One of the long-standing clichés of North Korea analysis is that it is somehow a unique, disconnected, and strange aberration. Writers are still found to occasionally assert in a most Orientalist fashion that the nation is “a hermit kingdom.” While Benjamin R. Young's Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World reaches for the edge of the appropriate in an age of subaltern and decolonial histories, it is not in any way clichéd. Young's refreshing book is a roller-coaster ride through the multiple ways that North Korea sought to reach out globally prior to the 1990s. This is the most global of books, connecting Pyongyang with everywhere from East Berlin to Niue, from Ulaanbaatar to St. George's (Grenada). It is also of a different decolonial or postcolonial moment, which is really one of the most interesting things about it. In 2021, the term “Third World” might feel like an anachronistic provocation. But Young touches on North Korea's engagement with another historical moment, when “Third Worldism” was a positive assertion of possibility from nations that were emerging from painful periods of colonization and seeking to build a new pole in global politics, resistant to the “First World.” For Korea, and later North Korea, imperialism came from an unusual direction, but one similar enough for Pyongyang to feel common cause with Entebbe, Kampala, Kinshasa, or Ramallah.

Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader adopts a useful periodization, decentering focus on the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in North Korean history and, over six chapters, exploring the different strategies adopted by Pyongyang to connect with allies and partners across the globe. Young traces Pyongyang's efforts to initially build connections and bolster its post–Korean War reputation with attendees of the 1955 Bandung Conference. The book goes on to detail the various efforts made by Pyongyang to export Kimilsungism as a useful ideological model for postcolonial nations across the globe to follow. These include using advertisements in local newspapers, promoting North Korean film screenings and cultural events, arranging travel to North Korea for useful individuals and groups, and, finally, creating ubiquitous “friendship societies” across the planet.

In the third chapter proper, which Young cheekily titles “Kim Il Sung's ‘Korea First’ Policy, 1972–1979,” readers can trace North Korean relations with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Just as, in our present, Beijing and Taipei are willing to spend fortunes on small countries willing to recognize their sovereignty, North Korea constantly sought to use the NAM to delegitimize and restrict South Korean diplomatic recognition, much to the frustration of NAM members and, as Young details, other Socialist nations like East Germany.

Young then moves on to the early 1980s, when North Korea seemed determined to financialize and export both mass gymnastics displays and an extraordinary propensity for violence across the globe. North Korea's spectacular Mass Games, held in Pyongyang's May Day Stadium since 2002, are now familiar globally, but not North Korean efforts to support countries such as Somalia, Uganda, or Rwanda holding their own versions in the 1970s and 1980s. The equally spectacular moments of violence produced by North Korea are also globally familiar, such as the Rangoon bombing of October 9, 1983 (North Korea's attempted assassination of South Korean president Chŏn Tuhwan [Chun Doo-hwan]), or the bombing of Korean Air flight 858 on November 28, 1987. Young records in some fascinating detail the unfamiliar story of how, along with statues and mass gymnastic displays, Pyongyang exported military capacity through the training of military forces for countries such as Uganda, Angola, Mozambique, and Libya. These forces would later overthrow their own governments (as in Uganda) and engage in brutal massacres (in the case of the Gukurahundi ethnic massacres in postcolonial Zimbabwe).

Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader is full of echoes and premonitions of the North Korea of our present, and the final chapter's title, “Survival by Any Means Necessary,” could describe much of North Korea's domestic and foreign policy since 1992. The violence meted out to unwitting Burmese bureaucrats in 1983, South Korean civilians in 1987, and those at the mercy of numerous African dictatorship's special forces brigades is mirrored by the assassination of Kim Jong Un's own brother, Kim Jong Nam, with a VX nerve agent in the middle of Kuala Lumpur Airport in February 2017. The book is challenged by the key issue for historians of North Korea—that none of North Korea's own archives are accessible—although it overcomes that limitation through an expansive, globetrotting reach. Rooted in the fantastic work of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project and North Korean International Documentation Project in Washington, D.C., Young travels the archival world. He extracts some particularly interesting material from the United Kingdom's National Archives on North Korean engagements with small Pacific island nations such as Kiribati.

Ultimately, this is a fine book, with problems and omissions, of course. This reviewer would like to have seen some engagement with the writings of Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh, Danish Eurocommunists who visited North Korea in the mid-1970s and produced the balanced, if disappointed, “Socialist Korea: A Case Study in the Strategy of Economic Development,” and would have liked the conclusion to be fleshed out a little further into our present. After all, so much of what Young talks about when it comes to North Korean global efforts is repeated or continues in our present, but the book is a very strong counter to the idea that Pyongyang is isolationist or cut off from the rest of the world, and will surely be a reference for interested readers and researchers to jump off from and return to when considering North Korean foreign policy in the future. It will also be extremely useful to any lecturer or teacher hoping to use as a frame for teaching on North Korean global engagements, and alternate sources of power in Cold War history.