Luckily, I’ve managed to keep writing and posting material elsewhere. In particular, since June 2015 I’ve been working with the Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, on the topic of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the relationship between people and technology.

As a rapid way of filling the gap since 2014, here are a set of links to pieces of writing I’ve done (either alone or with co-authors) that you might find interesting:

Learning from Martin Luther About Technological Disruption (October 2017, Project Syndicate)

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther used the printing press to spur debate on the Church’s practice of “indulgences.” The fact his efforts kicked off one of the most divisive periods of European history should serve as a reminder that while technology can support constructive debate, it can also fuel violent conflict.

Towards a human-centered model of economic growth (June 2017, Forum Agenda)

This paper outlines a narrative vision and policy agenda aimed at ensuring that the technological progress of the 21st century augments rather than substitutes for human potential and employment. It proposes a three-part programme to reorient the growth models of G20 economies towards this objective by designing social inclusion deliberately into their innovation ecosystems and economic policies in order to diffuse as widely as possible the overall gains in opportunity and prosperity enabled by technology and international economic integration

 What is the fourth industrial revolution? (January 2016, Forum Agenda)

Technologies are emerging and affecting our lives in ways that indicate we are at the beginning of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new era that builds and extends the impact of digitization in new and unanticipated ways. It is therefore worthwhile taking some time to consider exactly what kind of shifts we are experiencing and how we might, collectively and individually, ensure that it creates benefits for the many, rather than the few.

Five ways of understanding the Fourth Industrial Revolution (November 2015, Forum Agenda)

As new technologies combine with one another and are adopted across industries and sectors, they herald widespread change in the way we produce, work, interact and define ourselves. Here are five ways of looking at what that means for the world.

3 ways social innovation is changing the world (August 2015, Forum Agenda)

Did you know that civil society is innovating like crazy? All sorts of organizations, from well-known international NGOs to tiny yet burgeoning social organizations, are experimenting with new business models, new partnerships, new technologies and new ways of measuring impact.

How can Europe become more innovative? (August 2015, Forum Agenda)

Europe does not have a significant shortage of entrepreneurial talent or ambition – but it does have a shortage of dynamic firms that grow rapidly in both value and employment terms, with entrepreneurs and large businesses increasingly concerned about how they can innovate successfully in today’s highly competitive global markets. What will it take to make Europe more innovative?

Collaborative Innovation: Transforming Business, Driving Growth (August 2015, World Economic Forum)

To support the development of high-growth, innovation-driven economies across Europe, the Forum has focused for two years on fostering links between young, dynamic firms and large, established businesses. This report highlights approaches and strategies that business leaders and policy makers can take to create sustainable, pioneering and innovation-focused collaborations that benefit all parties involved.

Busting five myths about natural resources (November 2014, Forum Agenda)

Misconceptions about one of the most serious and widely discussed topics on the global agenda are at the heart of the World Economic Forum’s recent report, The Future Availability of Natural Resources: A New Paradigm for Global Resource Availability. This exploration of which resources will be available and for how long – involving over 300 experts and decision-makers – has uncovered that too often we rely on assumptions and clichés when thinking about supply, demand and the broader future of water, food, energy and mineral resources.

Our research indicates that growth in jobs and economic activity is correlated with young, fast-growing companies that bring something new to markets – through process, product or business-model innovation. However, despite having some of the most innovative economies in the world, Europe as a whole suffers in terms of the conditions for innovation and entrepreneurship, including measures such as technology adoption, commercialization of ideas and the number of young, highly successful firms.

Unfortunately, encouraging such ventures is difficult from a policy perspective, as what we are talking about is a complex lifecycle of teams of individuals interacting with different organisational forms, markets and regulation in order to bring an idea to life at a large scale. However, following a year of collaborating with the best and brightest in this area (including EC VP Neelie Kroes, Finnish PM Katainen, Estonian President Ilves, innovation guru Clayton Christensen, Europe’s top entrepreneurs, a wide array of leading CEOs and many, many others), we’ve come out with three interesting ways of helping European policymakers create helpful conditions for scale-ready entrepreneurs.

The first contribution from the project is a lifecycle model that helps illuminate and differentiate between various influencing factors in the journey of an entrepreneur (see the figure below). The first thing this model does is to highlight that the end goal is not a linear progression from idea to commercial scale, but rather a circular journey whereby serial entrepreneurs reinvest their energy, ideas and capital in subsequent activities. Secondly, the model helps people recognise that entrepreneurs move in teams, not just individually, through a variety of distinct phases: from the “stand up” phase involving the initial idea and motivation to take a risk in bringing it to life, through the “start up” phase where resources are gathered and execution occurs to create a viable business, then to the “scale up” phase where a step-change in terms of economic impact is realised by expanding markets, users, employees and value. Third, the model links each of these phases with different combinations of influencing factors, both individual and on an ecosystem level, which impact how a person or organisation progresses in their journey.

