Following the disastrous effects of the UNSC sanctions regime on Iraq in the 1990s, the academic literature on sanctions has since seen a shift from a narrow emphasis on the “efficacy” of sanctions toward an increased concern with their humanitarian impacts.Footnote ¹ Recognizing that sanctions are likely to have differential impacts on targeted societies, a number of scholars have examined the gendered impact of sanctions, utilizing both quantitative large-N methodologies as well as in-depth country studies.Footnote ² This chapter examines the gendered structure and impact of sanctions on the DPRK, with particular attention to the sanctions imposed by the UNSC amidst the unresolved tensions surrounding Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile program. Indeed, the gendered impact of sanctions on North Korea have largely been neglected in the literature, despite the fact that the country has been subject to sanctions for most of its existence and that the UNSC resolutions passed from 2017 onwards constitute one of the most stringent international sanctions regime in the world today.

No doubt this neglect reflects the difficulty of access to the country and the resultant paucity of substantive data. Furthermore, consistent and reliable gender-disaggregated data is lacking. Nonetheless, key macroeconomic and socioeconomic indicators – provided by national census studies on differential impacts on the population and by UN agencies such as UNICEF on maternal and reproductive health, along with reporting by humanitarian organizations and media outlets – do present a preliminary picture of the gendered impact of sanctions. We begin by examining the history and development of the sanctions regime and its impact on the sectors of the North Korean economy that have been primary employers of women, such as textiles and cross-border trade. We also examine how the impact of sanctions, particularly those imposed by the UNSC, is mediated through the gendered transformation of the North Korean economy since the crisis of the 1990s, whereby marketization has come to play an increasingly central role in social reproduction. As we argue, UN sanctions have served to intensify the burden on women’s role as primary earners by undermining employment and constraining marketized activities. There are secondary consequences as well, whereby women are made to take on additional caretaking work in the home and the community, as an indirect result of the sanctions. Rather than focusing on the efficacy or legality of sanctions as in most sanctions literature, we argue that the North Korean case demonstrates the unrecognized ways in which sanctions can have ripple effects far beyond their intended “target” – unrecognized precisely because debates about sanctions as a form of statecraft often preclude an examination of the kind of gendered violence enacted by sanctions on daily life.

The History of Sanctions and Their Economic Impact

The sanctions regime on North Korea is one of the oldest in the world, beginning with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, just two years after the state’s foundation. The war played a key role in establishing the hostile relationship between North Korea and the US, as well as in laying the basis for North Korean ambivalence toward the UN. The UN Command under US leadership intervened in what began as a Korean civil conflict “to restore peace,” only to wage a “scorched-earth” campaign throughout the three-year international war, destroying an estimated 75 percent of North Korean cities and industries.Footnote ³ Thereafter, in violation of Article 2 paragraph 13d of the 1953 armistice prohibiting the introduction of new weapons (except to replace existing ones) into the peninsula, the US deployed nuclear weapons to South Korea between 1958 and 1991.Footnote ⁴ Without a peace settlement to replace the ceasefire agreement, the Korean peninsula technically remained in a state of war. By the 1990s, North Korea had embarked in earnest on its nuclear weapons program as a national security initiative when it could no longer count on Soviet support following the end of the Cold War. This history of the Korean War and the Cold War that has led to the current sanctions stalemate thus makes clear why sanctions have failed to curb the North Korean nuclear weapons program and are unlikely to do so.

Within days of the outbreak of war, comprehensive US unilateral sanctions involved a complete embargo on US exports to North Korea.Footnote ⁵ As with sanctions regimes imposed on other state socialist countries, North Korea was thereafter denied credit or other financing programs, normal trade relations, and non-humanitarian assistance from the West.Footnote ⁶ North Korea’s external trading relations were therefore mostly oriented toward its socialist allies, and in particular, toward the Soviet Union, with the exception of a short-lived expansion of trade with Western Europe and Japan in the 1970s. Much like the case of Cuba, North Korea’s position within the socialist trading bloc meant that US unilateral sanctions had a relatively limited impact on the country’s overall development before the fall of the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁷ But the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to an abrupt end to the favorable trading relations North Korea had with the bloc and led to a severe economic crisis and famine that culminated in the deaths of up to 5 percent of the population.Footnote ⁸ As the economy began to recover by the turn of the century, North Korea was able to increase its external trade with its immediate neighbors of South Korea, China, and Japan. However, the deepening crisis surrounding North Korea’s weapons program subsequently led to a virtual standstill in trade with Japan and South Korea, as they imposed their own unilateral sanctions on North Korea. Still, the sharp drop in this trade was initially more than offset by North Korea’s burgeoning trade with China. By 2018, China accounted for 95 percent of North Korea’s external trade.Footnote ⁹

