This paper is interested in the spread of an autocratic ideology and the emergence of a societal belief. It is often assumed that the greater the capacities of an autocratic regime to inculcate an ideological belief into the minds and hearts of subordinate citizens, the more an autocratic ideology is shared in a given society. The extent of an ideological belief is explained by a direct and immediate function of its indoctrination capacities. The paper does not question this top–down, macro–micro approach, but argues that the spread of an ideology also depends on stabilizing micro–micro interactions and micro–macro linkages. In this light, the paper makes use of James Coleman’s famous explanatory model and theorizes the different partial mechanisms. It pays particular emphasis on the micro–macro mechanism. Borrowing insights from epidemiology, it argues that three classes of parameters should be taken into closer consideration: timing, contact structure, and the contagiousness of an ideology. In empirical terms, the paper illustrates its theoretical reasoning with the dissemination of the North Korean Juche ideology from the 1950s to the early 1970s, which represents an extreme case of a rapidly ideologizing autocracy. The paper relies on secondary sources as well as archival material retrieved from the former embassy of the German Democratic Republic in Pyongyang.

23rd November 2011 was the first anniversary of the artillery exchange between the two Koreas around the island of Yeonpyeong off the west coast of Korea. The artillery battle in 2010 was the first such since the Korean War armistice and brought the peninsula to a state of heightened tension. With the Lee Myungbak administration mulling an invasion of the North in the event of a collapse of the DPRK, a local conflict could easily explode into war. The last year has seen a lopsided arms race with South Korea dramatically increasing its military capabilities on a scale the North cannot match. The South Korean military are under American ‘wartime’ control, and since for technical reasons as well they cannot engage in war without US support, the Americans would be automatically involved in any war. A US-ROK invasion of the DPRK would almost certainly force China to intervene, as it did in 1950. A second Sino-US war would have calamitous, consequences.

South Korea and Japan have maintained tense bilateral relations over their unresolved historical and territorial disputes for decades. The US has repeatedly called for improved relations between South Korea and Japan and underlined the importance of US–South Korea–Japan trilateral relations to address North Korean threats and regional security challenges. Would we, then, expect the US to play a role in helping to mediate South Korea–Japan problems? If so, under what conditions and to what extent would the US get involved in South Korea–Japan disputes? If not, what makes the US hesitate to do so? We argue that US involvement in South Korea–Japan bilateral relations depends on the degree to which the US perceives the tensions as costly and risky for US national security interests. With an issues-based analysis, a granular examination of South Korea–Japan trade disputes and the spat over the GSOMIA in 2019, and qualitative interviews with former US government and military officials, we find that the US is more likely to involve itself in South Korea–Japan relations and more likely to use its leverage as a major power with its allies when it perceives significant risks to its capabilities to address security challenges, primarily those posed by North Korea.

In 2020 Chinese “dark fleets” replaced North Korean “ghost ships” in international discourse as symbolic of a certain form of global maritime threat and disturbance. This article takes a longer view of trouble on the high seas, looking back to the globalization of the oceanic commons at the behest of post 1945 geopolitics and new forms and methodologies of fisheries science. With Carmel Finley's articulation of Pacific Empires of Fishing in mind the article explores fishing histories of East Asia and the Pacific, both during and after the era of colonization The article considers the marginalization of already peripheral traditional Korean fishing communities by Japanese colonization, ecological collapse generated by the technological and statistical development underpinning scientific fishing, and the ghosts made of fish themselves as the powers and logics of accumulation and extraction transform the watery geographies of the Pacific.

During the recent years the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has rapidly advanced to the rank of a nuclear power, drawing simultaneously lots of attention on itself both by other states and the media. We argue that this means much more than only increase in its weaponry. Combined with its decades old steadfast strive for independence and opposition to the United States, this means a qualitative change in its position in the international system. The theoretical tool used for this analysis is not statistical size, but rather the style of behaviour. Small and great powers tend to have different styles of behaviour. Small powers usually orient towards acting as “good international citizens” performing important integrative and stabilizing tasks for the system, while great powers tend to play classical realist power games, ranging from readiness for military conflict to willingness for occasionally breaking international law. Despite its small size, North Korea systematically behaves like a great power, and its actions can meaningfully be interpreted from that angle.

Kim Jong Un's meeting with Moon Jae-In and the coming summit with Donald Trump do not constitute a volte-face by the North Korean leader. He has consistently sought meetings to find a solution to the nuclear problem, but equally consistently responded with nuclear or missile tests when his diplomatic initiatives are rejected. The recent virtuous cycle began when Moon seized the opportunity of the Winter Olympics in South Korea to create an opening for inter-Korean meetings and Kim reciprocated. Kim has also been consistent in his quest for engagement with the world economy as a strategy of economic development, and steadily taken steps away from his father's Military First policy toward his Economy First policy. His consistency creates an opening, which Moon effectively used to engage the North to propose a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons and end the state of war. The United States will have a historic choice to make in June when Trump meets Kim in Singapore.

The U.S. deployed a missile defense system, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in South Korea in April 2017, citing North Korea's nuclear and missile “threats” as justification. Its deployment, however, needs to be seen in the wider strategic context. Not only does the measure raise the arms race with North Korea, it also facilitates Japan's “proactive contribution to peace” and exacerbates the security dilemma between the U.S. and its allies on one side and China and Russia on the other.

On December 14, 1959, amidst much fanfare and tears, the first repatriation boat (provided by the Soviet Union) carried thousands of Koreans from Niigata, Japan, to Cheongjin, North Korea. Hailed as a humanitarian project under the intermediation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the repatriation of Koreans from Japan to North Korea continued until 1984, resulting in a total of more than 93,000 repatriates who relocated from Japan to North Korea amidst the Cold War division of the world with the majority never to return to Japan again. This article addresses multiple aspects of this project, looking into the media portrayal of North Korea at the time of the opening of the repatriation and the more recent academic discussion following the de-classification of the International Committee of the Red Cross papers. Based on these, the article frames the repatriation in a new light with the suggestion of possibly thinking about it as a form of human trafficking without reducing it into a one-dimensional political event or conspiracy by one government or another. Instead, the article emphasizes that the structure of power that sustained the repatriation was complex and so were the lives that repatriates experienced.

Sinjŏm or spirit fortune-telling is now an intimate part of everyday life among many North Koreans. Extremely popular at the grassroots level, the rise of this traditional religious culture since the late 1990s, if properly understood, can provide an interesting looking glass into North Korea's society and politics in transition. This report is one small step to that end.

Yun Isang (1917-95) was one of Korea's most prominent composers in the twentieth century. From 1957, the year he moved to West Germany, to his death in 1995, he had an internationally illustrious career, garnering critical acclaim in Europe, Japan, the United States, and North Korea. In South Korea, however, he became a controversial figure after he was embroiled in a national security scandal in 1967. As part of this incident, dubbed the East Berlin Affair at the time, Yun Isang was abducted in West Germany by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and charged with espionage for North Korea. This experience of victimization, which also included torture, imprisonment, and an initial death sentence, turned him into a vocal critic of Park Chung Hee and an overseas unification activist in contact with North Korea. This article remembers the moral and political framings of Yun Isang in South Korea against a recurring politics of forgetting that masks the magnitude of violence that was wielded in the name of national security. It traces coverage of Yun in several mainstream newspapers from the first mention of his name in 1952 to 1995. It argues that representations of Yun were mediated by a tension between national artistic progress and national security, one of the central tensions that defined South Korea's Cold-War cultural politics.