Scholars, journalists, and popular media tend to paint North Korea as the paradigmatic backward and underdeveloped “rogue” state—a hangover from pathological Cold War development schemes. But at the height of the Cold War, North Korea was the socialist development success story. Emerging from humiliating occupation first by the Japanese Empire (1910–45) and then devastating civil war (1950–53), North Korea quickly clawed out of destruction through state-led modernization and improvement in education, employment, civic involvement, and mining and heavy industrial development. North Korea was not merely proxy to great power conflict—the outcome of “Sovietization”—but also an agentic small state seeking development and international influence amid challenging geopolitical patterns. How has a small, underdeveloped postcolonial autocracy sought to attain its economic and political goals with an adversarial world? The two books under review tackle this questions from different angles.

In North Korea and the Geopolitics of Development, political scientists Kevin Gray and Jong-Woon Lee build a theoretical framework they call the “geopolitical-development nexus” to explain both North Korea’s successful economic development in the 1960s and 1970s and its failures in the 1990s. Three geopolitical “moments”—colonialism, the Cold War, and China’s rise—have shaped how North Korea chose certain policies for economic development, which here is defined as “the response to the emergence of industrial capitalism and its outward expansion in the nineteenth century through imperialism” (p. 12). The first part of the book (chapters 1–5) is organized chronologically, charting North Korea’s development policy decisions from the 1940s to the present. The last three chapters consider how and when China’s booming economy and political backing supports or hinders North Korea’s economy in terms of economic reform, geopolitics, and international sanctions.

Weaving together English-language and (often underutilized) South Korean secondary sources, the authors present rich detail of North Korean policy choices not merely as a case of state socialism reactive to the Cold War, but an agent in its own postcolonial national development. Students of Korean history would find little to quibble with in Gray and Lee’s description of this arc (Cumings 1997, Lankov 2002, Armstrong 2003, Oberdorfer and Carlin 2013). The authors show how exalted founder Kim Il Sung gained control of the country against other autochthonous communist factions, especially amid decolonization and state-building in the 1940s and 1950s. Having gained control of the state, Kim Il Sung’s fervent pursuit of “self-reliance” (Juche) played Beijing and Moscow off each other amid the Sino-Soviet Split to extract aid, political backing, and trade. Outlining the contours of policy decisions in the 1960s and 1970s, the authors examine how the state loosened some control on its planned economy. However, driven by what Gray and Lee call “developmental nationalism,” Pyongyang’s emphasis on heavy industry could not provide for the chronic shortage of consumer goods, rending Pyongyang unable to compete with the influx of Chinese products through informal markets.

Gray and Lee’s argument is strongest when it makes use of North Korean journal articles, state media, and official statements to discuss North Korea’s agency in designing development strategy. These materials help the authors explain North Korea’s economic crisis and devastating famine in the 1990s and tentative recovery from the 2000s in a viewpoint counter to mainstream liberal economic accounts of North Korea’s inefficiencies (Frank 2006, Haggard and Noland 2007, Kim 2017). Yet, readers unfamiliar with the Korean Peninsula’s twentieth-century history might miss some of the book’s important contributions. Deep on describing North Korean economic policy, the authors give short shift to describing political events specific to Northeast Asia or North Korea, such as the exodus of North Koreans in the 1990s amid devastating famine or the official political classification system that restricts and permits ersatz entrepreneurs (donju). Whether the state created the conditions for these trends is debatable and demonstrating how the state overlooked or co-opted these populations in policy would have buttressed their argument and made it accessible to wider academic audiences.

Most accounts of Cold War North Korea diplomacy focus on Soviet and Chinese aid for economic development and security. Benjamin R. Young’s Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World presents a compelling view of an underanalyzed story of North Korea’s Cold War diplomacy with revolutionary movements and nonaligned countries. Young describes how North Korea sought to export its own version of a developmental model to countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He contends that North Korea’s identity during the Cold War was based on “a global commitment to anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism,” or Third Worldism, which he employs in its Cold War contemporary definition as a socialist nonaligned movement (p. 4). Readers from some disciplines might take issue with Young’s evocation of this term, which analytically blurs the distinction between regime type (autocracy vs. democracy), historical encounters with imperialism (colonizer vs. colonized), economic organization (socialism vs. capitalism), and Cold War–era geopolitical blocs (East vs. West vs. the Non-Aligned Movement). It could be argued, as Young seems to, that these four elements align as part of a global political movement. Indeed, Young opens his book with reference to both Franz Fanon and historian Vijay Prashad’s important intervention that “the Third World was not a place. It was a project” (2008, xv). But given it has largely fallen out of favor, the term “Third World” warrants further dissection for audiences not familiar with the Non-Aligned Movement history.

Young has made a remarkably creative research design for a new perspective on a country notoriously hard for social scientists to find sufficient reliable information to study. He analyzes North Korean propaganda in context with an impressive array of at least eight countries’ diplomatic archives and international media reports. Through clear and evocative prose, Young illustrates how and why North Korea fostered important relationships with small socialist and nonaligned states through two main tactics: ideology-based public diplomacy, and investments in developing economies and militaries. The North Korean propaganda apparatus intertwined the political project of sovereign autonomy and anti-colonial subjectivity with the Kim Il Sung personality cult. Young traces how North Korea worked with countries like Indonesia, Cuba, and Vietnam in the 1960s to present themselves as the vanguard of a global anti-imperial revolution. Pyongyang trained guerrillas and supplied munitions to foreign revolutionaries, most notably in Mexico and Sri Lanka in the early 1970s. Even foreign radicals in the West positively compared Juche to its own ideals of revolution, ranging from Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s to Irish Republicans in the mid-1980s.

By the end of the 1960s Juche had been replaced by Kimilsungism. Developing countries might appreciate Pyongyang’s tangible investments, but North Korean diplomacy became tiresome “non-stop propaganda” (p. 63). The announcement of Kim Jong Il’s as successor to Kim Il Sung at the Sixth Congress of the KWP in 1980 reportedly angered foreign communist and left-leaning attendees who “condemned … the fathomless cult of personality” and nepotistic transfer of power (p. 97). Others picked up on the overtly political bent of the diplomacy to win over foreign supporters in their contest for legitimacy over South Korea. Pyongyang’s use of foreign ground as a site to carry out its conflict with the South angered erstwhile allies, especially following an attempt to assassinate the South Korean president during a 1983 visit to Yangon.

Young’s nuanced linkage of Korean ideology with a global anti-imperial movement does help overcome the pitfalls of ideology-centered analysis of ethnonational identity and cults of personality. Some scholars might question how North Korea’s explicitly racist vision of self-determination and denigration of non-Koreans reconcile with its internationalist vision, particularly as it pertains to domestic propaganda. Attention to the racial orders inherent in both North Korean ideology and “Third Worldism” might provide interesting insights into the uneven relationships among the small nonaligned states. Young’s impressive archival data not only shows foreign response to North Korean but also hints at patterns in other countries’ own diplomatic goals. How did Cuba and Vietnam—two of North Korea’s best friends afield—leverage their relationships with Pyongyang (and extraction of aid) in broader geopolitical goals? To go one step further, how is North Korea an example of this Third World diplomacy in comparative perspective? But these are merely extensions of Young’s thesis, not qualms with it.

Scholars of developmentalism, the Cold War, and the Non-Aligned Movement will all find something of interest in these two books. Exegesis of North Korea’s economic development arc begs systematic comparison to South Korea—one of the paradigmatic developmental states—which had the same Japanese postcolonial experience but, between US patronage and rapid integration into global capitalism, operated at a different geopolitical-development nexus. Today, North Korea finds few allies among its past anti-imperial community, while South Korea has become an important hub in trade, finance, migration, and diplomacy. More remarkably, even as South Korea focused inward on its authoritarian developmental period, as “Miracle on the Han” the government has packaged and exported its developmental model through the Korea Development Institute, which offers graduate degrees in public policy and has dispatched its own experts to Central Asia and Latin America since 2004.

As single-case studies, the books reviewed here enrich the continuing debate on how small states navigate adversarial global structures of capitalism, economic backwardness, and (neo)imperialism. Neither works pay much attention to macro-level changes in state-level political and economic institutions. Have North Korea’s political regime, economic institutions, and state capacity changed over the periods under study? (They have.) Future research should more systematically compare North Korea to other postcolonial and economically underdeveloped states to dissect how the conditions of developmental nationalism affect economic policy and development success and failure (as in Abrahamian 2018, Pempel 2021). Cross-regional analysis of North Korea with other postcolonial developing states could help theorize how ideology and geopolitics affect economic planning or diplomacy.