Kim Jong-un… Kim Jong Un and the Bomb – A Review 20 Dec 2021 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…
Beijing… “The Enemies Made this Possible”: Sino-North Korean Relations after 1948 6 Jun 202023 Dec 2020 “’The Enemies Made This Possible’: Sino-North Korean relations since 1948” with Yujin Lim, in Adrian Buzo, ed., Routledge Handbook of Contemporary North Korea (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 131-140. Abstract: This chapter is…
Chinese communist party… More to Life than Kim Jong-un: Reflections on Robert Collins’ Report on the Organization and Guidance Department 26 Sep 2019 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…
Borderlands… On the Opening of the Ji’an-Manp’o Trade Port 20 Apr 201920 Apr 2019 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…
American Foreign Policy… On Think Tanks, or, What Trump Didn’t Get in Helsinki 17 Jul 201818 Jul 2018 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 Korea-related expertise…
American Foreign Policy… North Koreans Watching Fox 24 May 2018 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), Chuck Schumer's courageous…
Kim Jong-un… On the Perils of Journalistic Moonlighting for Academics 19 May 201818 Dec 2020 The inter-Korean summit which occurred on 27 April 2018 coincided with a rare stretch of open time and full energy for me, so I was able to write three pieces…
Cultural Politics… Notes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives 30 Mar 20186 Apr 2018 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…
Beijing… Media Blackout in Beijing: Reading the Empty Spaces during the Kim Jong-un Visit 30 Mar 2018 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…
American Foreign Policy… On Red Lines and Reunification: Recent Remarks by the CIA Director on North Korea (updated) 31 Jan 20185 Feb 2018 [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…