Since June 2021, the National Committee on North Korea and the Wilson Center's Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy have worked together to implement a roundtable series called "Understanding North Korea." The series provided a platform for six emerging scholars to share their research ideas with peers and experts in the field and publish their findings in a format accessible to a general audience. Topics included North Korea's cyber activities, illicit finance, social controls, socioeconomic trends, and intra-elit power relations.

NCNK and the Wilson Center are publishing the first paper of this series, which has been written by Princeton Fung Global Fellow Dr. June Park. Dr. Park's paper provides critical analysis of North Korea's illicit financial activities in cyberspace - such as money laundering and crytpocurrency theft - within the context of the Juche principle of self-reliance. Read the full report here.