1933 Posts located
Much is made in Western circles of North Korea’s economic dependence on China amid questions of whether and how much leverage this gives Beijing. In an end game, however, Pyongyang…
Russia shares a border with the Korean Peninsula, and its declared interest is to maintain peace and stability in the region. During Soviet times, its Korean policy was based on…
On February 10, 2016, the South Korean government announced the closure of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, a symbol of its engagement policy and inter-Korean rapprochement. The move was part of…
Lately, many questions have been raised about how new currents are reshaping the economic architecture in East Asia, ranging from the Russian Far East to the Indian sub-continent with narrower…
Although it is happening more rapidly in South Korea, an aging society is a common feature in post-industrial societies around the world. With the number of retirees growing and the…
In March, Seoul suffered from the worst air pollution on record. Enough that the South Korean government has officially designated the problem as a "social disaster." But what is causing…
Over the past few years, Korea and Koreans have experienced incredible political, social, and diplomatic shifts. It is hard keeping up with all these new developments as a Korea Watcher,…
Even before the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, foreign policy practitioners and observers were talking about the difficulties of sequencing international sanctions relief for North Korea…
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…