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In this blog, we report on developments in and around North Korea, including the broader security setting and political, economic, and social change in the country.
Former Blue House spokesman Yoon Chang-jung, as is probably known to most readers of this blog, allegedly celebrated President Park’s up-until-that-moment successful visit to Washington by getting drunk and sexually assaulting a 21 year old Korean-American female who had been hired to work on summit-related tasks. Reportedly when the woman returned to her hotel room [...]
When we last checked in, Dennis Rodman was chillaxing with his friend “Kim,” doing Sunday morning talk shows, carrying diplomatic messages, and appealing to Kim to “do him a solid” and release Kenneth Bae. It seems that Worm is now losing his patience, indicating that “Obama can’t do sh#t” but promising to make another pitch [...]
In a classic essay, Isaiah Berlin draws on a fragment attributed to Archilochus to draw a distinction between foxes and hedgehogs; the fragment notes that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” If there was ever a hedgehog, it was Kenneth Waltz. Waltz’s “one big thing” was to view international [...]
Considerable attention focused last week on the visit to Pyongyang by Isao Iijima, special assistant to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. As I observed in a post last week, the Japanese public places marginally greater concern on abductees than on the North Korean nuclear program and the abductee issue has been a focal point of [...]
The Pyongyang Project is a Canadian social venture that focuses on travel and educational programs for foreigners and DPRK residents. While many of the group’s educational tours involve trips to Pyongyang, there are some trips that go to other interesting parts of the country. We recently received an advertisement for an upcoming trip that focuses [...]
Democracy promotion and human rights diplomacy are often assumed to be American conceits, but we are not alone. Among recently-created democracy efforts, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy deserves mention. Founded in 2003, the Foundation is engaged in a full spectrum of activities, from the practical to the academic (for example, they publish the Taiwan Journal of [...]
In a post from last summer, we argued that the military is occupying a larger role within party and state institutions. The events of the last six months—from the satellite launch and nuclear tests, to the particularly furious reaction to UNSC Resolution 2087 and the closing of Kaesong—appear to have military fingerprints on them. At [...]
Science—if you have access—has recently published an interesting piece by Richard Stone on developments in TB and TB treatment in North Korea. The good news is to be found in the efforts of NGOs such as Christian Friends of Korea and Eugene Bell who have long worked this issue. Christian Friends of Korea has undertaken [...]
A constantly recurring question is how decades of chronic food insecurity interspersed with food emergencies and even outright famine may affect the long-term physical and mental health of the North Korean people. Since we cannot do direct scientific study of the North Korean population, thinking on this issue is by its very nature speculative. One way [...]
Following the formal coronation of the Kim Jong Eun in early 2012, a boomlet of optimism followed some purported statements on reform: the so-called June 28 directive (“On the Establishment of a New Economic Management System in our Own Way”) and a speech entitled ““Let Us Effect Kim Jong Il’s Patriotism and Step Up the [...]
