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...

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...

Notwithstanding an international ban on ballistic missile and nuclear weapons tests, Pyongyang has launched seven ballistic missiles since January 2022. In this Special Report, Cheol-Wun Jang, Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, lays out the status of North Korea’s nuclear and missile development and the implications ...

Global NK Zoom & Connect has met with leading South Korean researchers who study North Korea and listened to their voices to understand current research on North Korea. For this issue, we interviewed Young-Sun Ha (Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the East Asia Institute and Professor Emeritus at Seoul National University). Based on the public s...

In the absence of Kim Jong Un’s New Years Speech, Young-sun Ha, Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the East Asia Institute and Professor Emeritus at Seoul National University, states that we can deduce what North Korea has in mind for 2022 through his speech, “On the Orientation of the Work of the Party and State for 2022.” Despite the “t...

As part of the Global NK Zoom & Connect project, the East Asia Institute (President Yul Sohn) held “North Korea in 2022: Kim Jong Un’s New Year’s Message and the Korean Peninsula." This webinar analyzed and forecasted North Korea's strategy in 2022 based on New Years' messages from the plenary meeting of the central committee of North Korean ...

North Korea is among the few states in the world with hereditary succession as the official policy for power succession; leadership is solely centered on the Kim family. This, however, is not to say that the successor is to inherit all characteristics of their predecessor. In this commentary, Hyeong Jung Park, Emeritus Research Fellow at the Korea ...

Both North and South Korea were both simultaneously admitted into the UN in 1991 yet have followed drastically different tracks since then. In this commentary, Shin-wha Lee, Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Director of Peace and Democracy Institute at Korea University, and the President of the Korean Aca...