As scholars and security specialists continue to call for a regional multilateral security framework for Northeast Asia, advocates of such a framework must contemplate the participation of the region’s most incorrigible actor, North Korea. However, one crucial question remains unanswered in the discourse: How does North Korea perceive multilateralism? To glean a better understanding I examine North Korean materials, statements, and behavior relevant to select cases of multilateralism, alongside secondary sources. North Korea’s realist interpretation suggests that Pyongyang largely equates multilateralism in the capitalist international system as ‘imperialism’. While some of North Korea’s statements and cooperative tendencies suggest it values rules and principles―one dimension of multilateralism―North Korea nevertheless does not subscribe to the western IR conception of the term, but rather equates multilateralism to that of a purely functional and strategic tool to pursue its own interests in an anarchical world.

The study of South Korea’s foreign policy here fundamentally relies upon the national roles by largely looking into the challenges on Multilateral Governance Reform, UNSC reform to be specific. However, it argues that East Asia Regionalism and the Middle East issues are the leverages for South Korea’s foreign policy objectives with regard to the trend of UNSC reform. The use of national roles as the tool to make analysis does not mean it is the only medium and other instruments are not relevant. The national roles are used in this sense because (1) South Korea has to continuously depend upon United States for national interests in terms of security protection. (2) North Korea gradually further develops its nuclear capacity meanwhile there is no progress has been made with regard to the Six-Party Talks. (3) From 2013 to 2014, South Korea has been one among other non-permanent member in the United Nations Security Council.

Since 2003, a series of Six-Party Talks has attempted to halt North Korea’s nuclear development; nonetheless, considering the development of North Korean nuclear capability, the talks are often regarded as an ineffective framework. In order to break through such a situation, first and foremost it is imperative to understand the nature of North Korean foreign policy. In this paper, I argue that North Korean foreign pol-icy can be explained by neoclassical realism: the international distribution of power is interpreted by its domestic political system based on the self-reliance (Juche) ide-ology and the supreme leader (Suryong) political structure, whose basis is its Con-fucian culture, and I argue that this perception has predominantly determined itsforeign policy decision making.

On 12 October 2008, as a successful result of Six-Party Talks, the US government removed North Korea from its list of terrorism-sponsoring states, which had been one of the main reasons for economic sanctions against North Korea. Although it could not be viewed as an imminent and irreversible decision, the softening of the Bush administration's position represents a major change in distrustful interactions between the two countries. What made the Bush administration change its policy course against North Korea, which had continued for a quite long time? Regarding the real effectiveness of sanctions against North Korea, this study seeks to focus on the changing perspectives on economic sanctions in US–DPRK relations and the changing strategy of the Bush administration toward North Korea. Eventually the Bush administration did not give up its basic attitudes on the economic sanctions against North Korea, but redesigned its existing unilateral economic sanctions to build multilater...

This article is a study of foreign policy that aims to understand the reasons for South Korea's refusal to join the trilateral military alliance with the U.S. and Japan in countering North Korea’s nuclear and missile provocation. Due to the crisis of the two Koreas and the North keeps doing any efforts that leads to escalate the conflict, the U.S. initiated trilateral military alliance with its allies, namely South Koarea and Japan. Surprisingly, South Korea stated that they do not want to join trilateral military alliance with U.S. and Japan.Using an extensive literature review method with an interpretive approach, it finds that South Korea’s domestic political condition and a high pressure from China regarding this issue were influential in South Korea’s decision to refuse to join the alliance. The domestic political condition refers not only to political leader, but also to historical burden, and the changing generational priorities. This study also shows that China has got a...

Forged in the blood and strife of the anti-Japanese struggle during the colonial era, the North Korean revolution, with Kim Il-sung at its core, was built on the ethos of the guerilla fighter. After independence, Kim Il-sung’s band of guerilla fighters purged competing factions and consolidated their power. Although the days of fighting Japanese colonialists in Manchuria were far behind them, the guerilla experiences from the 1930s continued to inform and shape the North Korean leadership’s worldview. As dedicated anti-imperialists, Pyongyang applied guerilla ethos to its foreign policy and established, what this paper terms “guerilla internationalism.” This strategy prioritized solidarity with radical regimes and non-state actors around the world and balanced revolutionary fervor with brutal pragmatism. Guerilla internationalism was built on the principles of guerilla fighting, such as deception, unpredictability, secrecy, and disruption. From training African rebels in the 1960s and 1970s to supporting “Che Guevarista” revolutionaries in Sri Lanka, North Korean leader Kim Il-sung assisted non-state actors in their own liberation struggles and thus instigated international instability during the Cold War. Although Kim Il-sung died in 1994, guerilla internationalism continued during the Kim Jongil era. From helping Hezbollah build tunnels in the early 2000s to providing arms to the Tamil Tigers, Kim Jong-il continued to aid revolutionary non-state actors. As Kim Jong-un continues to develop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the risk of Pyongyang transferring its nuclear technology to non-state actors would seem to increase. However, Kim Jong-un’s policy towards non-state actors is substantially different from that of his father and grandfather with implications for Pyongyang’s current foreign policy. See link for downloadable copy: http://www.keia.org/publication/revolutionary-state-north-koreas-support-non-state-actors-past-policies-and-future-issue

This study posits that the ineffective and futile efforts of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to contain North Korean nuclear ambition are a result of the United States (U.S.) consistently and strategically developing its sanctions regimes, rather than the limited implementation of the UNSC’s measures or by the non-compliance of China and Russia, the two North Korean-leaning permanent UNSC members. The U.S/ has endeavoured to maximise its strategic leverage against North Korea by consolidating bilateral channels to increase its foreign policy capacity and flexibility, instead of reinforcing multilateral pressures through the UNSC. Although both the U.S. and the UNSC share the goal of nuclear non-proliferation in Northeast Asia, the former deliberately exploited the deficient decision making process of the latter to maximise its foreign policy flexibility. Consequently, the U.S. has flexibly pursued both engagement and containment of North Korea while maintaining its hard-l...