North Korea: Policy Failures, Human Insecurity, Consequences, and Prescriptions

This article seeks to examine the causes and consequences of domestic and international policy failures in North Korea through the lens of human security, and to suggest several alternative policy options for the future. Human security is an emerging multi-disciplinary paradigm for understanding vulnerabilities at the level of individual human beings. It incorporates methodologies and analyses from a number of research fields, including strategic and security studies, development studies, human rights studies, international relations, and the study of international organizations. This article addresses the relationship between human security and development in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) by focusing on the dual concepts of freedom from fear and freedom from want as well as the relationship between human security and traditional state-centric security in North Korea and the surrounding region.