we enter 2015, and the responses of other states to them are widely perceived as realist…
Over the past sixty years, the two Koreas have embarked on completely different paths in almost every respect. One developed into a successful example of democracy with remarkable economic growth,…
Moving from the powerful and abstract construct of ethnic homogeneity as bearing the promise for unification, this chapter instead considers family unity, facilitated by the quotidian and ubiquitous tools of…
North Korea is a country easy to approach emotionally. For anyone with even a little twinge of conscience toward human rights, it evokes disgust. For many in South Korea, who…
When Kim Jong-il died in 2011, the world held its breath as North Korea entered uncharted waters. No other communist dictatorship in the last century – for that matter no…
On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched a surprise invasion of South Korea and started a war that is still technically ongoing. But it was – as North Korea’s Kim…
The North Korean economy is changing – we know this because of widely reported growth of private markets since the famine of 1990s. But black markets and illicit activities are…
In May, The Korean-born Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher Ryu Hyun-jin was named The National League Pitcher of the Month. When you think of Asians and baseball, you might think first…
The OECD’s March Interim Economic Outlook projects that Korea’s real GDP will increase by 1.6% in 2023, matching the Bank of Korea’s February forecast. The new projection is a slight downward revision from the OECD’s November 2022 outlook in the context of below-trend global economic growth. The impact of the war in Ukraine and high…
The Tokyo summit that brought together South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on 23 March 2023 successfully cleared away much of the accumulated debris of the last five years of dysfunctionality. The two-day official visit — the first by a South Korean president in a dozen years — checked off…
I’m currently completing a book on North Korea watchers - the community of scholars, analysts, government officers, NGO advocates and journalists who, for one reason or another, commit a portion of their lives to watching North Korea. After twenty-five years in government, academia and consultancy, with much of my time working on Korean Peninsula affairs,…
Elizabeth Salmón, the recently-appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, submitted her first report to the UN Human Rights Council on March 9. The report is set to be discussed on March 20 as part of the Council’s broad human rights agenda in Geneva from…