On Red Lines and Reunification: Recent Remarks by the CIA Director on North...
[UPDATED on 5 February 2018:] Donald Trump surely makes the North Korean state nervous. But when CIA Director Mike Pompeo actually emerges from his operations bunker in Virginia, he tends to speaks...
View ArticleMedia Blackout in Beijing: Reading the Empty Spaces during the Kim Jong-un Visit
Among the dozens of subplots feeding into and out of the curious-but-necessary welcome by Xi Jinping of Kim Jong-un this week is the question of information access and what it means or doesn’t mean...
View ArticleNotes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives
A lot of people seem to be interested in North Korean cultural diplomacy these days, so the (often peer-reviewed/probably badly flawed/usually enormously fun) work which I have been doing on this issue...
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On the Perils of Journalistic Moonlighting for Academics
The inter-Korean summit which occurred on 27 April coincided with a rare trench of open time and full energy for me, so I was able to write three pieces in response. None of these is full of blistering...
View ArticleNorth Koreans Watching Fox
This post operates on sanity-preserving ground rules: No referring to: think-pieces, think-tank analyses, journalistic hot takes, outraged or absurd Tweets (other than those thumbed out by POTUS),...
View ArticleOn Think Tanks, or, What Trump Didn’t Get in Helsinki
The Trump administration has brought with it a dark winter of discontent to US think tanks. Institutions stocked with the analytical rosters of former Clinton and Obama appointees with North...
View ArticleOn the Opening of the Ji’an-Manp’o Trade Port
As a small Chinese city on the Yalu River, Ji’an (集安) is an often-overlooked juncture for Chinese-North Korean movement of supplies and people. It was the main conduit for the Chinese troops into the...
View ArticleMore to Life than Kim Jong-un: Reflections on Robert Collins’ Report on the...
Today the NK News website published a 1600-word essay I wrote in response to Robert Collins’ extensive new report on the Organization and Guidance Department of the Korean Workers’ Party. A short...
View Article“The Enemies Made this Possible”: Sino-North Korean Relations after 1948
Adrian Buzo will be publishing a large Routledge Handbook on North Korea (which I believe is slated to be published in 2021) and asked me to contribute a chapter. I asked my PhD student Yujin Lim to...
View ArticleKim Jong Un and the Bomb – A Review
As the North Korean state made remarkable leaps to its nuclear and missile capabilities under the leadership of Kim Jong-un, Ankit Panda, a journalist and editor at The Diplomat, based in New York,...
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