ABSTRACT
North Korea appears in today’s media mainly as a major, unrelenting threat to the international security in northeast Asia and beyond. These threats are typically, although not exclusively, associated with the regime’s defiant pursuit of nuclear armament and further uranium enrichment programmes. Its on-going belligerent rhetoric against its main antagonists, South Korea and the United States, also adds fuel to the perceived threat. More recently, however, North Korea has attracted a different kind of security concern from the neighbouring countries and international organisations. In this sphere, today’s North Korean state is considered more of a threat to its own population than to the outside world. This threat is often described in the language of human security and refers to the country’s extreme food and energy shortage crises that have devastated the fabrics of North Korean society since the mid-1990s (Smith 2005, 45–76; Kim 2012). Whereas concerns about North Korea’s threats to the regional and international security focus on the country’s nuclear arms capability, those about North Korea’s human security problems tend to highlight the country’s preoccupation with state security amid radical economic failures.