One useful piece of feedback we have received from policy makers is that this framework allows them to prioritise policy interventions depending on whether they are looking to inspire and prepare people to take risks, lower barriers to company formation, or scale existing businesses. This sounds obvious, but it is interesting how many policy conversations revolve around identifying interesting ways of intervening in one particular part of this journey, without considering whether this is the bottleneck in their country, sector or segment.

The second contribution of the project came through a survey of 1500 entrepreneurs, predominantly from Europe, and a series of interviews with top policy makers, both of which were designed to identify specific barriers within the different lifecycle phases. The final report will go into depth on these aspects, but the headline result is that, while conditions for scaling are perceived as the most unfavourable among the three phases, it is still heartening that only 37% of European entrepreneurs found these conditions unfavourable, with 41% judging them favourable (see figure below). That is a better result than many of our collaborators expected. However, if you compare this result to perceptions from North American survey respondents for their region, there is a wide gap: 64% of USA-based respondents claim that in the USA scaling conditions are favourable or very favourable. This gap might help explain why so many European ventures move to the US when they want to expand globally.

The value of the survey is not just the country-level results around assessing conditions, but the various suggestions from respondents as to what can be done to improve the environment, and what they themselves would be willing to contribute to in order to assist others. More on this when we publish.

The third contribution draws from these two previous pieces of work to focus and create momentum around series of activities on which policy makers, entrepreneurs and large businesses can collaborate to improve these conditions and make a tangible difference to entrepreneurial ecosystems in Europe. As a teaser for the final report, here are two areas where we are planning significant work in the Forum community:

1. Reducing the fragmentation within European and member state activities around support for entrepreneurs. There is a lot of activity already in this space but it is unfortunately characterised by a lack of transparency, high search costs and numerous sub-scale initiatives that tend to be focused at the “stand up” and “start up” phases. Thanks to online platforms, big data and the possibility of new European-level coordination, there is the opportunity to assist entrepreneurs to find the support they need at the right time, meanwhile connecting service providers to share information and, where possible, join forces for greater scale.
2. Focusing on the opportunities for collaboration across sectors and between young and old companies. The economic structure of Europe is dominated by a wealth of SMEs, many of whom seem to have hit growth limits, and large incumbents. Both young / small companies and old / large companies can benefit from interaction whereby one brings innovation and the other brings market access. However, compared again to North America, there is less of a “symbiotic relationship” between these groups. New tools for collaboration as well as opportunities to interact can help solve this.

The overall goal of this work was to drive focus and momentum around the best examples of how stakeholders can support entrepreneurial activity, focusing of course on Europe, but which would also be applicable elsewhere. If I were to sum up the overall strategy for policy makers, it would be “focus, connect and partner” – identifying leading activities, connecting stakeholders by creating transparency around who does what, then helping people and organisations partner across sectors, countries and organisational types. This is as true for ventures driving new economic activity as it is for those organisations looking to help entrepreneurs.

For the intermediate report of the “Fostering Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurship in Europe” project, click here. For the final report due to launch June 24, stay tuned.

Finally, this work, and in particular the partnering aspects, has led us now to think much harder about the topic of “Open Innovation Ecosystems”. As we work to drive more activity around entrepreneurship, we’ll also be starting a new research effort to look at how new models of innovation across traditional boundaries might be adopted to lift Europe’s growth trajectory.

Last week I was in Prague, giving a speech on the competitiveness of the Czech economy to the Office of the Government and stakeholders of the National Reform Programme. The Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, released last month, says the following:

The Czech Republic falls by seven places this
year to 46th position. Concerns remain about the quality
of the country’s public institutions, with public trust in
politicians ranked an extremely low 146th, ahead of only
Argentina and Lebanon globally. The macroeconomic
environment has worsened slightly with rising deficits
and debt, although (at 55th) it remains more stable
than in much of the rest of Europe. Czech businesses
are relatively sophisticated and innovative, buttressed
by a strong uptake of new technologies. The country’s
competitiveness would be further enhanced by
improvements to the educational system and by injecting
greater flexibility into the labor market.

Competitiveness is all about the conditions and factors influencing productivity, in order to maintain current living standards and to support future growth. The Forum’s methodology combines three subindexes (and 114 indicators in total) to produce an overall competitiveness score which is then ranked. These subindexes (basic requirements, efficiency enhancers, and innovation and sophistication factors) are weighted differently depending on the stage of development of a country.

