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This chapter examines two intrawar deterrence failures in Korea in late summer and fall 1950, both of which were related to alliance politics. It shows that lack of coordination and mistrust in the communist camp rendered the alliance incapable of sending clear and timely signals of resolve to the United States that might have deterred the Americans from crossing the 38th parallel in the crucial three weeks following Douglas MacArthur's successful Inchon landing. This same lack of coordination undercut communist efforts at coercive diplomacy. U.S. policies in the early weeks of the Korean War had a powerful impact on strategic thinking in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China about the long-term implications of the military defeat of the North Korean communist regime and the unification of the Korean peninsula under a government friendly to the United States.

North Korea’s nuclear weaponization program and its ballistic missile programs have developed compelling capabilities that can potentially threaten all the Middle East, Africa, and Europe when proliferated (and many of these systems have already been proliferated). North Korea’s advances in maritime capabilities are important as well, including a new submarine with long-range capabilities and a developing capability to fire a ballistic missile. The North’s ground forces have not been idle, as high training levels and important initiatives in training have added to potential capabilities, including artillery and rocket systems that could create havoc in ongoing conventional conflicts in both the Middle East and Africa.

This chapter first provides a brief historical background of North Korea and discusses the political and economic indicators that have allowed massive human rights violations to take place. Next, it explains the severe food crisis and the kwan-li-so political prison system. Following an introduction to the concept of crimes against humanity and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, it analyzes the facts presented against the elements that constitute crimes against humanity and concludes that North Korea is committing crimes against humanity by starving millions of its people and maintaining a political gulag system. It explores an overview of the actions recently taken by the international community—including the United Nations, regional bodies, states and non-governmental actors—which acknowledge the severity and state responsibility for these atrocities. This evidence supports the conclusion that North Korea is indeed committing crimes against humanity and that the international community is taking note. The chapter ends with several recommendations that should be taken to alleviate the suffering of the North Korean people.

This chapter discusses the economic system in North Korea and investigates its past reform efforts. It also assesses North Korea's current reform measures and alternative policy packages. It concludes by identifying the factors responsible for both the crisis and outlines long-term solutions for the survival of the North Korean economic system. It highlights the open-door policy and explains the reasons why North Korea has opted for this strategy and is expected to follow it.

North Korea has always been able to get around sanctions using some very clever tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) for getting its arms distributed. This has been an ongoing situation no matter what sanctions are imposed or the methods used to impose them. The North Koreans are constantly changing their TTP in order to adjust to the complex international law enforcement environment, and two key examples (combining illicit arms with legitimate cargo in containers placed on ships and then reflagging the ships) point to the fact that they are adjusting their TTP in order to adapt to sanctions, avoid detection by maritime forces of other nations, and stay below the radar of law enforcement around the world, which is often very wary of shipments tagged as North Korean. There are several other methods that North Korea uses to get around sanctions and conceal its illicit financial networks as well (all described in chapter 3). Thus far, it appears that these methods have been largely successful, and I examine in detail how the DPRK uses its government powers to get around sanctions and proliferate its arms for profit.

This chapter explores the link between security assurances and North Korean nuclear decision-making by concentrating on four key areas. The first analysis presented here is an evaluation of key geopolitical shocks that had a major effect on the North Korean regime. The second is an analysis of the main sources of security assurances for North Korea over its history. Thirdly, hypotheses on security assurances based on how North Korea reacted to geopolitical shocks are explored. The chapter finally investigates the conditions under which security assurances may be most efficient in dealing with North Korea in the future. The four key waves that have hit North Korea include the Sino-Soviet split and rivalry, Nordpolitik of South Korea, the collapse of the Agreed Framework, and the advent of the Bush Doctrine. North Korea's nuclear policy responded to these waves to assure short-term survival. Creativity in adapting a security assurance to North Korea is a major determinant of the reclusive country's receptivity and reciprocity.

The Asian Tigers South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are the subject of this chapter, which describes their introduction to computing and how that technology became a central export and economic development strategy for these nations. In the process the economies boomed, grew faster than other national economies, and became some of the most intensive users of IT in the world. How those developments occurred are explained and experiences compared from one state to the other since each one had a unique national path to adoption. North Korea’s minimal experience with computers is also analyzed and placed within the context of Asian computing and economic development.

This chapter summarizes the path of economic development and capital formation during the half-century after the Korean War, and evaluates the means used for South Korea's success. The chapter also assesses the prospects for South Korea's future economic development and capital formation under a democratically elected government, still in its infancy. It speculates on South Korea's chances of attaining the levels reached by neighboring countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, China, and even Japan, and the challenges it faces to achieve this. Five major challenges faced by South Korea are discussed: improving the government's management ability, progress in technology, better labor-management relations, equitable income distribution, resolution of the so-called jaebeol problems, and the reunification of North Korea and South Korea.

This chapter considers a variety of indicators on the nature of North Korea’s external economic relations, including its direction and composition of trade. These data suggest why coordination problems around sanctions and engagement have proven so difficult, as China has come to account for an increasing share of North Korea’s trade. The chapter provides a balance-of-payments accounting of the country and demonstrates how the regime has been able to adjust to sanctions through illicit activities and securing external forces of foreign exchange, including capital inflows, despite its ambivalent posture toward foreign investors.

Violence was no longer unfamiliar between North and South Korea as various infantry engagements, guerilla encounters, and artillery bombardment frequently occurred. However, South Korean soldiers as well as their American advisors realized that the attack on June 25, 1950, was different. Frontline Republic of Korea (ROK) forces spread out as a result of several surprise attacks, and soon even the reserve forces were also under attack. Under Kim Il Sung, North Korea's potential for war was already recognized and it was already able to establish a military force comprised of 135,000 men that was divided into ten infantry divisions and was well trained by the Soviet Union, and artillery, a tank brigade, and an air force. North Korea asserted that the South Koreans may be occupied before any intervention from the United States would occur.

