North Korea

• 1. Introduction

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  North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is a country that Amnesty International considers to hold the worst human rights record in the world, yet it also once boasted a healthcare system with nearly 45,000 family practitioners serving its population. It sits on the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, bordered by China and Russia to the north and separated from South Korea by one of the most heavily fortified borders on earth. How did a land with ancient roots stretching back to the Lower Paleolithic end up as a hereditary dictatorship with nuclear weapons and an estimated 200,000 people in prison camps? And what does it mean that, as recently as 2024, its leader formally declared that the country next door is a hostile state and that reunification is no longer a goal? These are the questions that run through North Korea's modern story.

• 2. A Peninsula Divided

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  Korea was divided along the 38th parallel in 1945, after Japan's surrender at the end of World War II. The northern half fell under Soviet occupation and the southern half under the United States. Negotiations on reunification quickly collapsed. Soviet general Terentii Shtykov recommended the establishment of a Soviet Civil Administration and backed Kim Il Sung to lead the Provisional People's Committee of North Korea, established in February 1946. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was formally established on the 10th of July 1948, with Kim Il Sung as premier and Shtykov as the first Soviet ambassador.

  Kim and Shtykov were not content with partition. Ambassador Shtykov suspected that South Korea's ardent anti-communist leader Syngman Rhee was planning to invade the North and was sympathetic to Kim's goal of unifying the peninsula under socialism. The two successfully lobbied Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to support a quick war against the South. The North Korean military invaded on the 25th of June 1950 and swiftly overran most of the country.

  The United Nations intervened to defend the South, led by the United States, and forces rapidly pushed back into North Korea. As they neared the Chinese border, China entered the war on behalf of the North, shifting the balance again. Fighting ended on the 27th of July 1953 with an armistice that roughly restored the original boundaries, but no peace treaty was ever signed. Charles K. Armstrong calculated that an estimated 12-15% of the North Korean population died in the war, a proportion close to or surpassing the share of Soviet citizens killed in World War II. Almost every substantial building in the country was destroyed.

• 3. Kim Il Sung's State

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  Kim Il Sung used the post-war decades to consolidate power in ways that would shape North Korea for generations. He was deeply critical of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization policies, calling him a revisionist. During the 1956 August faction incident, Kim purged rival Soviet and Yan'an factions and successfully resisted efforts by both the Soviet Union and China to remove him from power. Most scholars consider the final withdrawal of Chinese troops from North Korea in October 1958 to mark the point when the country became effectively independent.

  The ideology Kim developed was called Juche, first pronounced in a 1955 speech titled On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work. Its core tenets were economic self-sufficiency, military self-reliance, and an independent foreign policy. Juche entered the constitution in 1972, and by the 1980s it had replaced Marxism-Leninism entirely as the state philosophy. By 1992, references to Marxism-Leninism were formally removed from the constitution.

  The economic picture in those early decades was more complicated than later Western narratives suggest. Industrial production returned to pre-war levels by 1957. North Korean GDP per capita was equal to that of South Korea as late as 1976. An internal CIA study acknowledged compassionate care for war orphans, a radical improvement in the status of women, free housing, free healthcare, and health statistics comparable to the most advanced nations. Life expectancy reached 72 before the famine that came later. The pre-famine healthcare network included nearly 45,000 family practitioners, roughly 800 hospitals, and 1,000 clinics.

• 4. Famine and Collapse

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  The Soviet Union was dissolved on the 26th of December 1991, and all Soviet aid to North Korea stopped immediately. Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack in 1994. His son Kim Jong Il declared a three-year period of national mourning before officially announcing himself as the new leader. What followed was catastrophic: flooding in the mid-1990s severely damaged crops and infrastructure, triggering a famine that the government proved incapable of containing. Between 240,000 and 420,000 people died. Many North Koreans fled into China, South Korea, and neighboring countries. In China, illegal North Korean child immigrants became known as the Kotjebi.