It seems that, both relative to other countries and in terms of raw scores, conditions and factors across all subindexes have been declining for the Czech economy. While this isn’t great news for the Czech government, especially in terms of headlines, a deeper look into the data reveals some nuance that indicates where the upside and opportunity lie:

• Weaknesses related to institutions, particularly the level public trust in politicians and elements linked to public sector efficiency, are certainly dragging down the country’s scores, with the Czech republic 88th in the world overall for its institutions. However I’d wager that this represents significant room for improvement in coming years – the country has recently endured some scandals and setbacks, but the opportunity is there for a new government to use the crises as motivation to improve on measures of ethics and corruption, as well as implement reforms in legal frameworks to improve dispute resolution.
•  The country ranks 37 out of 148 in terms of “efficiency enhancers” – elements linked to higher education and training, goods, labour and financial markets, tech readiness and market size. For innovation-driven economies like the Czech republic, these are weighted at 50% in the index, meaning that reforms here heavily impact the overall assessment of competitiveness. This is with good reason – efficient goods, labour and financial markets are critical to ensuring that resources are able to flow where they are most productive, and focusing on the conditions for business operations, incentives for working, legal rights and retaining talent have the potential to further increase the Czech economy’s productivity.
• The Czech economy is regarded as relatively innovative and sophisticated relative to other countries – its highest-ranked subindex focuses on these factors and puts it 36th in the world. The country has made large investments in its innovation ecosystem in recent years – ensuring that these investments translate into higher capacity for innovation will mean creating more links to industry, continuing to support scientific research institutions and looking at ways to improve the availability of scientists and engineers.

A Czech paper asked me if I thought it was possible that the country could be in the top five globally in 20 years time. Certainly possible, I answered; the future is wide open and while there is lots of work to do to catch up with Switzerland, Singapore, the US and Finland (to name a few), there is also lots of potential.

My mother and I just finished the awesome, 180km high-mountain walk that is the Tour du Mont Blanc over 10 days. It was something that we’d been discussing for a while, combining Mum’s love for long-distance walks with my obsession with the Alps. We learned a lot from the experience, and thought that it would be worthwhile sharing some reflections here for others planning to do the Tour du Mont Blanc in the future.

1. You don’t need much stuff. We carried all our own gear and managed to get everything down to a weight of about 8kg for mum, 10kg for me without water. We based our gear on the really useful list at www.walkingthetmb.com, and noted that:

• you really don’t need a sleeping bag – extra blankets at refuges are fine for cold nights
• two shirts, one pair shorts and one trousers was more than enough for day wear
• having long underwear and a warm jacket proved useful for evenings, even in July
• trail runners proved fine as footwear – but they definitely needed to be waterproof
• we definitely needed the hiking poles and earplugs
• leave your bulky DSLR at home and take a Fujifilm x100s instead – just as good quality, far lighter and you’ll end up using it more

2. Snow can make things pretty tricky, so plan accordingly. We walked from July 4th to July 13th 2013, after an excellent winter in the Alps that featured lots of snow. As a result, we crossed literally kilometres of the white stuff, some of which was angled across steep gullys where a fall would be very dangerous indeed. To avoid the challenge of snow, we’d recommend doing the TMB in September if you have a choice (August apparently is super busy). We saw only a few people using crampons, but we bought Mum a stretch-over set in Courmayeur nonetheless, which made her much more comfortable on long stretches of steep, sometimes quite slushy, snow. The large amount of snow also meant the river crossings were more challenging than normal, and we ended up with wet feet a few times.

3. Walking clockwise works really well. The traditional TMB route starts in Les Houches and proceeds counter-clockwise towards Contamines and the Col du Bonhomme. We started in Montroc and went clockwise towards Col de Balme and Col de la Forclaz (except on the final day, where we did the Tre-le-Champ to Flegere stage also starting from Montroc, to be able to start from our place and do the ladders going up). There are two big advantages of going clockwise – first, you see different people every night, as opposed to moving with the same vague group over the 10 days or so. Second, it feels like no-one else is walking with you. Since it seems that 90% of people doing the TMB tackle it anticlockwise, when going the other direction you start off each morning with no-one in front or behind you. Then, after 2 or 3 hours of walking, you’ll cross a bunch of people coming towards you from the next refuge, pretty much all at once, fairly bunched up. After they’ve gone, silence and not a person in sight again. Excellent.

4. The refuges in the middle of stages are really worth staying at. Most of the English speakers on the TMB (with British and Americans constituting the majority of TMBers when we were doing it) follow the Cicerone guide, and stick fairly closely to the stages as described. Since we were flying a bit more by the seat of our pants, booking accommodation a night or so ahead and walking a bit more or less depending on how we felt, we ended up staying at many refuges that fell in the middle of the guided stages (e.g. Rifugio Elena, Maison Vieille, Mottets etc). These turned out to be the best we stayed at – the best food, the best service and they weren’t fully booked, so we often had only a few people in the dortoir. Which means less snoring.

