DPRK

In: Bob de Graaff (ed.): Intelligence Communities and Cultures in Asia and the Middle East: A Comprehensive Reference.

My chapter is about DPRK Intelligence Agencies: History, Development, Organisation, Operations.

The book in general: How are intelligence systems structured in countries across Asia and the Middle East—from Russia to India, from Turkey to China and Japan, from Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia? In what ways did decolonization and the Cold War influence their organization? What is their mission, and to what extent do they come under public scrutiny? The authors of this comprehensive reference delve into these questions, and more, to provide a unique, systematic survey of intelligence practices and cultures in 22 countries.

Le décès de Kim Jong-il : le début d’une nouvelle ère en Corée du Nord ? Depuis la mort de Kim Jong-il et l’avènement de son fils Kim Jong-un, la Corée du Nord est entrée dans une nouvelle phase de son histoire. Les réformes économiques nord-coréennes rappellent le besoin de définir la nature du modèle économique nord-coréen. Une définition qui permet de présenter la stratégie du pays et d’en déterminer les enjeux.

2
Résumé

L’article suivant

à

pour but de présenter la question

de la sécurité interne en Corée du Nord. D’une part seront présentés les principales structures de sécurité en Corée du Nord. D’autre part nous verrons quels sont les enjeux en question ainsi que le rôle de ces entités sur la politique internationale de la Corée du Nord.

Today, in parallel with the more familiar names of Andrei Lankov, James Hoare, B.R. Myers, Victor Cha, Charles Armstrong and David Kang, we can count on the work of numerous authors, not necessarily “new” in terms of publications, but relatively less known to the public. Also, quite importantly, we are witnessing a rise in the number of (and visibility of) female scholars in a field that was largely male-dominated until recently. All of them present interesting approaches to previously uninvestigated topics, having introduced new concepts, presented new sources or re-evaluated old ones.

NORTH KOREA BEHIND THE VEIL is a collection of an insider’s short stories, articles and uncensored images, providing a unique insight and a different perspective on the world's most isolated, under-reported and misrepresented country. It is also the inside story of a different, changing country, challenging stereotypes, partisan and sensational reporting. — And this is what motivated the author, who lived and worked for seven years in North Korea, to publish it: “North Korea has been portrayed for decades as a monolithic gulag network filled with slaves and a hellhole by the mass media. The socio-economic changes North Korea has undergone over the last decade or more have been almost entirely unreported. Indeed, by the beginning of 2017, mass starvation had long ceased, while more and better-assorted markets emerged throughout the country (and yet you’re still reading that ‘North Korea’s regime is starving its population’). Fewer people are punished for political crimes than in the past (but you still read that three generations of a family are sent to the gulag for the slightest political crime). The rising middle class has been transforming the rigid old political class system since marketization has enabled people from lower classes to build their own business, with some becoming rich and even more influential than many party and government officials from the privileged ‘core class,’ something prohibited two decades ago. Yet, you’re still told by the media that a North Korean’s fate is solely defined by the social ‘caste’ he belongs to and so on. Business people around the world have had no access to any news of positive progress, while any stories of ‘normal’ development are generally considered not to be newsworthy by the media. — Alas, the strangulating economic embargo which was imposed later in 2017, a de facto collective punishment, is bound to reverse this progress, causing enormous and unnecessary suffering to the North Korean people.”

— Author Felix Abt is a politically neutral businessman and, therefore, does not share partisan views about North Korea. He is, however, critical of unfair North Korea reporting and does what he can to contribute to a more objective view of a country he knows much better than the journalists and bloggers writing about it.

He was an investor at several legitimate Joint Venture companies in North Korea which are now being driven into bankruptcy by U.N. "sanctions."