  In 1996, the government accepted United Nations food aid. International donors led by the United States initiated food shipments through the World Food Programme in 1997. The share of malnourished children declined from 60% in 1998 to 28% in 2013, though the World Food Programme still reported a lack of dietary diversity and access to fats and proteins even after stabilization.

  The economic wreckage from that era reshaped daily life permanently. By 2000, purchasing power parity GDP stood at an estimated $40 billion, with a per capita value of roughly $1,800. In 2024, gross national income per capita was $1,261, compared to $36,760 in South Korea. China filled the vacuum left by the Soviet Union's collapse and now accounts for more than 74% of North Korea's exports and 97% of its imports. Kim Jong Il also introduced a policy called Songun, or military first, which prioritized the Korean People's Army in state affairs and in the allocation of resources.

• 5. Nuclear Ambitions

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  North Korea promised to halt its nuclear weapons program under the Agreed Framework, signed in 1994. The international environment shifted when George W. Bush became U.S. president in 2001 and rejected both South Korea's Sunshine Policy and the Agreed Framework. Bush included North Korea in his axis of evil in his 2002 State of the Union Address. North Korea redoubled its nuclear efforts in response. On the 9th of October 2006, North Korea announced that it had conducted its first nuclear weapons test.

  Tensions with South Korea and the United States surged again in 2010 with the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan and North Korea's bombardment of Yeonpyeongdo. After Kim Jong Il died of a heart attack on the 17th of December 2011, his youngest son Kim Jong Un was named as his successor and continued pushing the nuclear program forward, including toward a possible hydrogen bomb and a missile capable of reaching the United States.

• 6. The Prison State

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  A 2014 United Nations inquiry into North Korea's human rights record found evidence for what it called systematic, widespread, and gross human rights violations, stating that the gravity, scale, and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world. North Koreans have been referred to by Human Rights Watch as some of the world's most brutalized people.

  Based on satellite images and testimony from defectors, an estimated 200,000 prisoners are held in six large prison camps, where they are forced to work. People perceived as hostile to the government, including Christians and critics of the leadership, are deported to re-education camps or political labor camps known as kwalliso without trial, often with their whole families, and mostly without any chance of being released. The International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea estimates that over 10,000 people die in these camps every year.

  With 1,100,000 people in modern slavery through forced labor, North Korea ranks highest in the world in the percentage of its population that is enslaved, at 10.4%, according to Walk Free's 2018 Global Slavery Index. North Korea is also the only country in the world that has not explicitly criminalized any form of modern slavery. The state security ministry was separated from the social security ministry in 1973 specifically to conduct domestic and foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and management of the political prison system.

• 7. The Kim Dynasty

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  The three supreme leaders of North Korea have all been members of the Kim family, a lineage referred to within the country as the Mount Paektu Bloodline. Kim Il Sung developed a cult of personality tightly bound to Juche ideology. His son Kim Jong Il inherited the cult in 1994 and his grandson Kim Jong Un took power in 2011. Kim Il Sung's birthday on the 15th of April is a public holiday called the Day of the Sun. Kim Jong Il's birthday is called the Day of the Shining Star and is one of the most important public holidays in the country.

  Several major landmarks are named for Kim Il Sung, including Kim Il Sung University, Kim Il Sung Stadium, and Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang. Defectors have been quoted as saying that North Korean schools deify both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Mount Paektu, a volcanic peak with an elevation of 2,744 meters, has been incorporated into the elaborate folklore surrounding the family; a state song titled We Will Go To Mount Paektu praises Kim Jong Un and describes a symbolic trek to the mountain.

  North Korea is governed by the Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System, which mandates absolute obedience to the Kim family. Kim Jong Un heads all major governing structures: he is leader of the Workers' Party of Korea, head of state, and commander-in-chief of the Korean People's Army. In 2024, he formally declared that North Korea would no longer seek reunification with South Korea, identifying it as a hostile state, a significant departure from a position that both Koreas had held since the peninsula was divided.