5. Prepare to walk for far longer than the guide (and the signs) indicate. Going up steep-sided mountains carrying a decent pack, crossing snow, fording rivers, avoiding landslides, checking the map and stopping to take photos of marmots and ibex – these all make the trip slower and more interesting. Only on one day did we beat the guide’s estimates, and that was because we consciously stretched out and powered on to see if we could. Every other day we were an hour or two behind the estimated times even without counting breaks. Which is absolutely fine when the weather is good, by the way, but something to keep in mind if you need to arrive at a refuge or get off an open slope by the time the afternoon storms roll in.

6. You don’t have to carry all your gear. The majority of people we encountered doing the TMB were only carrying small, light packs during the day, as they were with a tour group that moved their main bag for them from hotel to hut to hotel. The advantage of this is obvious – you can ease the load on your body by only carrying an extra layer, lunch, camera and water up and down all the hills (though we did see people carrying day packs that looked more loaded than our backpacks). The big disadvantages are first, that you have to walk to the group schedule (no going a bit further, taking a rest day or doing a detour to end at a different hut), and second, we presume that some of the high mountain huts (e.g. Refuge du Col de la Croix du Bonhomme) must be off limits, as there isn’t road or telepherique access for the people transferring bags.

7. Make sure you’re fit before you go. Mum may have had her Seniors card for almost a decade, but she walks for two hours every morning at home and has completed numerous 1000km plus walks across Europe. Even she was surprised by the physicality of the TMB, particularly with a pack – it’s pretty much all up and down and when you are often above 2000m you need to be able to handle the altitude too. You get fitter as you go along, but tackling ascents such as that from Contamines to Col du Bonhomme or from Tre-le-champ to Posettes requires the ability to just keep climbing up for 3h or so.

All in all, an amazing, awe-inspiring, ridiculously photogenic walk that Mum and I both enjoyed immensely and which I’d love to do again the other way around soon. Or, in my dreams, all in one go.

Pentagon Says Nuclear Missile Is in Grasp for North Korea

U.S. Designs a Korea Response Proportional to the Provocation

A “proportional” response that involves hitting North Korean targets sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would stir up the hornet’s nest, taking things up a notch. And the hornets are likely to have nuclear missiles? Awesome.

Let me try to put that another way. North Korea has a long history of provocation – including shooting down US military planes (on Kim Il-sung’s birthday), killing US soldiers, many attempts to assassinate South Korean Presidents, and of course the recent military shelling of Yeonpyeong. Throughout these acts, North Korean leaders have acted with extreme confidence, even in directly challenging the world undeniable military superpower. At each stage, the response from the US and the South has been not to react militarily, but instead to bolster US-South Korean defensive capabilities through exercises and assets.

Will this simply be another cycle of aggression then appeasement? Koreans that I speak to argue yes, that it is a matter of Kim Jong-Un asserting power both internally and externally, and that the current rhetoric is a calculated, logical gambit with an ultimate goal of  attention, dialogue that gives Kim good photo ops and makes the West look weak, and possibly some much-needed source of aid or other resources.

However what worries me is four conditions:

1. An unstable internal situation in North Korea. Kim Jong-Un is the new, “Great Successor” in the Kim regime, relatively worldly himself given his schooling in Switzerland, yet surrounded by a generation of military leaders who have been incredibly isolated themselves and who see the cold war as the glory days of North Korean power. Given the role that the Kim cults of personality have played in reassuring the population that their sacrifices on behalf of the country are not in vain, it is reasonable to think Kim wants to prove himself to his people. To what lengths will the regime go to demonstrate power externally, and consolidate it internally around Kim Jong-Un, and how “logical” will or can they be in calculating the response? Given Kim Jong-il’s reputation as the leader who made the country a nuclear power, in what ways will the son look for a way to militarily distinguish himself?

2. A nuclear, missile-capable DPRK. The stakes are much higher today than they previously were, both in terms of the threat and the consequences of action. At what stage will the US and South Korea, perhaps with China’s tacit consent, decide to attempt a pre-emptive knock-out of DPRK’s missile and nuclear facilities? It’s been done before here, and here. And what would DPRK military officials do if they thought this was even a significant possibility?

3. Fragile North Korea-China relations. One of North Korea’s sources of strength has been its ability to rely on its traditional allies to the North – Russia and China – both diplomatically and for resources. However it is unclear how close Kim Jong-Un and the Chinese leadership are, and the recent references by President Xi Jinping indicate that China is increasingly concerned by DPRK’s words and actions.

As always, I hope (and I think it’s likely) that my concerns are unjustified. But with new relationships like this, the possibility for missteps are higher than normal. And a misstep with a nuclear power, particularly a remarkably confident one which looks back longingly to the cold war as the period where the country was most stable and prosperous, could have disastrous consequences.

Let’s hope that instead the relationship is more aptly regarded as Jon Stewart satirized on the Daily Show recently – an amusing “rebound war” sideshow that is temporarily concerning, but ultimately nothing that anyone has to worry about.

The latest escalation following North Korea’s successful missile test on Wednesday 12 December is a planned (and now impending) nuclear test, ostensibly in response to UN Security Council Resolution 2087. This is concerning beyond the simple provocation of a controlled nuclear explosion, the demonstration of available fissile material and a nose-thumbing at the UN;  the implication is that the regime is testing nuclear warheads which, combined with long-range missile technology, significantly raise the security stakes in the region.

The relevant piece from the statement by North Korea’s National Defence Commission (NDC) issued in late January reads:

We do not hide that a variety of satellites and long-range rockets which will be launched by the DPRK one after another and a nuclear test of higher level which will be carried out by it in the upcoming all-out action, a new phase of the anti-U.S. struggle that has lasted century after century, will target against the U.S., the sworn enemy of the Korean people.

Even North Korea’s “Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea” responded to the resolution with fighting words.

“Sanctions” mean a war and a declaration of war against us.

We have already declared that “we would react to provocation with immediate retaliatory blows and a war of aggression with a great war of justice for national reunification.”

…

All our service personnel and people will never allow the reckless confrontation moves of the group.

Those who dare stand in the way of our just cause will never be able to escape deadly retaliatory blows.

So, yeah. Back to those scenarios about the day after a truly region-shaking encounter between North Korea and one of its many enemies…

PS. Thanks to the Peterson Institute’s “Witness to Transformation” blog for keeping me up to date on what’s happening and for supplying the links to most of this material.

Unfortunately my analysis regarding North Korea’s desire to make a statement during 2012 seems to have been correct – on 1 December 2012 North Korea announced that it is planning a missile launch for the period surrounding the South Korea presidential election. It seems likely at this stage that DPRK will go ahead with the launch, perhaps as early as Monday 10 December, with weather as the main delaying factor.

Since then, the usual efforts have been made to forestall the event itself, and some less usual ones to prepare for it. NATO, the US and others have called for North Korea to halt the launch, the US PACOM has moved two warships closer to the peninsula for monitoring and missile defence, and Japan has reportedly authorised surface to air missiles for interception in the (rather unlikely, according to the trajectory coordinates provided by Pyongyang) event that it looks like the missile is heading towards Japanese territory.

South Korea’s stance is normal and expected. On the other hand – though I admit I’m not certain of this – I don’t believe that for the April launch the US specifically talked about moving ships with “ballistic missile defence capabilities” into the area. Official PACOM news releases don’t actually mention the missile defence or intercept angle (just referring to “monitoring“, but I would think that China would be rather sensitive to the US demonstrating its missile defence capabilities in that way.

The uncertainty now becomes around whether the launch occurs in such a way to invoke a stronger than normal response from Japan, South Korea or the US. With China-DPRK relations themselves at an uncertain stage with a new Chinese leadership and Kim Jong Un’s reported desire for greater independence, the China-Japan relationship in trouble and the timing of the South Korean election, there are many more variables for the important players to keep track of and therefore a more fragile regional balance to maintain. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Image from the excellent 38 North blog: http://38north.org/2012/12/sohae120612/

Having been turned onto books about North Korea by a book review in The Economist, I’ve managed to consume (a few only partially) a number of different books and accounts of the country over the past couple of weeks. And I’m definitely fascinated by the subject. Here is my reading list in case you are interested in sampling from my sample. It also serves as the bibliography to my previous post worrying about North Korea-driven geopolitical risk.