Since the middle of the 20th, there have been two places of division caused by war in east Asia. One is in the Korean peninsula, the other is related to the Taiwan Strait. After the war and the long-term military confrontation, the two places of division had many exhibition halls which discoursed on the war and the military confrontation. How the displays of the historical opposite subjects discourse on the same war is the topic that this study concerns about.
Extending the meaning of the South Korean scholar Youngseo Baik’s “core location” makes the intersection points of modern east Asian history where disputes exist be connected. This study will focus on main battlefield display discourses of north and south sides of the Korean peninsula and both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The content of battlefield display in four places, “ROK and DPRK” and “Taiwan and mainland China”, will be analysed and be directly compared. Integrated comparison of the battlefield display in the Korean peninsula and the Taiwan Strait will be carried on with the macro-memory and the micro-memories perspectives as well. All is to find out the core values of battlefield display. After a series of comparative study, the core values of battlefield display are summarized as “keep peace”, “keep reconciliation” and “keep talk”.

Against all the odds, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) has survived two decades of acute crisis since the end of the Cold War. It has neither collapsed nor reformed itself, despite the dire state of its economy and the existence of extensive international sanctions. This has been possible as it has skillfully adapted to circumstances and found new ways to maintain supply lines and revenue streams, developing and using a range of suppliers and altering their relative importance over time, as well as the way in which they operate, in order to circumvent sanctions. Furthermore, they have also been able to develop new ones. There has also been a shift away from direct state control over illicit and semi-official activities, towards putting more trust in market mechanisms and obtaining the state’s and the regime’s share through different forms of “loyalty schemes”, bribery and public-private constructions. This shift has made it more difficult to target the d...

Part 1 of this article on North Korean women introduced the female iconography of the DPRK. In this second part, I explore the various roles of North Korean women and the realities of their daily lives. The DPRK takes pride in claiming to have eradicated gender inequality, a phenomena previously regarded by Kim Il Sung as both a ‘feudal vestige’ and evidence of the brutality of the Japanese occupation. And to his benefit, many experts agree that the DPRK has at least kept a de jure commitment to gender equality, as nearly all available documentary evidence seems to show.

NORTH KOREA BEHIND THE VEIL is a collection of an insider’s short stories, articles and uncensored images, providing a unique insight and a different perspective on the world's most isolated, under-reported and misrepresented country. It is also the inside story of a different, changing country, challenging stereotypes, partisan and sensational reporting. — And this is what motivated the author, who lived and worked for seven years in North Korea, to publish it:

“North Korea has been portrayed for decades as a monolithic gulag network filled with slaves and a hellhole by the mass media. The socio-economic changes North Korea has undergone over the last decade or more have been almost entirely unreported. Indeed, by the beginning of 2017, mass starvation had long ceased, while more and better-assorted markets emerged throughout the country (and yet you’re still reading that ‘North Korea’s regime is starving its population’). Fewer people are punished for political crimes than in the past (but you still read that three generations of a family are sent to the gulag for the slightest political crime). The rising middle class has been transforming the rigid old political class system since marketization has enabled people from lower classes to build their own business, with some becoming rich and even more influential than many party and government officials from the privileged ‘core class,’ something prohibited two decades ago. Yet, you’re still told by the media that a North Korean’s fate is solely defined by the social ‘caste’ he belongs to and so on. Business people around the world have had no access to any news of positive progress, while any stories of ‘normal’ development are generally considered not to be newsworthy by the media.

— Alas, the strangulating economic embargo which was imposed later in 2017, a de facto collective punishment, is bound to reverse this progress, causing enormous and unnecessary suffering to the North Korean people.”

— Author Felix Abt is a politically neutral businessman and, therefore, does not share partisan views about North Korea. He is, however, critical of unfair North Korea reporting and does what he can to contribute to a more objective view of a country he knows much better than the journalists and bloggers writing about it. He was an investor at several legitimate Joint Venture companies in North Korea which are now being driven into bankruptcy by U.N. "sanctions."

The two studies brought together in this volume not only look like they are miles apart, in fact they are. The first study investigates the construction of the M4 motorway in Pakistan, while the second study deals with the presence of North Korean forced labour in the supply chains of Chinese factories and international textile brands.
One common strand that links these two different studies is that of the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). These studies try to determine to what extent companies and financial institutions take responsibility in order to ensure compliance with internationally agreed standards in the value chain.
Another strand the two pillars of this report have in common is the presence of the Netherlands: the Dutch state as a stakeholder participating financially in the first project, while the second project involves major Dutch companies whose supply chains run very high risks of containing North Korean forced labour.
The third common strand is the introduction of new empirical facts into the discourse, through regional interviews in the first project and by way of new ways of mapping and understanding supply chains in the second.
Finally, the last common strand is the role of China in both projects.
Both case studies show how proper implementation and execution of CSR requires awareness and knowledge of the region involved and should never be a matter of merely ticking the boxes. The severe infringements we found in both case studies show as much: due diligence needs to be tightened up.

For many of us, the idea of people living happily in North Korea doesn’t seem possible. Even less likely is the idea of North Koreans having an emotional connection to the country’s leader. But things look different on the other side. In the DPRK, the notion of an “evil leader in an evil country” simply becomes an “imperialist lie,” a myth that North Korean media work relentlessly to debunk. The regime in fact, invests a great deal of energy in building idyllic images of life, telling its citizens that they could hardly be happier anywhere else as they are truly loved by their leader, Kim Jong Un. How does North Korea deliver such messages and for whom are such stories being told?

In this presentation I first underlined the need to distinguish between the illicit cross-border trade that the North Korean regime has been applying for almost forty years, serving also Chinese organized crime groups and the illicit trade that personnel from the State Security Department and the police of North Korea perform as their side business for earning some extra income. Moreover, for researching both phenomena empirically, I adjusted the rational choice theory and the general strain theory by connecting them to those Confucian values which still are relevant as informal norms in North Korea.

North Korea Webinar by Universal Peace Federation (UPF) on 25th June 2022.

Presentation by Felix Abt on

1. Sanctions, impact and lifting them
2. The role of South Korean, Chinese and other foreign companies in the North
3. A post-reunification scenario

The framework known as “Responsibility to Protect” (“R2P”) has afforded legal endorsement and codification to the doctrine that States hold responsibility under public international law for the protection of their own citizens and of those who reside within their prescriptive jurisdiction. This holds true in peacetime and wartime alike, and it is shaped by an understanding of “security” which increasingly calls for comprehensive and multifaceted assessments (human security) to replace the traditional ones centred on military protection. Within the human-security paradigm, the right to food stands at the forefront of a reconceptualization which proceeds beyond the quantity of available (or accessible) food, up to scrutinise its nutritional value more pertinently, and human capabilities in context. “Hidden hunger”—the chronic insufficiency of nutrients intake that victimises hundreds of millions of children worldwide—is currently dismayingly unaddressed in legal scholarship, despite representing a proven trigger of violent spirals which turn countries to conflict and frustrate their Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”). It is therefore essential to analyse the chances to successfully invoke the R2P framework as to intervene in countries whose ruling classes can be identified as the major cause of protracted hidden hunger (either because those regimes keep their population in a condition of civil conflict, or due to those rulers’ individual greed and unconstrained authoritarianism). The case-studies of Burundi and North Korea respectively are enlightening to this end, and surprisingly illustrate that whereas, strictly legally, the R2P provides (modest) enhanced room for perpetrators accountability, its political impact restricts the options available for the international community to argue that the wilful production (or passive acceptance) of hidden hunger violates the internationally recognised “right to food”, and intervene accordingly whenever necessary.

