Robert Pervine and colleagues employ Ice Cube’s 1990 song, “Endangered Species” to explicate the popular narrative on black men as an endangered species. This song was preceded by seven-years by Walter Leavy’s 1983 article in Ebony Magazine. Leavy introduced the black community to the provocative question, “Is the black male an endangered species?” To emphasize the deteriorating condition of the African American male, Leavy pointed to a number of factors including high rates of unemployment, homicide, and imprisonment, as well as a decrease in life expectancy that negatively impact their ability to prosper in life. The term “endangered species” refers to a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular area. Causes of the endangerment are usually the loss of habitats, poaching, and the unleashing of an invasive species, in this case police violence. The concept of black males as an endangered species was a reversal of the newly created sense in the US coming out of the 1950s and 1960s that America needed to improve the conditions of the Black Community in order to make good on its commitment to abolish the basic injustice of segregation.

The final substantive chapter examines the impact of international sanctions on the North Korean political economy. On the one hand, sanctions can be said to have exacerbated the tendency whereby North Korea has become an economic appendage of the booming Chinese economy. Indeed, we examine how the strengthening of sanctions have coincided with a shift away from economic relations with its erstwhile trading partners of South Korea and Japan and towards China. In terms of their impact, we argue that sanctions until 2017 at least largely failed to exert pressure on the North Korean economy, but they have at the same time deepened the illicit nature of its external economic relations. Even less have they translated into political pressure on the North Korean regime. We also examine the impact of increased enforcement by China of UN sanctions since 2017 and the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign. By examining the unintended consequences of sanctions, the chapter contributes to critiques of the mainstream sanctions literature and has direct policy implications.

In chapter seven, we examine the more direct material impact of the rise of China on the North Korean economy. This is examined through the lens of the broader debate regarding the impact of China’s rise on developing countries. We argue that while North Korea’s trade relations with China do resemble the resource dependency found in many Global South countries, North Korea has in recent years become increasingly integrated into cross-border regional production networks, with textile manufacturing being outsourced to North Korean producers as well as the growing dispatch of North Korean labour to China as a result of ongoing economic shifts within China itself. Although this relationship can be conceptualised as a form of economic dependency, North Korea’s economic collapse in the 1990s preceded its growing economic relations with China. In this sense, China has played an important facilitative role in North Korea’s economic recovery following the 1990s. However, concerns with the North Korean leadership regarding import dependency on China have in recent years led to a policy emphasis on domestic import substitution, a strategy that has had some success, albeit at relatively low levels of production.

In chapter two, we examine North Korea’s post-war recovery and its extraordinarily rapid transition towards a modern industrial economy in the 1950s. Here we draw attention to the massive financial support that North Korea received from elsewhere in the socialist bloc in that decade. The existence of the more advanced ally of the Soviet Union and its generous developmental assistance underpinned Kim Il Sung’s ultimately erroneous belief that North Korea would not have to sacrifice living standards in order to pursue a strategy of heavy industrialisation. Developmental strategies were, however, mediated through ongoing domestic political struggles. The factional disputes of the 1950s were in part related to questions of developmental strategy and were a reflection of the exiled nature of Korea’s communist movement during the colonial era and the nature of the various factions’ international linkages. In this chapter, we also draw attention to the substantive nature of North Korea’s developmental policies in the 1950s, including that of the socialisation of production. We also examine the decline of international aid to North Korea towards the latter part of the decade, and how that led to increased emphasis on mass mobilisation campaigns. This chapter consists of original, unpublished material.

In chapter six, we examine the degree to which the Kim Jong Un regime has proactively sought to reform its political economy in line with China’s economic reforms. While political considerations amongst North Korean policymakers have led to an explicit rejection of Chinese-style reform, the North Korean authorities have in fact carried out a number of reforms that are broadly similar in substance to those in China. In this respect, we pay particular attention to the reform measures carried out under the slogan of “Our-Style Economic Management Method.” The structural differences between the Chinese and North Korean political economies have, however, meant that the reforms have had divergent impacts. This relates to the fact that it could be argued that while China (and Vietnam) were in the 1980s pursuing a more classic model of rural-based industrialisation, North Korea faced a somewhat different challenge of structural adjustment as seen in the former Soviet bloc (and China’s northeast). The greater degree of industrialisation and urbanisation in North Korea have led to correspondingly greater bureaucratic resistance to reforms.

