In From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), Elidor Mëhilli argues that Communism in Albania “engendered a shared material and mental culture across borders without ensuring political unity.” In Guns, Guerrillas, and the Great Leader, Benjamin Young shows the extent to which policymakers and ordinary citizens in another prominent case of Communist heterodoxy—North Korea—drew from, and indeed tried to export, the “party central committees, recognizable slogans, surveillance techniques, censorship rituals, a mental map, and a new vocabulary” that were, for Mëhilli constitutive of the socialist world. Young argues that the relationships forged through the export of such techniques and ideas to Third World states fundamentally “shaped and molded North Korea's national identity,” causing officials in Pyongyang to foreground autonomy and anti-colonialism as the “core principles” of their state (p. 11).Guns, Guerillas and the Great Leader contributes to research on socialist internationalism by stressing that the Soviet Union was not always the one that laid down the ideological terms for such exchanges. Young's work additionally reveals the occasional frictions and competition that occurred between Communist states for influence in the Third World. Fostering relations with Third World states was, Young shows, a strategic priority for Communist countries keen to enhance domestic perceptions of their global influence, their standing in international organizations, and their hard currency supplies. Guns, Guerillas and the Great Leader sets out to recover the independent aspirations and impact of “small states” on the Cold War (p. 11). It should additionally be read by scholars interested in the blending of soft and hard power in Communist states’ Cold War diplomacy and the nature and limits of these same states’ autonomy from the Soviet Union. The book considers whether a special subset of Communist states existed—also including Albania—which had more in common with one another than with their nearer regional neighbors on account of what became their “renegade” status (p. 124).Young traces North Korean engagement with the Third World (defined “not [as] a geographic area but a global project … that prioritized anti-imperialism and anticolonialism”) from 1956 through 1989 (p. 1). The North Koreans first fostered bilateral relations with seemingly like-minded states such as Indonesia under Sukarno, Cuba under Fidel Castro, and Communist-ruled Vietnam. It then courted the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)—which it joined in 1975—to promote the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula. North Korean leaders quickly grew disillusioned, however, with what they perceived to be the NAM's crippling lack of consensus. By the 1980s, North Korea turned toward newly independent states in the South Pacific to “extend its diplomatic presence and undermine South Korea” (p. 116). North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung simultaneously made a concerted effort to broker relations with “African strongmen, such as Mugabe, Mengistu, and Museveni” (p. 135).At first, the North Korean regime presented itself—often rather successfully—as a model of non-capitalist development that Third World states could emulate. Toward the end of the 1960s, North Korea sought to export official reverence of Kim Il-Sung but met with more limited success, as Young points out. With the rise of Kim's eldest son, Kim Jong-Il, in the early 1980s and the initial shakiness of his claim to succession, Young notes a militarization of Pyongyang's exports to the Third World, hand in hand with a turn toward “guerrilla nostalgia” in domestic North Korean cultural production (p. 96). Shortly thereafter, the North Korean regime began to export its conflict with South Korea to the Third World, epitomized in 1983 by the attempted assassination of South Korean President Chun Doo-Hwan in Burma. What Young terms an increasingly “chauvinistic” attitude toward Third World states was accompanied by an increasingly chauvinistic tone in domestic North Korean politics (p. 151). Ultimately, Young argues, military exports came to be seen by the Kim family as a financial lifeline pure and simple: “if a country was willing to pay the North Korean government for arms or military training, Pyongyang would appease its clients regardless of their past loyalties or political ideologies” (p. 135). Even in these most “opportunistic,” economically minded times, however, Pyongyang still sought to raise its international prestige by exporting builders, civilian experts, and mass gymnastics instructors—and with them an ideology of Juche (p. 135).Young takes the meaning-making, and even world-making, potential of ideology seriously, showing how the concept of Juche (which he translates broadly as “self-reliance” and “self-sufficiency”) was not merely a front for weapons sales. He sees it instead as a helpfully capacious philosophy that resonated with the leaders of some of Pyongyang's allies, such as Ethiopia, Mali, and Mozambique (p. 79). Juche was at once an idea of “socialist modernity rooted in autonomy and anti-colonialism” and simultaneously “a pragmatic strategy used by the North Korean leadership to bolster its international status and prestige” (p. 3). That Juche found adherents overseas could have been stressed even more forcefully by including additional sources authored by Third World actors as a complement to the diplomatic communications forming the core of the book's source base. That some ideologies traveled better than others is made clear by Young, who devotes chapter 2 to a thoughtful exploration of why Kimilsungism was of only limited international appeal.North Korean policymakers resolved the tension between their desire for autonomy and membership of a broader Communist bloc by identifying “niches” (p. 10) for which they sought international renown. These niches included, above all, mass gymnastics instruction and “cheap arms” (p. 10). My own research into Czechoslovakia's weapons industry suggests that competition among Communist countries to sell arms to Third World states was fierce during the late Cold War, and stable associations and enduring loyalties between buyer and seller seldom developed. Regardless of whether Young is right in arguing that North Korea established an unassailable “niche” as an arms purveyor, he convincingly demonstrates that North Korea—through its relationships with Third World states—did find ways to further its own interests in a Communist bloc dominated by the Soviet Union and China. The North Koreans fostered strategic friendships with India, Malaysia, and Singapore, for example, to stem the spread of “Maoist extremism” in the face of China's Cultural Revolution (p. 32). Later, North Korea joined the NAM over Soviet protests and used it to “cozy up to” another Communist outlier, Yugoslavia (p. 92). The demise of East European Communism in 1989 came as a bitter blow to Pyongyang. The North Koreans lost their erstwhile leverage from relationships with Third World states.North Korea expunged all reference to Marxism-Leninism from its official party line in 1980 but, as Young's book shows, socialist internationalism extended far beyond questions of official doctrine. From construction sites to aerial bombardment, from gymnastics performances to newspaper columns, the venues for and material traces left by North Korea's socialist internationalism share important commonalities with its Eastern European equivalents. If what Young calls “speaking Juche” did not employ the “new vocabulary” of Albanian Communism quite word for word, then this language was at least strikingly mutually comprehensible. Were these languages of autonomy and anti-colonialism spoken only by “renegade” Communist states or also, in country-specific forms, by the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe? Young's comprehensive and accomplished lexicon invites researchers to decide.