The conflict between the two Koreas is deeply rooted in the results of the WWII, namely, 1945, when postcolonial Korea was divided into North (Soviet occupation zone) and South (U.S. occupation zone). As an aftermath of global bipolar standoff and Korean war (1950-1953) followed by Korean Armistice Agreement, a demilitarised zone was established along the 38th parallel, between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Republic of Korea. The latter signed Mutual Defence Treaty with the U.S. in 1953. South Korea's rapid economic development was enabled by its modernisation and industrialisation. North Korea, on the other hand, has been relying on the aid from the Soviet Union and its allies, having created what is referred to as totalitarian society, ideologically based on the ideas of Juche.
North Korea, actively developing its nuclear and missile programmes since 1980s, unilaterally withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2003. In 2006, the DPRK conducted its first nuclear weapons test. In 2012, it was declared a nuclear-armed nation in its constitution.
Currently, the state of affairs on the Korean Peninsula can be described as a regional conflict with potential implications for the whole globe. The existence of external actors trying to make the most of the situation represents one more aggravating factor.
The crisis has reached one of its peaks in 2016, with two nuclear tests conducted by North Korea, one of them being allegedly thermonuclear.

North Korean restaurants operating outside the DPRK is an interesting example to explore the meaning of national cuisine as an instrument of the state official politics of national cultural identification. While the DPRK is still quite closed in its contacts with the outside world such restaurants become practically the only place where the country can demonstrate on the regular base its culture, traditions and way of life to the broad international audience and thus transmit certain cultural and ideological messages using the language of national foodways. Under such conditions we can regard these restaurants not just the places to taste Korean food but in a sense an instrument of public diplomacy of the DPRK.
The paper presents the results of the field research conducted by the author in two North Korean restaurants (Koryo and Reungrado) operating in Moscow at present time. The main purpose of the field research was to investigate how these restaurants present Korean cuisine for foreign clientele, what extra-culinary meanings they transmit and in this regard, if it is possible to see their activity as an instrument of public diplomacy of the DPRK.             
The author argues that the sphere of national food culture is a terrain where we can trace the actual evidences of indirect (latent) inter-Korean cultural interaction in spite of the fact that on the surface both states declare the independence and authenticity of their vision of national culinary tradition. The author also asserts that in contrast to the previous decades, nowadays the DPRK has started to reconsider its attitude toward the cultural resource of the national foodways in order to use it more actively as an element of the official politics of national identification.

In 2006, Diane Sawyer became the first American journalist to broadcast live from inside North Korea. Her trip ended with an hour-long special programme scrutinising life in what she considers possibly ‘the most dangerous flashpoint on Earth’ (Sawyer 2006). The threat Sawyer actually presents, however, is not that of a nuclear-armed country but of a country whose regime, despite the will of the people, refuses to be a major market for US consumer goods. Applying Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of media operations, I conduct a discourse analysis of the textual and visual symbols Sawyer uses in illustrating and evaluating the country’s quality of life in ABC Primetime ‘North Korea: Inside the Shadows’. I conclude that Sawyer is unable to overcome her ethnocentric worldview, and therefore, North Korea is unable to emerge from the shadows.

I have just finished watching BBC Panorama’s “Undercover in North Korea”, perhaps the best example of what documentaries on North Korea should not be like. Let me be perfectly clear: these are thirty minutes of biased, factually incorrect, snobbish, uninformative, stereotypical, absolutely useless footage.

We have seen that even though a number of problems persist, North Korea has slowly modified its stance towards foreign aid and humanitarian cooperation. The DPRK seems to have accepted the notion that foreign intervention in the country is needed and has set up a few state-supervised NGOs to coordinate help and initiatives that address the needs of more vulnerable elements of society, particularly the disabled, the elderly and young children. This trend has been much more notable since Kim Jong Un took power, and some analysts in South Korea have speculated that it may serve as a shield against the numerous accusations of human rights violations that North Korea has faced. Other experts however, argue that the DPRK’s commitment to improve living standards across the country is more substantial than one may think. In this second part we delve deeper into the characteristics of North Korea’s system of social welfare and healthcare.

The given article is dedicated to scrutinising North Korean missile and nuclear programmes from the standpoint of securitisation theory advocated by B. Buzan and O. Wæver. The author utilises various ideas within the securitisation theory to explain reasons which invoked the development of Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear programme in Northeast Asia as a subregional security complex. The paper marks out the "securitising actor", "referent object" and "audience" in accordance with the described methodology. The work features examples of how securitisation influences countries’ official positions on the international arena and the perception of North Korean nuclear programme by the general public. Based on the conclusions drawn, the research provides a periodisation of North Korean nuclear and missile programme evolvement, which unravels its "pulsing", pendulous nature; its multilateral gist, as well as mutual influence of the acts which compose it.

