u/NKinitiative

While Kim Jong Un builds the most capable war machine in North Korean history, South Korea’s government is dismantling the very measures designed to deter him — and calling it peace. Meanwhile, its own conservative opposition, retired generals, and even sections of its own military bureaucracy say the erosion runs deeper than diplomacy: down to unloaded machine guns at the DMZ, a documented rupture in intelligence-sharing with Washington, and a budget that funds North Korean soccer fans before it funds border radar.

Today I treat people’s teeth. Some fifteen winters ago, I crawled across a frozen river with a packet of rat poison clenched in my hand. What closed the distance between those two scenes was not, as I believed for years, my own effort. It was policy.

People tend to think of policy as something remote from their lives—debated in government offices, argued over in the legislature, buried in reports most will never open. But for me, policy was always pressed against the skin. It put me back in a classroom. It let me sleep somewhere warm. In the end, it made me a dentist. This is that story. But to tell it, I have to go back to the day everything collapsed.

I was born in North Korea to a father who was a military officer and a mother who was a physician. In my early childhood, my family lived a life stable enough that many North Koreans would have envied it. I never worried about food. We had a warm home. My mother was respected in our community as a doctor, and my father was a soldier admired by everyone who knew him. As a child, I believed that life would last forever.

Why don’t North Koreans resist? Since I began working on North Korean human rights, this is the question I have been asked most often. But I now want to ask a more fundamental one: why have we grown so accustomed to it?

It is not only dictatorship that confines North Koreans. Our own indifference — the moment we begin consuming their suffering as one more recurring news item — becomes a second barrier. Dictatorship makes people fall silent. Familiarity makes people stop acting.

What if the missing variable in North Korean human rights is not information, but learning?

For decades, efforts to improve human rights in North Korea have focused on expanding access to outside information. Governments, non-governmental organizations, activists and defectors have supported radio broadcasts, USB drives, foreign films and South Korean dramas as ways to challenge the regime’s monopoly over truth.

These efforts are necessary. In a country where the state controls nearly every official source of knowledge, access to outside information is not a luxury -- it is a basic human right. But information access, by itself, does not explain transformation.

Many North Korean defectors describe encountering South Korean dramas, foreign media or outside news before they began to question the system. These stories matter because they show that outside information can create cracks in a closed society. But they also raise a harder question: Why does the same information transform some people and not others?

On June 9, 2025, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification issued a forceful demand to civic organizations: stop sending anti-North Korea leaflets across the border. It was the fifth day after President Lee Jae-myung had taken office. Two days later, at 2 p.m. on June 11, the president ordered the military to halt the loudspeaker broadcasts it had been directing toward North Korea. The order ended broadcasts that had resumed fifteen years earlier, following North Korea’s sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in 2010.

In early July, the National Intelligence Service shut down radio and television broadcasts it had transmitted into North Korea for more than half a century. The radio services went off the air one after another, and the television broadcasts ended completely at midnight on July 14, after the South Korean national anthem played for the final time. Unlike the military’s loudspeakers, which successive governments had installed and removed depending on their political orientation, the National Intelligence Service’s broadcasts to North Korea had continued for fifty years regardless of who governed in Seoul. At 10 p.m. on August 31, the “Voice of Freedom” also ended its broadcasts. Of the radio services operated by the South Korean government and public institutions for North Korean audiences, only KBS Hanminjok Radio remained.

I crossed four national borders illegally, evading the guns behind me and the soldiers and police watching for people like me. I tumbled down mountainsides. I nearly capsized on a river whose depth I could not guess. There were moments when I was close to fainting from hunger and could not ask a single person for help, because I had entered each of those countries without a passport.

This is an experience possible only for people from a country where most citizens will never hold a passport in their lives, and where leaving is, in nearly every form, a crime.

The Lee Jae-myung administration is moving rapidly to complete the transfer of wartime operational control, or OPCON, within President Lee’s term.

At a meeting of the Future Defense Strategy Committee in May, Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back remarked, in language that left room for ambiguity, that there would be no major problem even if South Korea were to assume OPCON tomorrow. After being informed of the remark, President Lee went so far as to publicly rebuke the defense minister’s equivocal position, saying that a defense minister should declare that “there would be no problem at all even if we were to take it over tomorrow.”

Washington also appears to view the transfer of OPCON to South Korea favorably. At the Shangri-La Dialogue later that month, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth described South Korea’s desire to assume more operational control, more quickly, as encouraging and said that the United States should continue to support such moves. On the surface, Seoul and Washington appear to be speaking with one voice for the first time in years...