Some restrictions related to trade and travel had eased with the end of the Cold War. In particular, the 1994 Agreed Framework had led to a suspension of North Korea’s nascent nuclear weapons program in exchange for the promise of normalized diplomatic relations and an agreement by Washington to support the development of Pyongyang’s domestic energy infrastructure. Nonetheless, sanctions related to anti-terrorism and nonproliferation stayed in place, which meant that North Korea remained under heavy restrictions and was effectively unable to apply for membership in global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, given the US opposition, and its disproportionate influence due to weighted voting.Footnote ¹⁰ Following the resumption of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program in the early 2000s, the US imposed yet stricter sanctions. Financial measures, such as the designation of financial institutions servicing North Korean customers as “money laundering concerns” under Section 301 of the Patriot Act, served to isolate North Korea from the dollar-based international financial system, while “secondary sanctions” targeted persons and entities in third countries that had dealings with the country.Footnote ¹¹ Such measures have considerably narrowed the scope of North Korea’s legitimate exchange with the world economy. Humanitarian operations by NGOs and international organizations have also been hindered by the absence of banking channels and the cumbersome exemptions process required under the existing sanctions regime.Footnote ¹² With regards to the broader impact on the country’s economy, however, North Korea was until 2017 largely able to offset US sanctions through trading relations with its closer Northeast Asian neighbors, namely China, South Korea, and Japan.

The booming Chinese economy played a key role in North Korea’s post-1990s recovery and reflected China’s demand for North Korean mineral exports as well as the country’s integration into China-centered regional production networks. This process of steady economic recovery coincided with the imposition of UN collective sanctions following Pyongyang’s first nuclear test in 2006. Over the following decade, the sanctions passed under UNSC Resolutions 1695, 1718, 1874, 2087, and 2094 failed to exert any discernible macroeconomic shocks on the North Korean economy. This was largely for two reasons. First, the sanctions took the form of so-called “smart sanctions.”Footnote ¹³ These were designed to prevent the transfer of weapons and weapons-related material, but also sought to target North Korean elites by prohibiting the export of luxury goods to the country and placing travel bans on key figures associated with the weapons program. The sanctions also included a ban on new grants, financial assistance, or concessional loans to North Korea, though with exemptions for “humanitarian and developmental purposes.”Footnote ¹⁴ The sanctions did not at this time include bans on the economic sectors that were driving North Korea’s recovery and tentative growth, such as minerals, textiles, and seafood exports. The second reason for the failure of targeted sanctions to have a significant economic impact was that due to North Korea’s traditional role as both ally and as geopolitical buffer state vis-à-vis US-allied South Korea, China had little inclination to strictly enforce the sanctions, and thereby played the role of “black knight.” Furthermore, the porous nature of the Sino-Korean border meant that traders in the region were able to make use of informal cash-based methods of trade settlement as well as illicit techniques such as the misreporting of customs declarations. North Korea was thereby able to evade the increasingly stringent unilateral and multilateral financial sanctions.Footnote ¹⁵ In short, the sanctions that might have exerted pressure on the North Korean economy were weakly enforced, and their lack of efficacy confirmed the general pessimism toward “smart sanctions” in the literature.Footnote ¹⁶

From 2017, however, paralleling the onset of the “maximum pressure” strategy of the first Trump administration, UN sanctions were expanded to target the broader North Korean economy. Amongst other measures, UN Resolutions 2270, 2321, 2371, 2375, and 2397 imposed blanket bans on North Korean exports of minerals, seafood, and textiles. In addition, they placed limits on exports to the country of crude oil and petroleum and imposed a ban on the dispatch of North Korean workers overseas, while mandating the repatriation of existing dispatched workers by the end of 2019.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite efforts to improve the design and implementation of targeted UN sanctions with standardized humanitarian exemptions, these ostensibly “targeted sanctions” actually covered such a wide range of sectors that they amounted to a near total economic blockade. Moreover, in contrast to the resolutions of the past, these new stricter sanctions were proactively enforced by China as a result of both Beijing’s increasing impatience with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, as well as US secondary sanctions aimed at Chinese companies and financial institutions suspected of evading sanctions. As a result, from 2017, UNSC sanctions exerted a sizable macroeconomic shock on the North Korean economy, with North Korean exports to China dropping by 88.2 percent in 2018, and imports declining by 29.9 percent.Footnote ¹⁸ Hundreds of Chinese joint ventures were required to close by the end of 2017, and even those remaining had difficulty operating without the ability to import the necessary materials.

