North Korea’s People-to-People Engagement with the Koreans in the United States, 1981-1991 1) - A Diasporic Perspective -

Despite the lack of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea), there have been a number of cases of unofficial exchanges between the people of two countries. US-DPRK people-to-people exchanges began to take place more actively from the 1980s between academic, religious and friendship institutions. In this milieu, the Korean diaspora in the United States played a central role as a diaspora group with links to both societies and laid the groundwork for exchanges in academic, religious and humanitarian spheres. This article traces the people-to-people exchanges between North Korea and Korean Americans that began to take place from 1980s to the early 1990s and evaluates the short and long-term impact of these engagements. This paper argues that these exchanges in the 1980s with the Korean diaspora in the US helped shape North Korea to reconstruct its diaspora policy and diversified efforts to engage with the US in the 1980s and 1990s.