Abstract

North Korea’s survival strategy at the end of the Cold War can best be understood as a deliberate rejection of political and economic reforms and a turn toward self-imposed isolation. While much scholarship has examined the global transformations marking the Cold War’s end, comparatively little attention has been paid to North Korea’s internal resistance to change and pursuit of isolation. With an increasing number of newly available sources from archives around the world, it is now possible to offer a fresh interpretation of when, why, and how the North Korean regime resisted reform during the final decade of the Cold War. In this lunchtime seminar, I will discuss some images that led me to hypothesise that North Korea had already begun turning away from reform and opening in the mid-1980s—well before the Tiananmen Square protests, unrest in the Eastern bloc, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.