North Korea ranks last in the world in the Democracy Index, with heavy restrictions on freedom of movement, speech, and assembly. Despite outside sanctions from the UN Security Council and diplomatic efforts to engage with the Kim regime, little progress has been made on denuclearization or improving the human rights situation in North Korea. The National Bureau of Asian Research spoke with Jieun Baek, the author of North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (2016), to gain insight on information dissemination, an alternative tool that governments and NGOs could use to undermine the regime’s information blockade and thus increase the space for change from within.
