Introduction

Today North Korea is perhaps the worlds most closed country whose
totalitarian political system is built on a family dynastic succession. Founded
in 1948, the politics of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) or
North Korea has been shaped by a constant interplay between the external
security environment on the one hand, and political dynamics internal to its
own history, culture, and society on the other hand. The Korean
independence movement against Japanese colonialism (19101945), the
division following the occupation by the American and Soviet forces, and the
Korean War (19501953) are important historical experiences behind North
Korean nation building. Despite predictions of the regime collapse, North
Korea is one of the few remaining communist regimes after the end of the
Cold War. With the cessation of Soviet aid in 1990, however, North Korea has
suffered from a near-bankrupt national economy and despite the need for
economic reform, has refused to contemplate significant opening. This selfimposed isolation still has not shielded the regime from a steady inflow of
information from the outside world. Four major themes characterize post
Cold War North Korean politics. First, under the banner of the Military First
(Songun) policy, Pyongyangs nuclear program has become tied to the
regime survival in the last twenty years. North Korea declared itself to be a
nuclear power in 2005 and the international negotiations aimed at
denuclearizing North Korea have yielded modest mixed results. Second, the
ideology of Juche (self-reliance) has been a central theme in the domestic
political process of building and consolidating the North Korean regime of a
one-man rule since the Kim Il-Sung era. A third theme is the dilemma of
North Korean economic reforms toward marketization. Pyongyang has tried a
few measures of market economy to attract foreign investments, but
remains extremely wary of the social and political ramifications of such
steps. Fourth, in 2012 the future of North Korea is at a crossroads after the
death of Kim Jong-Il in December 2011 and the generational succession to
his young son Kim Jong-Un.

General Overviews
The literature that informs North Korean politics generally tends to cover

both Koreas in a single publication given their intertwined modern history.

More recent works have looked specifically at North Koreas postCold War
predicament. Oberdorfer 2001, Cumings 2005, and Robinson 2007offer an
excellent historical overview of Korean politics. They all rightly highlight the
importance of collective historical experiences such as the Japanese
colonialism, the occupation, the division and the Korean War in shaping their
national politics. Kihl 1984, Kim 1998, and Yang 1999 offer a comprehensive
overview of the political systems of the two Koreas to readers who wish to
grasp some basic understanding of North Korea in comparison with South
Korea. Most recently, there have been works that could serve as texts on the
specific topic of North Korean politics aside from the aforementioned books
on modern history. McEachern 2010 offers a comprehensive assessment of
the North Korean regime from an institutional perspective. Cha 2012 is the
first scholarly and public policy book on North Korea published after the
death of Kim Jong-il.