In chapter five, we argue that the economic collapse and famine of the 1990s profoundly transformed North Korea’s political economy. North Korea’s population increasingly turned towards market activities for their survival. North Koreans have continued to rely on markets for food and everyday goods, though marketisation has since expanded to the services, transport and housing sectors. While much of the existing literature has presented state and market as situated in a zero-sum relationship, we challenge the ontological separation between state and market to argue that the rise of the market in North Korea has been closely intertwined with the state. State officials have increasingly become involved in market activities, and the growing entrepreneurial class have entered into partnerships with officials as a means of negotiating the lack of clear property rights. The state has also taken a leading role in furthering the process of marketisation through the creation of new economic sectors, such as the mobile communications sector, for example.

The conclusion of the book recaps the main arguments, but also examines the recent emphasis of the Kim Jong Un regime on the “improvement of people’s livelihood” and on the development of science and technology. We also draw on the implications of the analysis for thinking about development and catch-up industrialisation more broadly. The conclusion also makes some projections concerning North Korea’s future development.

In chapter three, we examine the impact of the growing geopolitical tensions of the 1960s on the North Korean developmental model. The emerging Sino-Soviet split raised important questions regarding the reliability of North Korea’s socialist allies and further strengthened the impetus towards autonomous heavy industrialisation and the building of a strong independent military industrial sector. Furthermore, these geopolitical challenges were exacerbated by the establishment of a strong military regime in South Korea and the latter’s own national project of catch-up industrialisation. As a result, the negative economic consequences of militarisation became increasingly visible in the 1960s. This chapter also examines the emergence of Juche as the ruling state ideology in North Korea. Here, we engage with the existing literature on the topic by reinterpreting Juche as a particularly intense form of developmental nationalism aimed at legitimising the human mobilisation required to facilitate catch-up industrialisation. From the late 1960s, Juche thought was further transformed as an ideological justification to strengthen Kim Il Sung’s monolithic system, and as such, the previous emphasis on post-colonial catch-up development was diluted. Here, we draw parallels to the voluntarism of Stalinist and Maoist ideologies while highlighting the distinctiveness of this North Korean form of developmental nationalism.

In chapter four, we examine the North Korean regime’s attempts to overcome its secular economic decline through the opening of trade relations with the West in the 1970s. As elsewhere in the socialist bloc, declining growth rates and superpower detente led to growing engagement with the West. However, the collapse of raw material prices in the 1970s and North Korea’s failure to export its manufactures made it increasingly difficult for the country to service its debts and, as a result, Pyongyang defaulted in the mid-1970s. Locked out of world capital markets, North Korea made some attempts to attract FDI investment in the 1980s, though these attempts were limited and largely unsuccessful. As a result of a poor investment climate and continued geopolitical instability, North Korea became increasingly reliant on aid from the Soviet Union and China. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union along with the pragmatic shift in China’s foreign economic policy in the early 1990s immediately exposed North Korea’s excessive reliance on cheap energy imports. The earlier “privileges of backwardness” possessed by North Korea thus quickly became a curse, leading to economic collapse and to mass famine. North Korea’s strong developmental nationalism along with the almost complete elimination of civil society meant instead that the country’s socio-political system was relatively impervious to the transformations elsewhere in the socialist world between 1989 and 1991.

We argue that the North Korean developmental regime can be understood as an outcome of multiple combined historical lineages, including Korea’s history of colonial modernisation under Japanese rule and the imposition of the Soviet model of catch-up industrialisation in the immediate post-liberation era. The factionalised politics of the exiled anti-Japanese resistance movement and the ultimate ascendancy of Kim Il Sung’s Manchurian guerrillas led to a virulent form of postcolonial nationalism that emphasised autonomous national development rather than enmeshment with the socialist international division of labour. Following liberation, the new state underwent a series of "bourgeois democratic reforms” including a rapid land reform that addressed longstanding peasant grievances and ensured a degree of initial popular support for the new regime. The success of the land reform owed much to the fact of national division and that many landlords were able to flee southwards. The democratic reforms also served to integrate the population into the emerging corporatist mass organisations. Understood as a process of what Antonio Gramsci referred to as “passive revolution,” this has significant implications as to the state’s ability to mobilise society around developmental goals and contain any potential opposition to the state and its project of national development.