The DPRK has by no means remained passive in the face of sanctions. Recent years have seen a shift from the early Kim Jong Un-era policy of establishing foreign investment zones and decentralizing decision-making rights for state-owned enterprises, toward a reassertion of the role of the state in the economy, alongside increased efforts at import substitution as part of a broader strategy of economic self-sufficiency. Beginning in 2015, Kim Jong Un began to speak of the need to counter what he saw as the “import disease” (suippyŏng), referring to the heavy dependence on Chinese imports in terms of both capital and consumer goods. As sanctions have tightened, the emphasis on domestic production has increased.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite the lack of concrete data to evaluate the success of such efforts, at the very least, there are grounds for skepticism as to whether such efforts at “self-sufficiency” can address the pressures exerted by UN and multilateral sanctions, and Kim Jong Un’s admission in 2021 of the failure of North Korea’s Five-Year Strategy (2016–2020) suggests continued economic challenges.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, any strategy of import substitution is likely to remain dependent on the import of capital goods and technology and thus the prospects of success seem remote. As such, UN sanctions imposed after 2017 have placed considerable pressure on the North Korean economy.

The Gendered Impact of Sanctions

Given this overall effect, it is likely that UN sanctions have had a broad and disproportionate impact on women’s livelihood in North Korea, as suggested more broadly by cross-country quantitative research. Drury and Peksen argue “women will feel the cost of sanctions most due to their more vulnerable status in the economy.”Footnote ²¹ Women are usually the first to be laid off in times of economic stress, and in the case of North Korea, their positions are especially disrupted by sanctions due to the targeting of export-oriented industries such as textiles in which women tend to dominate.

In the formal sector, although women make up almost half (47.8 percent) of the workforce, economic sectors are segregated by gender, with women dominating several of those most affected by the sanctions regime, such as health and welfare services, fisheries, and textiles. The country’s integration into cross-border production networks, particularly in the apparel sector, which is dominated by women, had been an important part of the post-1990s crisis recovery. The 2008 national census recorded 399,011 workers in the clothing industry, with women accounting for 86 percent of all workers in the sector.Footnote ²² Yet this was well before the expansion of cross-border trade and the growth of consignment-based processing in North Korea, and as such, the total number of female employees in the sector is likely to have grown significantly thereafter, although reliable data on this is not available. On the one hand, the outsourcing of apparel production to North Korea was initially concentrated at the inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex close to the border with the South. Seoul’s closure of the complex in 2016 led to the dismissal of 50,000 female workers, thereby likely having a significant negative impact on the local economy. From the early 2010s, however, Chinese enterprises also outsourced production to North Korea. The sectoral ban on North Korean textile exports led to a decline of 99.5 percent in textile exports, from $585 million to $3.2 million.Footnote ²³ Though there is some scope for previously exported apparel to be redirected toward the domestic market, this is likely to be limited given the decline in the purchasing power of North Korean consumers. As a result, sanctions on North Korean textile exports are likely to have had a significant negative impact on women’s employment and livelihood.Footnote ²⁴

The gendered impact of UN sanctions has been intensified by the socio-economic transformations that have taken place since the 1990s. As with other socialist states, North Korea had originally been established upon the basis of formal equal rights for women and men, as enshrined in the Law of Equal Rights for Men and Women (also known as the Equal Rights Law or Gender Equality Law) passed in 1946. This law declared equal economic, cultural, social, and political rights, including the freedom of marriage and divorce and the abolition of prostitution and concubinage.Footnote ²⁵ As North Korea embarked upon its program of economic recovery and catch-up industrialization following the Korean War, women were encouraged to enter the workplace, though there was a distinctly gendered employment structure with men largely employed in heavy industries and women in light industry and the service sector.Footnote ²⁶

Women’s employment was facilitated by the socialization of reproductive work that served to lighten the burden on women’s domestic labor through, for example, the public provision of nurseries, kindergartens, laundries, and canteens, thereby serving to relieve working women of the “double burden” of family duties and employment.Footnote ²⁷ On paper at least, this concern with gender equality has continued. The 2010 Law on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Women specifically targeted issues of discrimination and entrenched gender stereotypes to promote the advancement of women – including rural women – in public life, education, employment, and healthcare access.Footnote ²⁸ Through this law as well as labor protection laws, women were formally guaranteed paid maternity leave, childcare and nursing breaks during work, public laundries, and communal kitchens.