On June 11, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control published a list of medical devices that may no longer be exported to North Korea under the standing humanitarian general license; they now require a specific OFAC license. The contents are pointed — oxygen generators, diagnostic imaging systems, and pumps above a set flow rate — the precision-component end of the medical spectrum, not bandages and antibiotics. No press conference accompanied it. Three days earlier, an American treaty ally had shipped one of those very categories of equipment to Pyongyang. South Korea’s Jeju Province confirmed on June 8, through Yonhap and international wires, that it had sent about 160 million won — roughly $105,000 — in goods to the North: citrus saplings, greenhouse materials, forestry pesticide, and a hemodialysis machine with consumables. The cargo left Incheon on April 1, transited China’s Dalian, and reached the port of Nampho on May 4, with the approval of Seoul’s Unification Ministry. It was the first local-government transfer to the North under President Lee Jae-myung, cast by the province as a revival of its old “vitamin C diplomacy.” Humanitarian aid, in other words. The complication is the man who reportedly arranged it...

Q1

*Earlier this year, the editorial board of a leading American newspaper declared that “Korean Peninsula denuclearization is no longer a realistic option,” calling for North Korea to be recognized as a nuclear-armed state and for policy to shift toward freeze-and-containment.*¹ *A prominent American foreign policy journal has similarly argued for abandoning denuclearization in favor of deterrence-based “cold peace.” You experienced the North Korean system from the inside. How do you assess this trajectory — and what strategy, in your view, would actually complete denuclearization?

Q4

*In June 2025, South Korea’s Supreme Court upheld a sentence of seven years and eight months against Lee Hwa-young, former Vice Governor for Peace Affairs of Gyeonggi Province.*⁷ The central allegation is that $8 million was illegally transferred to North Korea in 2019 — during President Lee Jae-myung’s tenure as governor — in violation of U.S. Treasury OFAC sanctions and UN Security Council resolutions. Prosecutors have identified President Lee as the alleged final authorizer of the transfer, though his trial has been suspended owing to his status as a sitting president. Two questions: Where, in your assessment, did those funds flow within the North Korean system? And do you believe this matter has a structural effect on this administration’s freedom of action toward the North?

In ‘Squirrel and Hedgehog’ a famous North Korean state-sponsored animation, the enemy factions representing the United States and Western powers are shown only as vicious wolves, foxes, and weasels. Crucially, these enemy territories contain no ordinary citizens—only brutal soldiers. By completely erasing the existence of innocent civilians from the screen, the regime ensures that its own people’s hatred remains absolute, uninterrupted by any human sympathy. Today, democratic societies are falling into a very similar conceptual trap by failing to separate the tyrannical North Korean regime from the 25 million ordinary citizens trapped beneath it....

This July, the United States turns 250. There will be fireworks over the National Mall, parades down small-town Main Streets, and the familiar rereading of a sentence that still startles you if you slow down enough to hear it -- that all people are created equal, born with rights no government may grant or take away.

I did not grow up with that sentence. I grew up in North Korea, where believing it could cost you your life. The state did not merely govern us; it tried to own the inside of our heads. Loyalty was measured, ranked, inherited. People were sorted at birth into classes of trustworthy and hostile, and the sorting followed you like a shadow you could never outrun. To imagine yourself as free -- not someday, not in another country, but free by right, simply because you were born -- was the most dangerous thought a person could have...

South Korea held its ninth nationwide local elections Wednesday. By early afternoon, something unprecedented had occurred.

Ballot papers ran out across the country. Fifty polling stations experienced shortages. Voting was suspended at 22 of them. Citizens who had arrived to exercise their most fundamental democratic right were turned away and told to wait, sometimes for hours.

What happened next was something I could not have imagined growing up in North Korea. The people took to the streets -- spontaneously, peacefully and in enormous numbers. Those in their 20sand 40s led the demonstrations, constituting more than half of those present at the Jamsil counting center.

... Xi’s sudden journey north looks, above all, like leverage aimed at President Donald Trump. His message to Washington is plain: I alone can rein in a nuclear-obsessed Kim Jong Un -- and so America should ease its trade and geopolitical pressure on China.

At the same time, he invoked the China-North Korea Treaty of Friendship, which turns 65 this year. It is a reminder of an old debt: without the hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops who shielded the North with their blood in 1950, the Kim dynasty would not exist...

The AFC's major sponsors -- Visa, Qatar Airways, and NEOM -- face serious legal exposure if $1 million reaches Pyongyang. On May 23, a North Korean women’s football club won the AFC Women’s Champions League in Suwon, South Korea. The athletic achievement was genuine. The $1 million prize that comes with it is something else entirely -- a cash transfer into one of the most dangerous and sanctioned governments on earth...

On September 9, 2022, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) had adopted and promulgated the decree ‘On the State Policy on Nuclear Forces’ the previous day. The core of this legislation mandates that an automatic nuclear retaliatory strike be initiated immediately should the North Korean leadership, including Kim Jong-un, come under attack. 

The full text of the decree has been translated herein for academic purposes...

This is a full translation of North Korea’s latest amended constitution for academic purposes. The DPRK promulgated these constitutional revisions in March 2026.