The deployment of large numbers of British troops to both Korea in 1950 and to Kuwait in 1990 followed similar domestic and international legal paths, though the political contexts were quite different, one occurring at the outset of the Cold War and the other at its end. Britain was instrumental in shaping the idea of coalitions acting under the authority of the UN as an alternative to the more centralized application of military force envisaged under the UN Charter. This chapter traces the Parliamentary and international political debates that led to the development of this as a form of lawful military action. In particular, it concentrates on why it was necessary to obtain UN authority for these actions when they could readily be justified as exercise of the right of collective defence.

This chapter explores the link between weak states and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation, examining the threat of WMD proliferation, outlining various avenues by which both state and nonstate actors might attempt to acquire WMD, and exploring ways that state weakness could facilitate each proliferation pathway. It focuses primarily on nuclear weapons, but also discusses chemical and biological weapons. It argues that weak states do have certain vulnerabilities that proliferators might attempt to exploit, including high levels of corruption, poor security, and weak law enforcement capabilities. Two fragile states in particular—North Korea and Pakistan—clearly pose a serious proliferation threat. Globally, however, state fragility does not uniformly correlate with proliferation potential. In fact the most problematic group of countries may be relatively strong “states to watch” that have or seek nuclear weapons capabilities. States in this category—unlike the weakest states—have the resources and capacity to develop WMD, which in some cases could pose a direct threat to the United States. They also are characterized by certain governance gaps that may make them deliberate or inadvertent sources of WMD materials for nonstate actors.

This chapter discusses the evolution of political activism during the administrations of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun (1997–2000). During this period, the trends of fragmentation and remobilization identified in Chapter 4 converged, resulting in a new propensity toward political reorientation. Concomitant to this is the tendency toward transnationalization. In addition to these two political trends, a third and entirely new development also started to emerge: an attempt to depoliticize discourse over North Korean human rights. A group of actors sought to build bridges between ideologically opposed political adversaries, concerned that the legacy of decades of political activism had stultified discourse over inter-Korean relations. Appealing to universal, depoliticized values of human rights and democracy, in an attempt to overcome deeply entrenched divides in South Korean society, these actors strove to untangle the issue of North Korean human rights from the ideological web of norms, beliefs, and arguments in which it had become caught.

Evidence of Pyongyang’s arms sales to Iran begins with the evidence that North Korea has been proliferating conventional and unconventional weapons to Iran since the early 1980s. Since that time, North Korea has shipped nearly every kind of ballistic missile it builds, not to mention related military advisers, engineers, technicians, and trainers, to Iran. It has proliferated nuclear technology, missile technology, conventional weapons, and numerous spare parts to Iran. But it has also shipped conventional weapons and spare parts to Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. This has been going on for years. I also reflect—in detail—on what North Korea has proliferated to Iran in the Kim Jong-un era, beginning in December 2013.

There are so many countries in Africa that North Korea provides goods and services to that space does not permit the listing of all its activities there. In this chapter, the focus will be on the military proliferation activities that have occurred since the beginning of the Kim Jong-un era (with a focus on how many of these activities began long before Kim Jong-un became the North Korean leader). African countries to which North Korea continues to sell military weapons, refurbishment, and training include (but are not limited to) Ethiopia, Eritrea, Congo (Brazzaville), Congo (DRC), Zimbabwe, Uganda, and even Egypt.

Chapter 2 examines the prolonged and vehement competition between North and South Korea over the allegiance of colonial-era Korean migrants who remained in Japan in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. The divergent transborder nation-building strategies that the two postcolonial states employed to make their own docile citizens out of this opaque and recalcitrant population are identified. North Korea launched a successful repatriation campaign and heavily invested in Korean enclaves, presenting itself as a safe haven in which marginalized Koreans could find an escape. South Korea instead fashioned itself as a broker that could facilitate their integration into the Japanese mainstream, and a gatekeeper that could control their engagement with families and home communities in South Korea. The control of the bureaucratic persona of Koreans in Japan, buttressed by the consensual practices of other states, was critical for South Korea’s eventual ascendancy in this competition.

The successful incorporation of Koreans who remained in Manchuria into communist China led to their disownment by South Korea, yet this incorporation was not necessarily seen as incompatible with their special tie to North Korea. Chapter 3 examines how China, North Korea, and the Korean Chinese embraced or challenged varying interpretations of this transborder tie, and how they reconfigured the boundary and the meaning of the Korean nation. Beyond the realm of ethnic minority policies, it examines the changing management of several cross-border migration flows (both authorized and unauthorized) as a lens with which to explore the unfolding of this relationship. It shows how various forms of cross-border transactions profoundly shaped the war-making, state-making, and nation-making (or unmaking) processes in both countries, as well as the life trajectories of Korean Chinese who straddled their two fatherlands to navigate the turbulent socialist transition in both countries.

This article describes the distinction between “free” and “forced” migration, as observed from the pool of world history. Despite the perceived distinction, there is another view that presumes some degree of force at some level or the other, in all kinds of migrations. To historians, this distinction is often superimposed on the division between free labor and slavery. In contemporary border politics, the issue is not normally the distinction between the movement of free labor and the slave trade, but rather between those who are forced by persecution to flee across frontiers, and those who migrate for economic or other reasons. The incessant repatriation of some 90,000 Koreans from Japan to North Korea between 1959 and 1984 raises two pertinent questions—the distinction between forced and free movement across national boundaries, and the notion of returning home.