Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World by Benjamin R. Young

Abstract

Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader centers on North Korea’s “Third Worldism,” tracing its international-relations outreach to developing nations starting in 1956, when leader Kim Il-sung consolidated his domestic power, to 1989, when North Korea hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students. Young draws from such rich sources as newspaper articles from around the world, third-party embassy records, and North Korean state media reports. His globe-spanning study captures North Korean activities in far-flung locales, from Senegal to Mexico, Sri Lanka, Cuba, Vietnam, Uganda, Pakistan, Egypt, Zambia, and many more. It even reaches so far as the tiny Micronesian island nation of Nauru, where the president explained that his nation already had “relations with some countries they didn’t really like” when justifying his acceptance of North Korea’s diplomatic overtures in 1982 (123). These engagements, we learn, served several purposes for North Korea. Internationally, Kim Il-sung promoted the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (dprk) as a model for other struggling nations seeking to move beyond binary Cold War entanglements, arguing that they could achieve independence and self-reliance by following the dprk’s philosophy of self-sufficiency, or Juche. Meanwhile, domestically, North Korean media outlets highlighted these initiatives as evidence of the respect that Kim Il-sung and the dprk commanded on the world stage while obscuring the fact that they had been initiated and funded by the North Korean government.Young reveals that these campaigns had mixed results. North Korea’s training for staging overseas “friendship games” proved to be its most enduring diplomatic initiative. Brisk sales of bespoke statues to dictators abroad showcased the dprk’s unique expertise, earned the country praise from outside authoritarian regimes, and infused the North Korean economy with much-needed hard currency. Less successful, however, were funded North Korean friendship societies, laudatory articles about North Korea planted in local newspapers, and sponsored dprk state visits for foreign dignitaries. At times, these efforts appear to have engendered an appreciation for North Korea’s development model in unlikely corners, but, by and large, they were dismissed as overt and simplistic propaganda or exploited for profit by target audiences, doing little to improve North Korea’s international image. More importantly, Young shows that the North Korean government increasingly approached target nations not as diplomatic partners but as sites for hacking and theft, for disseminating anti–South Korea propaganda, and for staging direct terrorism against adversaries (like the 1983 attempted assassination of South Korean leader Chun Doo-hwan in Rangoon [Yangon]).This book’s central focus on long-term, proactive engagement rather than on episodes of defensive brinksmanship provides a welcome addition to studies of dprk international diplomacy. Nonetheless, Young does not substantively engage with international-relations scholarship and political theory that would permit a comparison of North Korea’s practices with those of other nations. Likewise, Young could have used the extensive research about North Korea’s diplomatic history with its larger allies, such as China and the Soviet Union, and with its adversaries, such as the United States, to situate North Korea’s developing world initiatives within a broader strategy, providing perspective on the goals and effects of these campaigns. In sum, Young’s Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader tells a fascinating story, but its primary contribution lies in expanding our knowledge of a lesser-known aspect of North Korean diplomatic history rather than in an elucidating theoretical framework or an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology.