The Policy of Enforced Isolation in North Korea and Albania: Its Role in Regime Survival and Regime Collapse

Abstract

The article seeks to analyze the North Korean regime’s isolationist policy, which is focused more towards its own population than towards other countries, as a key survival strategy. North Korea and Albania shared many historical and ideological similarities between the 1940s and the 1980s, but their fates diverged when Albania was eventually engulfed by protests and underwent regime change. Albania’s Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha had done his best to keep the population isolated, as has his North Korean counterpart. But Albanians under Hoxha’s successor Ramiz Alia began to gain access to unfiltered international news from neighboring countries. In contrast, North Koreans have been sealed off from the outside world. Most North Koreans were, unbeknownst even to themselves, living in an information-deprived world. If this type of domestic isolation is systematic on the part of the regime, North Koreans will only begin to realize their predicament and its source once they begin to receive unfiltered and authentic information from the outside world.