North Korea has embarrassed scholars and policymakers around the world by seizing the U.S. intelligence-gathering ship Pueblo; exchanging bitter reproaches with its blood-tie ally China and its former patron the Soviet Union; conducting a series of underground nuclear tests; and taking provocative actions against South Korea, such as the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan (Ch'ŏnan) and the shelling of Yeonpyeong (Yŏnp'yŏng). Can we explain what has made North Korea behave this way? What kind of lens should we have in order to understand what North Korea has done and what North Korea is? Is North Korea an exceptional state? The authors of this edited volume collectively answer these fundamental questions by using an analytical lens of historical institutionalism.

North Korea has been predominantly portrayed as a problem, for example, as “a puppet of the global communist movement,” “a totalitarian regime,” “a failed economic system,” and “a security threat” to the region (p. 2). Jae-Jung Suh argues, however, that the “proverbial blind man” cannot understand North Korean phenomena without paying attention to “the broader playing field,” Juche (chuch'e) as an institution that shapes “leader's and others' interests and strategies” (p. 8). North Korea's Juche as an institution “has emerged out of the interactions of Kim Il Sung's group and its challengers and between the North Koreans and outsiders, particularly the Soviets and Chinese” (p. 24). Since it was established as the central institution, Juche “has evolved in response to shifting conditions” and “facilitates certain choices and impedes others” as North Koreans respond to “indigenous developments as well as exogenous shocks” (p. 7). Thus, this volume's authors claim that unlike the speculations of the “blind man,” North Korea may be different from the outsiders, but it may not be isolated from the world.

One of the major contributions of this collaboration is that the authors put the Juche ideology into a historical context and explain its emergence and evolution as an institution by tracing “the development of institutional inertia and critical juncture” (p. 2). Hongkoo Han demonstrates that the Minsaengdan Incident caused by the Chinese Communist Party cost a number of casualties of North Korean communists fighting against Japanese imperialism, but it led to Kim Il Sung's rise as a leader of the anti-Japanese revolutionary movement and made him count the Korean revolutionary interest “first and foremost” (p. 57). Gwang-Oon Kim rejects both the Sovietization thesis and the self-powered revolution thesis regarding North Korea's state formation; instead, he argues that North Koreans were trying to uphold their national identity “in a predictable manner” (p. 68) due to their feeling of betrayal and resentment against the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Union.

Kim Il Sung's group had to address challenges to find “the most desirable and realistic development strategies, from the ashes of the Korean War, from the post-Stalin Soviets, Maoist China, the eventual Soviet-China split, and in the face of domestic problems” (p. 95). Through the serious clashes between utopian ideals and pragmatic realism, traditionalism and revisionism, and individualism and collectivism, Kim Il Sung's group successively crystalized its development strategy and the Suryongje (Suryŏngje). However, the institutional development of Juche has had unintended consequences. The success in economic development in the earlier stage of state formation could not hold in the 1990s. In addition, the top-down development strategy privileged collectivism, but the Suryongje, which was once established as means for the collective society, replaced “collectivism as a goal in itself” (p. 107). So the bottom-up social and economic development process was not able to work in North Korea.

By the end of 2013, North Korea shocked the world again by executing Kim Jung Un's uncle Jang Sung Taek (Chang Sŏng-t'aek) for crimes against the state. North Korea was framed as an uncivilized society, and the image of North Korea as a problem was widely portrayed in the global media. How can we explain why this happened? This collection reminds us that North Koreans have responded to external challenges and domestic opposition forces in an unexceptional way. The specific answer to the question may be different depending on whom you ask, but the authors assume that Juche as an institution structures North Korea's interests and strategies, although it could be interpreted in many different ways over time depending on where you stand. The emerging challenge in contemporary North Korean studies is to answer the question of how Kim Jung Un and his group will interpret Juche as a governing institution and what kinds of options they have in the face of internal and external challenges. The authors of this volume or other scholars may provide thoughtful and comprehensive explanations based on this informative collection.