With the economic collapse of the 1990s, however, the state cut provisions of welfare, thereby increasing the care burden on women. The Public Distribution System, which provided basic food to some 60–70 percent of the population, collapsed by 1996, forcing women to turn to other means to provide for their families.Footnote ²⁹ As women lost their jobs in the state sector, they turned toward informal market activities by selling handicrafts or consumer goods acquired through cross-border trade with China. Meanwhile, men, as heads of household, were expected to continue to hold their jobs in official workplaces. Thus, another gendered division of labor emerged whereby men had to turn up for work in state-owned enterprises or the state bureaucracy, often for minimal or nonexistent pay, while women engaged in market activities. At the same time, even though women were increasingly engaged in market activities to support their families, they were still subject to gendered norms regarding family responsibilities. Because of the reductions in state welfare programs, “women’s work” included socially reproductive labor, such as caring for children or elderly parents, or within the community, working as nurses or teachers.

Differences of opinion exist as to the extent to which the process of marketization led to an improvement in the socio-economic status of women in North Korean society.Footnote ³⁰ On the one hand, marketization has indeed led to the emergence of a small but influential entrepreneurial class known as the donju (literally, money-masters), among whom women are a majority. However, focusing solely on this group risks neglecting the fact that with the onset of marketization, there has been increasing economic inequality.Footnote ³¹ As elsewhere, women are by no means a homogenous group in North Korea, and the process of marketization has been one of increasing divergence of experiences.

For women who remained in state employment, discriminatory practices were prevalent, despite the formal legal protections. Surveys carried out by DPRK’s National Committee for Implementing International Human Rights Treaties in the years leading up to its periodic review in 2017 on the status of women in local government and other institutions found a number of discriminatory hiring and employment practices. One such practice was that women were transferred against their wishes while they were on maternity leave.Footnote ³² Furthermore, when women lost their formal employment, they were likely to turn to the informal sector, such as illegal black markets, cross-border trade, and prostitution, or were trafficked into forced marriage or sex work. Those involved in illegal market activities were thereby more likely to be arrested for “economic crimes,” and large numbers of women had to face predatory officials and the penal system.Footnote ³³ In addition, women made up the majority of those who chose to leave the country, and often became victims of trafficking and sexual violence. Several human rights reports noted problems of sexual violence and harassment, domestic violence, and sexual trafficking, as well as cases where state officials forced repatriated women to obtain abortions.Footnote ³⁴ As the stringent multilateral and collective sanctions regime closed off opportunities for formal trade with China, as well as permits for overseas workers, cross-border traders are at increased risk of being trafficked, blurring distinctions between voluntary and forced migration. In the last 2017 periodic review by the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the DPRK reported that 6,473 women returned to the country after being trafficked or travelling abroad without permits between 2005 and 2016.Footnote ³⁵ While the absolute number may seem proportionally small, this is a significant acknowledgment by the North Korean government of “illegal” travel resulting from economic hardship, since all unofficial travel is strictly prohibited. Thus, the increase in women’s personal freedoms and responsibilities that came with marketization did not on the whole lead to substantial improvement in their social or political status, and indeed, many women remained on the margins of poverty and food insecurity.Footnote ³⁶

