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I recently received the Peterson Institute website stats for the first two months of the year. Makes for some interesting reading. A post regarding North Korea Freedom Week made the Institute’s Top Ten downloads for the month of January. (Way to go, Suzanne!) We got lots of play via pingbacks at NK News, One Free Korea, [...]
A familiar trope of the North Korean famine literature is the assertion that the event would have significant long-term effects on the physical and mental capacities of individuals who were nutritionally deprived as children. While the notion has enormous intuitive plausibility, I know of no actual evidence on the North Korean case, and studies of [...]
In an earlier post, we talked about Rice’s views of North Korea during the first administration. In this post, we carry the story forward, focusing particular attention—as Rice does—on the events of 2008. Rice offers little further insight on the atrophy of the talks in 2003-4 but notes that on becoming Secretary she sought “a [...]
Sanctions are a complex technology with correspondingly complex macro- and microeconomic as well as political effects. Iran is currently facing quite draconian oil-related sanctions, most notably the EU decision in January 2012, to wind down purchases of Iranian crude oil by July 1, 2012. But the country has also been hit by a wave of [...]
Last week, we noted that there was at least some debate about whether missiles and space launch vehicles were effectively the same thing. The political issue has more or less been settled; the Russians and even the Chinese have weighed in forcefully. For the record, we cite two more entries in the debate, however. The [...]
We received a comment on the international legal issues surrounding the missile launch from Jared Genser – an Adjunct Professor of Georgetown Law School who teaches a seminar on the UN Security Council – that merits inclusion in a regular post. In subsequent communications, we have clarified a few further issues having to do with [...]
Embedded below is a brief video that I made for an event at Tomas Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Note that it was recorded on 15 March–before the North Korean missile launch announcement.
Etel Solingen’s 2007 Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East struck us as something genuinely fresh in the sometimes-stale proliferation literature: an attempt to construct a political economy of nuclear weapons. Solingen draws an admittedly stark dichotomy between outward-looking and “backlash” coalitions. But she notes that states that have actively sought [...]
We begin with corruption, one of our favorite topics. Kim Jong-un, the Magnanimous Comrade, in Greg Scarlatoiu’s parlance, announced a special amnesty for prisoners this year which Steph Haggard and Jaesung Ryu likened to a shell game. Now the Daily NK is reporting that the possibility of amnesty is being used to shake down prisoners. [...]
There is an old Marxist adage that the future is certain but the past is constantly changing. We continue to reconstruct what happened under the Bush administration for work we are doing on sanctions and engagement; a first pass is a short monograph on economic statecraft. In deconstructing this period, we read Condoleeza Rice’s memoir, [...]
