Just as a large bat or other suitably mass-laden starving carnivore might reserve a special vim for gnawing on a rabbit head, I take particular pleasure in downloading and digesting think-tank reports and their kindred documents about North Korea.
Here are a few you may also enjoy or, barring that, find useful:
Bates Gill, “China’s North Korea Policy: Assessing Interests and Influence,” US Institute of Peace, Special Report #283, May 2011.
Joel Wit, et. al., “Preparing for Sudden Change in North Korea,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2009.
David M. Mrosek, “China and North Korea: A Peculiar Relationship,” M.A. thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Ca., March 2011.
William Boik: “Understanding the North Korea Problem: Why it has Become ‘The Land of Lousy Options‘,” (long upload), Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, Pa., July 2011.
NKHR Briefing Report No.5, “Homecoming Kinsmen or Indigenous Foreigners? The case of North Korean Re-settlers in South Korea,“(Seoul: Life & Human Rights Books, February 2011).
NKHR Briefing Report No.6, “The Battered Wheel of the Revolution; Briefing Report on the Situation of Violence against North Korean Women,” (Seoul: Life & Human Rights Books, February 2011).
Chung Chong Wook, “The Korean Peninsula in China’s Grand Strategy : China’s Role in Dealing with North Korea’s Nuclear Quandary,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2010.
Zhu Zhiqun, “The Sinking of the Cheonan and China-North Korea Relations,” EAI Background Brief #546, 28 July 2010.
Finally, do not miss Scott Snyder — who is by all accounts the dean of Sino-North Korea relations watchers — hold forth in this video at the Korea Society about what North Korea really wants from China these days. Snyder is a master of understatement and there is a great deal in his talk, a kind of summation of data, that one rarely seems employed in the onrush of daily news reports from the border region.
Or, if you are a thrill seeker, you could join the hundred-plus souls who in the last two years have somehow found their way to this hour-long talk by B.R. Myers at the World Affairs Council of California. I’m about to take the plunge; see you on the other side!
Adam Cathcart 