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North Korea, Opposition Politics, and British Nuclear Deterrence
I wrote the following piece for The Guardian, the stalwart newspaper for whose North Korea Network I have done a handful of essays and events over the past couple of years. After much back and forth...
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Recent Histories of (Local) Violence in the Korean War
Today I received a stunning new text: Su-kyoung Hwang’s monograph Korea’s Grievous War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). A link to the publisher’s description of the book is here....
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Youth Work and Class Education under Kim Jong-un
The following is my original intro to a piece I just published in Seoul after some substantial carving down. In other words, the intro was cut, but I think it still stands up, so now you can read that...
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North Korean Human Rights: Rex Tillerson as Blank Slate
Will the Trump administration maintain and extend US pressure on North Korea on the human rights front? Will the Executive Branch aim to extend and intensify US criticism of and dialogue with Chinese...
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North Korea and Border Crossings in Northeast Asia
On 17 February, I will be lecturing at the Irish Institute for Korean Studies at University College Cork, a dynamic university in the revolutionary heartland of the Republic of Ireland. The title of...
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Comment on the North Korean Missile Launch
I was on BBC television this evening (via the Leeds studio) discussing the North Korean missile launch with Celia Hatton, who, fortunately for me and the BBC, is a veteran ‘China hand’ with years of...
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Recent Op-eds and Media Work
The last three weeks have been particularly intense for analysts of North Korea, China, and Sino-North Korean relations. Amid the struggle to get two of my normal scholarly research articles submitted,...
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Reflections on the History of Chinese-North Korean Relations, and US-DPRK...
Sometimes we need to modify the questions we ask. The question “Is the Chinese Communist Party going to cut off North Korea?” results in a fairly predictable string of analyses — usually adding up to...
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North Korean Economic Change as Relinquishing of Party Control
The veteran reporter Choe Sang-hun has produced one of the most interesting analyses to follow in the confused aftermath of the non-event that was the North Korean set piece for foreign journalists in...
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Napalm and Invasion: North Korean War Memory and British Sources
In a recent post on his black-and-white personal blog, the North Korea scholar B.R. Myers criticizes a recent ream of journalistic think pieces about the function of Korean War memory in the DPRK. The...
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Wise Words and Wishful Thinking on China’s Relationship with North Korea
The most recent wave of analysis emerging out of North Korea’s test of an apparent Intercontinental Ballistic Missile has once again brought minds back to focusing on China’s ability to pressure North...
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Poking the Wasp Nest: Shen Zhihua’s Controversial Speech on North Korea
Why should we care about scholars in China, or the complaints they have toward North Korea? Usually, readers take interest in Chinese scholarly debates because something specific and enticing has been...
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Writings and Media Work: July 2017
For whatever reason, July has been a particularly active month in the various cockpits where I do my work — coffee shops, trains rocketing between Leeds and London, my university office, and British...
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Evaded States: Security and Control in the Sino-North Korean Border Region
Adam Cathcart, “Evaded States: Security and Control in the Sino-North Korean Border Region,” in Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands, Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer, Alessandro Rippa, eds.,...
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Hillary Clinton and the Taxing Friendship: China and North Korea
This essay, previously unpublished, was written in Seattle on 27 May 2010. Hillary Clinton arrived in Beijing last weekend to send an urgent message to China: put pressure on North Korea. Tensions on...
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Joshua’s Map: Beijing’s Coverage of North Korean Defector Issues and Human...
In January/February 2015, the Huanqiu Shibao (the foreign affairs tabloid under Beijing People’s Daily, massive readership etc.) used one of Joshua Stanton’s maps to indicate the locations of North...
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Right of Reply: Kim Jong-un’s Rejoinder to American Threats at the UN General...
I imagine that most people did not expect Kim Jong-un to make a direct statement to President Trump — I certainly didn’t. But the North Korean leader has done so, adding yet another layer of surprise...
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Notes on the Sino-North Korean War of Words
Just because the US President has thrown up a number of smokescreens and signs of real mania of late does not mean writers must “resist” by reflexively taking an analytical approach toward US-North...
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Weaponizing the Past, or, How to Get a Book Contract in Trump’s America
It seems a bit too easy these days to begin any essay with a nod to how disturbed one is by the latest muddy geyser of Presidential discourse. As most sentient beings on the planet today could tell...
View ArticleCoupling and De-coupling the North Korean Missile Program from the Kim...
An essay earlier this year by Fodor Tertitsky, and a recent NewsHour interview with missile specialist Jeffrey Lewis, got me thinking about the nature of the relationship between reform and...
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