Books:

• The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future by Victor Cha. A wide ranging and excellent overview of North Korea, including extracts from many defector accounts, insights into the human rights situation, first hand descriptions of diplomatic events during and since the 2nd Bush administration and really interesting analysis of DPRK’s politics and economics. The first book I read on this topic and the most comprehensive I’ve come across so far. Some of the quotes from humanitarian reports are the most disturbing I have ever read.
• The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Chol-hwan Kang and Pierre Rigoulot. Very interesting first hand account of a North Korean gulag as told by a defector from a Japanese-Korean family who effectively grew up in a hard labour camp. George W Bush was a fan of the book and invited Kang to the White House. It covers mostly the 1970s and 1980s as Kang left DPRK in the 1992.
• Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden. I haven’t quite finished this. It’s the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, an escapee from a political camp in central North Korea in which he was born and raised, about his life. It’s not as gripping or well-written as the Aquariums of Pyongyang and confirms a lot of the attitudes and actions children and adults experience in North Korean concentration camps.
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. Beautifully written and very well executed coverage of the lives of six North Koreans all of whom were from the city of Chongjin. It covers the 1990s, and is particularly insightful when one wonders how people coped with the famine that stretched from 1994 to the end of the decade, killing North Koreans in the millions. It also is wonderful contextual companion to Victor Cha’s discussion of the role of market activities in relieving pressure on state-run distribution systems while simultaneously raising the populations expectations, causing a shift in power by encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour and allowing a trickle of information that is potentially dangerous to the regime’s control.
• Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin.  I haven’t finished this one, though I’ve read more than half of the book with lots of jumping around. In 800-odd pages it covers the lives of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, drawing on official accounts (ie propaganda), stories from defectors (including transcripts of interviews, which is a fresh way of presenting perspectives after reading previous, edited accounts) and other biographic material (such as files from the Soviet Union released after its collapse). The most interesting pieces I’ve read include Chapter 12, which looks at how socioeconomic status dictates gang behaviour and relationships amongst young men in the country, and Chapter 25, in which one high ranking defector argues that the regime would be very willing to push the nuclear button.
• The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh. This one I have only flipped through, but it seems to provide a rather broad overview of North Korea based on defector accounts, discussions with North Korean officials, interviews with those living close to the northern North Korean border and other reports and documents coming out of the country.
• The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea by Charles Robert Jenkins. An interesting, relatively quick read on what it was like for a US  Korean War deserter to live for forty years in North Korea. It particularly highlights the inventiveness and, frankly, wealth of handy man skills one needs to get by in the country. One of the most interesting elements here is that he married one of the Japanese abductees, Hitomi Soga.
• The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters by B.R. Myers. An excellent, very insightful book on North Korean ideology. As with Martin’s book above, it draw sheavily on the stories, teachings and art of the regime as a way of understanding the country. But while Martin tends to take these at face value and look for interesting biographical insights or indications of the leaders’ personalities in these sources, Myersapplies a more sociological analysis to drill down a number of layers beneath the propoganda, developing thereby his claim that the worldview of North Korea is “an implacably xenophobic, race-based worldview derived largely from fascist Japanese myth”. Myers argues that to focus on the official “juche” ideas of self-reliance is to mistake it for anything coherent and meaningful, and therefore to miss the far more powerful race-related narrative that lies beneath it. Fascinating.

Other interesting material:

• North Korea: Witness to Transformation. This is an excellent, regularly updated North Korea blog by Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard at the Peterson Institute. Fascinating and very up to date.
• United Nations Overview of Needs and Assistance in DPRK 2012. The UN’s overview of needs and assistance for DPRK provides a good scan of the current economic situation in the country and a fairly comprehensive overview of humanitarian issues, including food security, health, nutrition and sanitation, has a brief section on natural disasters, and provides UN agency sector response plans.
• A Completely New Blueprint’: North Korea’s Relations with China at the End of the Kim Jong-il Era by Adam Cathcart and Michael Mudden. This is a detailed and very interesting collection of documents looks at the frenetic interactions between Kim Jong Il and China in the last two months of Kim’s life (documenting 18 episodes of contact), drawing conclusions about what this tells us about North Korean politics and raising questions about how Kim Jong Un (who apparently had very little contact with China during the mourning period after his father’s death) will manage Sino-DPRK relations.
• Unofficial translation of Kim Jong Un’s speech on 15 April 2012, the 100th anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth

Let me first admit a few biases and caveats. For rather random reasons I’ve been reading a lot about the country over the past few weeks – so recency and availability biases are having a strong effect. I’m also not claiming any unique data or specialized knowledge in assessing North Korea – my opinions are my own and based on a review of a wide range of public sources. Nevertheless, a number of internal and external dynamics suggest to me that the recent quiescence of North Korea is not at all a stable state. In short, I’m concerned about a scenario that could unfold in the next few months where a) the DPRK makes a significant military provocation, in the form of another nuclear test or an unprovoked attack on South Korean (or even Japanese) assets, b) such a provocation escalates into a regional crisis involving military retaliation and c) the events catch people off-guard and unprepared and thus have particularly negative effects on markets and regional stability.

