As of April 2022, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) has become more aggressive in all areas, including ideology, economy, foreign policy, and nuclear strategy. As President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol is inaugurated next week, he faces serious challenges in navigating inter-Korean and U.S.-DPRK relations under these conditi...

Kim Yo-jong has risen as a key figure in North Korean leadership as Chairman Kim Jong-un’s strategic partner over the recent years. In this Research Review, Helene Kim, Visiting Researcher at the Reunification Institute of Ewha Womans University, analyzes Kim Yo-jong’s leadership through motive imagery analysis. The author claims that Kim Yo-jo...

In this Commentary, Jihwan Hwang, Professor at the University of Seoul, provides a dim outlook for North Korea’s course of actions following the Russia-Ukraine War. Dr. Hwang claims that the war has confirmed North Korea’s correlation between nuclear weapons and survival and its view that a peace regime provides no guarantee for security. The a...

The following Research Review contains a summary of a chapter from the book North Korean Women, Leading Change. In this Research Review, Mi-ju Kim, lecturer at the Department of North Korean Studies and a research fellow at the Institute for Unification Studies of Ewha Womans University, looks into the human rights infringements North Kore...

In this Commentary, Sangmin Lee, Director of the North Korean Military Research Division at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), provides an evaluation of North Korea’s ICBM technology, discusses the threat behind North Korea’s development of tactical nuclear weapons, and suggests ways in which South Korea can deter North Korean mil...

interviews leading North Korea experts for timely analysis on North Korea once a month. For this month, we invited Andrew Yeo (SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies, Brookings Institution; Professor, Catholic University of America) to analyze the implications of the Russia-Ukraine war on East Asia and discuss prospects for the Biden and Yoon a...

The following Research Review contains a summary of the article “Changes in North Korea’s Financial System During the Kim Jong Un Era: Based on North Korean Literature,” co-authored by Minjung Kim and Sung Min Moon of the Bank of Korea. In this Research Review, Minjung Kim, an economist in the Economic Research Institute at Bank of Korea, dis...

Although South Korean and North Korean comedies both originated from theatrical features of the Japanese colonial era, the two comedies have diverged into distinct forms of art after the Korean War. In this Special Report, Young Jeong Park, Adjunct Professor at the University of North Korean Studies, compares and contrasts comedies of the two Korea...

Notwithstanding explicit warnings of the U.S. and its European allies, Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th. In this Commentary, Yang Gyu Kim, Executive Director at the East Asia Institute (EAI), identifies the Russia-Ukraine war as a case of deterrence failure from the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s perspective. He p...

Notwithstanding United Nations prohibitions on ballistic and nuclear weapons tests, North Korea has continuously been on a streak of weapons proliferation. In this commentary, Hyeong Jung Park, Emeritus Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), analyzes the intentions of the unusually high number of tests, looking into...