This book provides broad, deep insight into how North Korea calculates, balances, and addresses key policy challenges. The authors—Korean, European, and American—have extensive experience in North Korea and with North Koreans, crucial to addressing the myths and misconceptions about how the North functions and perceives the world.

This ambitious book is constructed to provide the reader with unusually broad and deep insight into North Korea, illustrating how the Kim Jong-un regime calculates, balances, and addresses the various key policy challenges it faces. This will be accomplished through the extensive experience of the authors—Korean, European, and American—in North Korea and with North Koreans. There is no substitute for such direct experience in order to address the numerous myths and misconceptions that have grown up and persisted over the years about how the North functions, and how it perceives the world. Moreover, the usual focus on a single issue—for example, just nuclear or just economic matters—fails to provide a sense of how important the inter-relationship of these separate parts is in understanding the whole. The experience brought to bear in the book and the breadth of coverage provides badly needed, critical insights about North Korea at time when policy in Seoul and Washington toward the North is at a crucial hinge point.

Introduction by Robert Carlin and Chung-in Moon

Chapter 1: To What Extent and How Do We Know About North Korea? Linking Contextual Intelligence to Sound Policy by Robert Carlin

Chapter 2: Can the Kim Jong-un Regime Survive? by Jong Seok Lee

Chapter 3: The North Korean Economy in Crisis: Prospects for Reform and Policy Options by Rüdiger Frank

Chapter 4: Kim Jong-un's Economic Reform and Opening: Opportunities, Constraints, and Prospects by Dongho Jo

Chapter 5: North Korean Society at a Crossroad: Change and Continuity in the Kim Jong-un era by Sung Kyung Kim

Chapter 6: North Korea’s Foreign Policy: A Revisionist State, An Alliance with China, or A Third Way? by Jung-Chul Lee

Chapter 7: The Status and Role of the North Korean Military During the Kim Jong-un Period by Gee-Dong Lee

Chapter 8: Nuclear North Korea: A Path Forward in View of Facts, Myths and Uncertainties by Siegfried S. Hecker

Chapter 9: International Sanctions on North Korea: Are They Working? by Thomas J. Biersteker and Zuzana Hudáková

Chapter 10: North Korea’s Food Security Strategy: Analytically Flawed, Inherently Fragile by Hazel Smith

Chapter 11: North Korea’s Health System in the Kim Jong-un Era by Kee B. Park and Edward I. Ham

Chapter 12: Understanding North Korea: Negotiation by Robert Carlin and Chung-in Moon

Panelists: William Perry, Robert Gallucci, Daniel Russel, Joseph DeTrani, Dong-won Lim, Jaejoung Lee, Haesung Chun

Chapter 13: Understanding North Korea: Engagement by Ruediger Frank

Panelists: James Glyn Ford, Eun-jeung Lee, Alexandre Mansourov, Kee B. Park, Geoffrey See, Nam Sun Song, Ki-jung Kim, Dongho Jo