While the sanctions resulted in the increase of the informal sector and markets, the strengthening of multilateral and collective sanctions also had a marked impact on their vitality, thereby posing considerable challenges to women’s role as primary earners and caregivers. Reports suggest that the strengthened sanctions led to a sharp reduction in the number of merchants and items available for purchase, even in the capital Pyongyang. In the city’s marketplaces, the scope of available goods was largely reduced to food and beverages rather than the broader range of consumer goods that had been available in the past. Meanwhile, as the economy slowed, there was also a decline in the public’s purchasing power in the markets.Footnote ³⁷ The price of real estate also saw a sharp drop, with apartment prices in the city of Pyongsong, for example, falling by 50 percent during 2019 compared with the previous year. As a result, the construction sector saw declining levels of investment by the donju.Footnote ³⁸ At the same time, surveys of refugees who left North Korea in 2019 found that alongside the absolute decline in the scope of market activities, households’ participation in the official economy had fallen to 71.6 percent, the lowest rate since the survey began in 2012. This is suggestive of the negative impacts that the sanctions have had on the ability of the state-owned enterprises to pay wages to their workers: The enterprises became increasingly reliant on the market and cross-border trade for investment funds and materials, and for sales of output after the 1990s, and as the sanctions impeded cross-border trade, these enterprises foundered.Footnote ³⁹ By extension, their decline is likely to have considerably impeded the state’s efforts to address its own fiscal crisis through the taxation of market activities, and the fiscal crisis in turn would likely force the state to further reduce social services on which women had relied, such as childcare and public education, thereby increasing women’s burdens at home.Footnote ⁴⁰

Conclusion

The DPRK government has frequently been criticized for diverting resources toward its nuclear and other weapons program, resources which could otherwise have been used to provide greater social welfare and security for its people. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the North Korean system was very much one born of a war that remains effectively unresolved to date. Indeed, the country has been threatened with nuclear weapons for longer than any other state in existence. Due to this history of hostility, sanctions not only serve to worsen the precarious situation, but deter the engagement and trust-building that are required for a lasting resolution. In this political context, sanctions have the paradoxical effect of legitimizing and compounding draconian measures taken by the North Korean government in the name of national security. Sanctioned states are typically able to shift the blame for their economic mismanagement onto the international community, and indeed, sanctions, in practice, do often fail to make a distinction between the state and its people.Footnote ⁴¹ North Korea also does not enjoy the kind of external alliances enjoyed by its counterpart, South Korea. It remains one half of a divided country with a unified history going back at least a thousand years, before the division imposed by external forces in 1945. The North therefore competes with the South for legitimacy to represent Korea, a contest in which the North increasingly has found itself on the losing side. The state’s precarious geopolitical environment thus precludes any realistic possibility of Pyongyang accepting demands for full denuclearization in exchange for sanctions relief. Other socialist states in Asia, such as China and Vietnam, were able to improve their relations with the US through concessions that did not impact their overall national security. For North Korea, on the other hand, the key demand made by the US (and by UNSC resolutions), namely the dismantling of its nuclear weapons program, would undermine the very cornerstone of North Korea’s security strategy through nuclear deterrence.Footnote ⁴² North Korea’s steadfast adherence to its nuclear policy is thus a result of its fundamental geopolitical insecurity.Footnote ⁴³

While North Korean militarism may therefore have proved to be a successful deterrent so far, the country’s economic situation, made much worse by the sanctions, presents yet another form of insecurity. At the same time, if the sanctions are intended to force North Korea to halt its nuclear weapons program, they have clearly failed. To the extent that the intent was to provoke public discontent and thereby create pressure against the sanctioned state, we know that sanctions often have the opposite effect, as Dursun Peksen describes in Chapter 15 in this volume. In the case of Iran, rather than opening space for dissent, sanctions and international isolation further closed avenues for women’s organizing.Footnote ⁴⁴ In North Korea, the space to maneuver for women further narrowed, as women lost their jobs in the formal sector and were forced to provide for their families by participating in the informal sector, sometimes at risk to their own safety.

While the advent of targeted sanctions supposedly resolved the problem of indiscriminate harm to the population, that has certainly not been the case with regard to North Korea, where the most recent sanctions explicitly aimed to cripple each of its major economic sectors. For this reason, they effectively function as though they are comprehensive, with the expected consequences, as families and communities struggle with everyday basic needs. Women are particularly impacted, as they shoulder most of the care work needed as doctors, nurses, teachers, managers, and caregivers within the family and within the community. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare just how much care burden falls upon women in times of crises, and the extent to which essential services are provided by women and other undervalued persons in society. Mainstream debates on sanctions that revolve around questions of the efficacy and legality of sanctions fail to capture the human experience. The “targets” and intended “effects” that abstractly frame the terms of the debate hide the deeply gendered impact, as the majority of women and girls in North Korea must trek daily to provide clean water for their families, spend time at the marketplace to acquire food, and incur dangers in cross-border contacts for trade.Footnote ⁴⁵