Now I know that making event prediction with a time attached means it is highly likely I am proved wrong (and I very much hope I am). But I work in scenarios – the point is not to be right but rather to ensure that both risks and opportunities are considered, discussed and prepared for, even if they never precipitate. So here are three reasons why you might take a few minutes to think about what would happen if North Korea unexpectedly made a move that destabilised the region:

1) Kim Jong Un, the new and unknown “great leader” (appointed following the sudden death of Kim Jong Il in December last year), has both some stripes to prove as well as a track record of military provocation. According to the North Korean press and other reports, he was involved in the October 2010 shelling of the South Korean island Yeonpyeong, and the ballistic missile test that took place in April 2009. More interestingly, he went ahead with the (failed) missile test earlier this year that seemingly contradicted the Feb 29 moratorium – this moratorium saw DPRK promise to suspend missile tests and nuclear activity in return for 240,000 tonnes of food aid from the US, but lasted only a couple of months. Depending on how the succession politics are playing outside within North Korea, it would not be unreasonable for additional aggressive actions to be deployed as evidence of the new leader’s strong hand and decisiveness. Any such attack would be characterised so as to entrench the public’s need for their new leader to defend against North Korea’s “enemies”. A show of military force would be right in line with the regime’s focus “‘military first” politics referred to by Kim Jong Un during his April 15 speech this year.

2) The timing is opportune – North Korea likes to act on symbolic days for its foes, and elections are occurring in both the US and South Korea before the end of the year. Its second nuclear test took place on the United States’s memorial day in 2009. It conducted ballistic missile tests on Independence Day in 2006, (unsuccessfully) testing a three stage missile with an intended range that would allow it to reach the continental united states. Attempting to disrupt the US election would fit this pattern, as would trying to influence the South Korean Presidential elections. Additionally, the year 2012 is an auspicious one for DPRK, being the 100th year since the birth of Kim Il Sung, and the regime has apparently for at least four years been on a mission to show that in 2012 North Korea will be “a great and prosperous nation”. Given that the attempted missile launch on April 13 this year failed, the regime may be looking for another way to show that strength.

3) The country, and regime, remains stressed for both internal and external reasons. While we now very little about what happens within the country in terms of protest and the possibility of revolution, it has been a hard year for DPRK in terms of flooding and agricultural production, as the food aid discussions have shown. Since July, there have been a spate of rumours internally about Kim Jong Un’s supposed plans for economic reform that suggest that change is afoot, but which also raises concerns about how to keep such changes from leading to popular criticism of the regime. The internal situation links to external concerns about the Arab Spring and global concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. North Korea would be keen to avoid the kind of scenario that has happened in Libya or Syria (particularly the former, where relinquishing nuclear weapons was involved), and is likely to be extremely sensitive right now about how the US and others are dealing with Iran. On September 1st DPRK signed a technology agreement with Iran that might herald a more concerted effort to transfer North Korea’s superior missile technology , bringing the two countries into closer alignment. The regime may consequently feel like weighing in on current events by reminding the world of its existence and nuclear strength, thus showing solidarity with Iran while demonstrating the country’s strength and uniqueness to its own population.

If you accept these points, the question then becomes whether a North Korean provocation would be serious enough to matter beyond raising heart rates in Seoul. It’s clearly not in North Korea’s interest to deliberately kick off a major confrontation that would lead to regional conflict. Going on past behaviour it is more likely that it would attempt to use its unique situation between the US, Japan, South Korea and China to remind the world of its dangerous capabilities and regional importance, whilst not going so far as to alienate its traditional allies or force the hand of its enemies. The desired payout would be a combination of global attention, aid flows and internal popularity. So the baseline expectation would be for a troubling act that didn’t quite cross the line into outrage; that the international community would condemn the act but with the Russians and the Chinese being rather diplomatic; and Japan, the US, South Korea and others would try to use the event as an opening for diplomatic moves and conditional aid offers to convince the North Koreans to give up their nukes.

However my sense is that the potential for escalation is greater today that it was previously. One driver of this links global dynamics and regional dynamics that mean parties that traditionally acquiesce to DPRK intimidation could decide to call North Korea’s bluff. There is no longer a “sunshine policy” in Seoul which would repay bad behaviour with kindness, and the US does not want to set a bad example for Iran or others with proliferation right now. A second driver is the trend by DPRK towards more aggressive military acts. Recent acts by North Korea have been far more serious and direct – for example the (alleged?) sinking of the Cheonan in March 2010 which killed 46 sailors and the Yeonpyeong artillary attack which killed four people on November 2010. Since North Korea probably hasn’t had a chance to build another three-stage missile to test, and its new launch sits may be waterlogged, it might opt next time for a less technologically symbolic, but more directly-damaging display of power.

