The North Korean nuclear issue has been one of the most significant challenges to international peace and security in the 21st century. The failure to peacefully resolve the issue could trigger regional instability or even nuclear warfare in the worst scenario. Since its first successful nuclear test in 2006, North Korea has repeatedly defied the international community regarding its nuclear program despite the effort and resources that the international community has focused on the issue. Many consider Pyongyang decision-makers irrational or simply crazy. Nonetheless, since early 2018, North Korea has drastically changed its foreign policy and actively pursued rapprochement.

How to understand DPRK foreign policy, its past, and future? How will the nuclear issue develop under a possibly new paradigm of North Korean foreign policy? This book seeks to provide readers with a comprehensive analysis of North Korean foreign relations. As the existing analysis and literature on North Korean foreign relations focus primarily on China, the United States, South Korea, and Japan, but such analysis ignores the DPRK's relations with many other states and organizations that not only interact with North Korea nevertheless also play important roles in its strategy of surviving in the international systems.

About the Author

Wieqi Zhang is associate professor at Suffolk University, Boston.

Jun Taek Kwon is associate professor at Utica University, New York.

Reviews

"For anyone who wishes to understand how North Korea has defied expectations simply by surviving in a rapidly changing geopolitical environment, this valuable volume serves an accessible but thorough guide. Through these contributions, the apparently irrational and mercurial foreign policies of the Kim regime become intelligible responses of a small power that perceives itself as threatened by enemies and unreliable allies alike."

-- Dwight Wilson, University of North Georgia

"The conceptual framework that any political system needs a set of three strategic goals to sustain survival namely security, identity, and prosperity. This framework is utilized for analyses of North Korean relationship with several countries. In this sense, Strategies of Survival: North Korea Foreign Policy under Kim Jong un, is uniquely comparative and analytical rarely found in the literature of comparative politics, let alone North Korean studies. In this way, the survival oriented North Korea's foreign policy is interpreted as being rational and explicable."

-- Han S. Park, University of Georgia

"Strategies of Survival is a unique and altogether necessary survey of the sources of North Korean foreign policy. The volume includes careful, evidence-based explorations of particular aspects of diplomatic and security policy of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, connecting these policies with long-term historical developments and with the domestic politics of the regime. North Korea's leadership may be paranoid, but its understanding of the world is rooted in a deep and not unreasonable sense of vulnerability. Strategies of Survival exposes that sense of vulnerability and makes it intelligible for policy and academic audiences."

-- Robert Farley, University of Kentucky

"Practitioners of foreign policy like to read books that provide fresh insights, a clear structure, and a good story. The volume "Strategies of Survival: North Korea Foreign Policy under Kim Jong un" by Zhang and Kwon checks all these boxes. It should be standard reading for all diplomats serving in Pyongyang or at the East Asia desk of foreign ministries.

Right from the masterful introduction, it puts paid to the inexorable saga of the North Korean leadership being an irrational lot of shamans of stone-age communism. It connects the (purported) ideological basis for the ruling "socialist", yet somewhat Confucian, dynasty to specific events and contexts. The authors outline a red thread that leads the reader through individual chapters and shines a bright light on the complexity of North Korean foreign policy that must use the tools and customs of ordinary statecraft under the inner constraints imposed by a quasi-monarchical system."

-- Fredrich Lohr, Northeastern University



Book Information
ISBN 9781666922318
Author Jun Taek Kwon
Format Hardback
Page Count 176
Imprint Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Publisher Lexington Books
Weight(grams) 435g
Dimensions(mm) 236mm * 157mm * 20mm