Military-first era governments used diplomacy and military deterrence to pursue regime security goals but, in the absence of a strong civilian or political counterweight to military-first logic, foreign policy evolved into that of ‘nuclear deterrence first – diplomacy second'.

The central goal of early military-first era foreign policy was to achieve normalisation of diplomatic relations with the United States. Military-first foreign policy pursued bilateral engagement with the United States and also engaged in diplomatic outreach worldwide to states of all ideological hues. The objective was to reduce North Korea's diplomatic isolation abroad, to enhance regime security and to obtain support for economic redevelopment. Kim Jong Il's government presided over a historic rapprochement with South Korea and rebuilt relationships with Russia and China.

Military-first government recalibrated their security policy after the 2000 election of George Bush, as DPRK decision-makers viewed activist United States foreign policy as heralding a military attack on North Korea. Military-first governments were not confident that their conventional armed forces could withstand military intervention and reasoned that they could use scientific expertise, technology and thefissile materials they possessed to develop a nuclear weapons capacity. The aim was to provide effective deterrence against foreign invasions. North Korea's decision to vigorously pursue the development of nuclear weapons precipitated what became known as the ‘second nuclear crisis'.

The military logic that underpinned DPRK domestic and foreign policy viewed political problems through a militarised lens in which thefirst choice of solution was via military means. Military-first era national security policy evolved to explicitly constitute regime security around the possession of an independently controlled nuclear weapons capacity. In 2013 Kim Jong Un announced that diplomacy and deterrence remained the foreign policy instruments of the military-first era but, in practice, the balance between the two was skewed so that nuclear deterrence remained the core of security policy.

In reaction to what became a permanent loss of reliable provision of food and basic goods from the state, the reiteration of coping reactions of the population reconstituted the economic system from the bottom up. In military-first era North Korea, markets became the primary source of supply of goods, including food, for most of the population. Marketisation was an uneven and unpredictable process as not all had access to market opportunities and those that did were not always able to take advantage of them, yet market transformation in North Korea was notable for its visible feminisation. Women's participation in market activities was not viewed as primarily commercially motivated but as providing for the family. In the face of a government that remained fundamentally hostile to liberal capitalism, women's participation in markets was not undertstood as a direct challenge to the economic organisation of the DPRK.

Marketisation was a social phenomenon and an economic process and also had political consequences. The daily practices of local Party of ficials promoted, legitimised and valorised market dynamics and had the unintended effect of contradicting central state messages, all of which were founded on the pretence that the state could control and direct economic and political life as it had in the Kim Il Sung era. Marketisation generated incentives for poorly paid officials to waive and reduce penalties such that the legal system became more porous and less of an absolute bulwark of state repression. The Party became the driver and de facto legitimator of marketisation and in so doing ceased to act as a well-functioning, reliable transmission belt for ideological education and revolutionary discipline. Marketisation brought new ideas along with goods imported from abroad. The continued inability of the government to deliver decent consumer goods and to provide a decent standard of living contrasted with what the population knew about the living standards of their neighbours in China and South Korea. The result was to diminish the authority and legitimacy of the leadership.

Government policy in North Korea hasn't changed much over the last twenty to thirty years; the mass mobilisation of the Kim Il Sung era morphed into military-first politics as the overriding objective of regime survival dominated domestic as well as foreign policies. Political freedoms remained non-existent and political reform off the political agenda. North Korean governments remained authoritarian and systematically subordinated individual human rights to regime security imperatives. Nevertheless, the breakdown in state capacity to reward acquiescence and punish dissent allowed North Koreans to carve out a space for the exercise of limited but important freedoms, especially in everyday economic decision-making.

The transformation of North Korea from a rigid command economy during the Cold War to the marketised society of today was not planned or foreseen but can be explained by understanding how North Korean people – not the government – took action by themselves, for themselves, in response to external and domestic exigencies. The self-directed activity of millions of small traders, led by women, who swapped, bartered, sold and generally engaged in the whole spectrum of non-state-directed, private economic transactions, transformed society from below and from inside; social change was not led from abroad.