These two drivers should be put in the context of international concerns that North Korea is developing ever-more threatening nuclear capabilities, which simultaneously raises the stakes for the international community to draw a line while emboldening North Korean aggression. Unlike Iran, the DPRK already has shown via two nuclear tests that it possesses the ability to make a bomb, and it likely has nuclear warheads. It already has SCUD-type missiles (the Rodong-1) with a range that includes Japan. And despite the failed test earlier this year, North Korea is undoubtedly getting closer to being able to deliver a warhead to cities further afield, possibly even the continental US. Missile tests conducted in April 2009 had much greater success than previous attempts, flying a long range, three-stage missile towards Hawaii over the Japanese island of Honshu. In his book “The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future“, Victor Cha, a former National Security Advisor for the Bush Administration argues that the advancing capabilities of North Korea’s missile programs could make it only the third country (after China and Russia) to be able to launch nuclear missiles on major US cities as soon as within four years. These facts make North Korea more confident, as it must feel that possessing such capabilities deters serious responses from other countries. But it also acts as a ratchet for conflict risk – bolder moves by DPRK might invoke bolder responses from South Korea and others which could quickly get out of hand, particularly in circumstances where lines of communication and relationships are uncertain and personalities unknown and third parties (ie Iran) are watching closely to gauge the strategies of different players. In this context, if a provocation looked serious enough to the US and Japan, it may shift the priority level of North Korea rapidly up in global geopolitical circles and lead to actual military action, with corresponding risks for South Korean and Japanese cities, and heightened stress for China and Russia.

To run this scenario further is to fear that a major misstep by the regime now, combined with internal pressures created by a poor, hungry, unhealthy and what looks like an increasingly frustrated population (according to defector accounts), could cause the North Korean regime and corresponding social system to collapse, leading to reunification in a “hard landing” scenario. Per capita GDP in DPRK is under $1000 per person – less than a twentieth of those in South Korea. Given such income disparities and the dramatic differences in infrastructure and productive capacity, estimates of the costs of reunification range from the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars – with a significant portion of this simply being humanitarian aid to help the millions in North Korea who are suffering from a lack of basic nutrition, health and other essential services, and the hundreds of thousands reputedly in labor camps and prisons in truly horrific conditions.

An unexpected collapse of the DPRK would be incredibly difficult for the region. Besides the direct cost to South Korea and the international community of a sudden reunification, there are of course broader geopolitical concerns. China has demonstrated that it has a stake in keeping the Kim regime intact – which means that if the regime falls, they may see the need to provide alternative stabilizing measures to ensure that refugees don’t flood across the border (and possibly, as Victor Cha has argued, to retain access to North Korea’s mineral resources). And yet, according to Cha, there is no official talk on how North Korea’s neighbours would together handle a sudden collapse of the country. Questions such as “Would the Chinese government send troops to maintain order in North Korea in the event of a regime collapse?” are troubling for everyone in the region.

Why might I be wrong in terms of timing or importance of an aggressive act? A few indicators that may weigh against my arguments above include:

A) Work by Kim Insoo and Lee Min Yong indicates an inverse relationship between security threats and agreements around food aid – so the recent discussions about aid may indicate some more breathing space.

B) Sino-DPRK relations, while suffering after the death of Kim Jong Il (who had been interacting extensively with the Chinese in the last few months before his death), still seem close enough for significant influence to be a factor in any provocation. I’m assuming China don’t want North Korea rocking the boat- (they apparently brokered the moratorium in February), so this may also push down on the probability of a military or diplomatic crisis initiatives by Kim Jong Un or his army in the short term.

C) The aforementioned chatter about land reform in North Korea, despite firm policies being absent from the latest parliamentary session, may suggest moves by the regime to improve popularity through efforts to raise standards of living rather than by shifting people’s attention to external enemies. Kim Jong Un may wait to see if this strategy provides him with the desired stability before reverting to external military tactics.

D) Any act resembling a third nuclear test would necessarily consume a significant amount of North Korea’s plutonium or enriched uranium. As Axel Berkofsky points out, the regime may want to “keep its powder dry” rather than expending processed materials, potentially ruling out a nuclear provocation.

These points notwithstanding, I’m worried about the possibility of serious North Korean military action and the risk of escalation into a regional crisis without adequate planning. As with other risks in the region, it’s the uncertainty around what would happen AFTER the initial geopolitical event that is the true source of concern. I very much hope I’m wrong, but I’m worried enough to urge a quick consideration of the issue at a time precisely when there already seems to be so many other geopolitical threats on the horizon.

For those interested in the reading I’ve been doing that serves as the source of much of this material (apologies for not footnoting every point of fact or source of inspiration), I’ve provided a bibliography in a separate post. I welcome your thoughts, comments and corrections!