In this article, I proposed an approach that assumes  the presence of Confucianism
1
(유교) and
Neo-Confucianism (성리학)  in the North Korean ideology especially  during  the Kim Jong Il’s
(김정일) era
2
. I would like to prove that North Korea can be at least partially seen as the modern
revival of  the  Choson Confucianism in terms of ideological phenomenon
3
. North Korean elites,
especially Kim Il Sung  (김일성) and  Kim Jong Il reinvented and manipulated various forms of
Confucianism because they wanted to legitimate their domination

This article is part of the new NK News feature dedicated to shining a light on innovative and lesser known authors  presenting four names which have published a number of valuable North Korea-focused studies in recent years. From the DPRK’s relations with eastern Europe to North Korean conception of human rights, this week’s scholars have all shed light on previously unexplored topics, helping to expand the focus of North Korean studies well beyond the usual paradigms of security and traditional international relations theory....

Considering the life sentence given to South Korean missionary Kim Jeong-wook, what motivates an increasing number of people to risk delivering a message of spirituality to North Korea? In recent times, the cases of Robert Park, Kenneth Bae and John Short have made headlines, bringing to the fore the complicated relation between religion and society in North Korea...

Cosa sappiamo della Corea del Nord? A volte il solo fatto di porre questo tipo di domanda (per la quale spesso si sfoderano risposte pronte: “è un posto terribile”, ed immediate contro-domande: “perché, cos’altro dovremmo sapere?”) scatena dibattiti accessi, su forum, blog e media internazionali. Il Paese, per come viene percepito a livello internazionale, è sinonimo di tutto ciò che non vorremmo vedere: violazione dei diritti umani, povertà, malnutrizione infantile, rischio di proliferazione nucleare, rischio di guerra imminente, per citare alcune delle parole più comunemente associate alla Repubblica Popolare Democratica di Corea (questo, il nome reale, infatti, accorciato internazionalmente in ‘DPRK’; il nome ‘Corea del Nord’ è più noto, ma meno corretto).La DPRK ha cominciato ad occupare uno spazio crescente nei media a meta’ degli anni ‘90, quando il collasso economico del paese mostrava la sua fase finale (e non iniziale, come molti credono – il Paese è semplicemente fermo da allora, ma la crisi veniva da lontano, dagli anni ‘70 e ‘80) con una serie di carestie che in pochi anni, secondo stime delle nazioni unite, ha spazzato via tra il 5 ed il 10 per cento della popolazione...

Ryang argues instead that “Kim Jong Il, the ryodongja (the Leader) can be replaced, but Kim Il Sung, the suryong (the Great Leader) is irreplaceable”. In other words, Kim Jong Il never took the place of his father, as that place was never his to take. Ryang also offers a theory for how the cult of Kim Il Sung changed after his death in 1994, explaining that between the 1970s and 80s North Korea found a way to deal with the unavoidable death of its charismatic leader, shifting the narrative on his persona from a concrete (and human) point of view, where Kim Il Sung was praised and loved for what he did, to a more abstract entity who represented love...

North Korea is considered as a secretive state. Paradoxically, the country is developing last trend technologies.The scope of this work is related to the development of cryptocurrencies in the  context  of  the  DPRK.  The  report  starts  with  a  presentation  of  the  IT sector in North Korea. The second chapter is focused on the development of  Internet  in  North  Korea.  The  two  last  chapters  are  dealing  with  North Korean’s IT attacks and the key organizations driving these issues.The objectives of this study are to address key issues and critical paths for dangers  associated  to  the  bitcoins  industry  form  the  perspective  of  the DPRK. This report can be considered as crucial, as The IT sector in North Korea is a sub-cell of the North Korean economy which was analyzed only by a few western analysts.