North Korea and Reunification

Efforts to denuclearize North Korea continue, but it is highly doubtful whether this goal will be reached. An often-expressed fear of a nuclear-armed North Korea is that it might use this capability to coerce reunification with the South on its terms. Though its leaders often speak of the desire for reunification, North Korea will not and could not pursue a successful nuclear coercion strategy because it carries an inordinate amount of risk, even for Pyongyang, which raises serious doubts about the credibility of its nuclear threats, the possibility of success, and the likelihood of pursuing such a strategy in the first place. And even if North Korea were to succeed, its efforts to integrate the South Korean economy would be a disaster, leading to the end of the North Korean regime.

The juche H-bomb? North Korea, nuclear weapons and regime-state survival

Existing scholarship on North Korea's nuclear programme remains overwhelmingly centred around questions of containment or engagement with the North Korean regime-state, amid international calls for denuclearization. Yet, scholarship has rarely interrogated the precise value of nuclear weapons to the regime-state. This article develops a new theoretical framework of nuclear ideology to explore the puzzle of the survival of North Korea. This framework aims to show how the North Korean nuclear programme is deeply entrenched within the state ideology of juche, as one device for continued regime-state survival. Through interviews with elite North Korean defectors and textual analysis of North Korean and international sources, I show that North Korea's nuclear ideology has been constructed according to different frames of meaning, targeting referent actors of international ‘enemy’ powers and domestic audiences. This article concludes that nuclear ideology functions primarily as a tool to arouse domestic legitimacy for the North Korean regime-state, by targeting elite actors within the highly stratified domestic population. From an international perspective, perception of North Korea's survival remains tied largely to the regime-state's physical possession of nuclear weapons. This article has extremely timely theoretical and policy implications given the current ‘dialogue’ between US and North Korean leaders. First, it opens up fruitful avenues of inquiry surrounding questions of the legitimacy of rogue states within international relations. Secondly, this article calls for a more robust understanding of the domestic-level politics of North Korea, in order to understand the regime-state's foreign policy decisions vis-à-vis its nuclear programme.

Bringing North Korea to the negotiating table: unstable foundations of Kim Jong-un’s North Korean regime

This article investigates the linkage between Kim Jong-un’s power consolidation and Pyongyang’s abrupt return to the denuclearization negotiation table in 2018. It argues that behind Pyongyang’s turnabout lie the three unstable pillars of the Kim family’s rule: a faithful winning coalition, the juche ideology, and Chinese patronage. Upon taking office in 2011, Kim had to debilitate his father’s winning coalition to consolidate his power. With the winning coalition enervated, Kim could not expect its willingness to suppress the masses were they to develop into an ejectorate, and therefore introduced market reforms to secure the people’s support. The reforms, in return, inevitably eroded the ideological appeal of the Kim family, thereby rendering his hold on power more vulnerable to economic pressure. Under such circumstances, Chinese patronage increasingly faltered. It is due to the instability of these three pillars that Kim Jong-un returned to the negotiating table.