In daily life, most people were forced into circumventing governmental regulations in order to find ways to survive and, in a few cases, prosper. The government's refusal to acknowledge the fundamental importance of marketisation in sustaining life and livelihoods increased the sense of dissonance between official pronouncements and real life. The failure to end economic hardship and the awareness of better living standards in China and South Korea combined to create a crisis of legitimacy for military-first governments. Strident government rhetoric directed against South Korea was partly designed to demonstrate to a domestic audience that even if North Korea was not as rich as the South, it was more legitimately Korean. Patriotism, as noted long ago by Disraeli, was the last resort of the scoundrel.

The aim of Japanese colonial policy was to incorporate Korea into an expanding empire as a subordinated supplier of raw materials and labour whose inhabitants were to be stripped of national rights and aspirations. The intent was to eradicate Korean national identity and to force Koreans to assume loyalty to the Japanese state and the Emperor. The politics of colonialism brought annexation and militarised occupation enforced by a coercive police apparatus. The economics of colonialism brought rapid industrialisation accompanied by mass migration that provided labour for the huge new manufacturing plants established by Japanese business in the north-east of the peninsula, in what is today the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). The social dislocations brought about by colonial policy combined with the repression through which policy was enforced engendered the radicalisation of the population.

The denial of Korean independence and national identity and the increasingly militarised occupation, combined with the absence of outlets for moderate opposition to Japanese policies, narrowed the political options open to Korean nationalist leaders. Peaceful demonstrations failed to achieve political change, nationalist leaders were often forced into exile and some pursued guerrilla warfare from bases across the contiguous Chinese border. The Japanese military ferociously hunted down and killed members of armed opposition groups, and Kim Il Sung, based first in Manchuria and then in the Soviet far east, was one of the very few survivors of Japanese retribution.

Soviet troops, representing the Allied powers, entered and occupied northern Korea in August 1945. The thirty-eighth parallel almost immediately hardened into a territorial and ideological border between two political quasi state-like bodies in the northern and southern parts of the peninsula. The Soviet Union did not intend to remain in Korea but did intend to leave behind a regime friendly to the communist superpower. Soviet authorities promoted Kim Il Sung as de facto political Leader of the north and, in 1948, supported Kim Il Sung as the first Leader of the newly established sovereign state of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

The United States, Japan, much of the rest of the world and a significant part of the population of South Korea viewed North Korea as constituting a threat to international security because of its very nature as an aggressor state, variously termed ‘rogue', ‘outlier' or just plain ‘mad'. From this perspective, the threat was magnified exponentially by North Korea's possession of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear armaments. China and Russia did not share the rogue state perspective on North Korea, but they did not support North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

The United States government was understood by allies and adversaries as the necessary leader of global negotiations with North Korea given the historic, unresolved conflict between the two states and the dominant position of the United States in East Asia. East Asia was important for United States governments but after 9/11 and the ensuing ‘war against terror' security priorities initially shifted to the Middle East and United States policy concentrated its efforts on securing alliance structures, most notably with Japan, and focused on managing complicated relations with China, its economic partner and erstwhile political adversary. United States policy became one of containment as, other international priorities, combined with domestic political opposition to offering North Korea inducements, precluded radical initiatives to resolve the Korean conflict. After the United States and the DPRK came close to war in June 1994, military force was never again considered a viable policy instrument because of the fear of damaging retaliation against Seoul. United States administrations were left with few negotiating instruments other than economic sanctions and the strategic calibration of humanitarian assistance programmes to support diplomacy.

The two-term administration of President Obama developed a policy of ‘strategic patience' and called for China to do more to encourage the DPRK to denuclearise. International organisations, states and campaigning non-governmental organisations (NGOs) supported the call for North Korea's denuclearisation and campaigned for human rights reform in North Korea.

Kim Il Sung's North Korea is conventionally understood as if there were few social cleavages other than those founded around political fault lines. Kim Il Sung attempted to create a monolithic society in which social differentiation was always a function of the political system, but to think of Kim Il Sung as having been uniquely successful in achieving the absolute subordination of the society to the state is misleading. Kim Il Sungist society was also shaped by multiple identity markers including occupation, geographical provenance, gender and generation.

Kim Il Sung set out to create a society where loyalty to the Leader provided the most important qualification for social status and privilege. Occupational status also followed political allegiance as the best jobs were reserved for Party members and officials. To the extent that Kim Il Sungist politics created a new social structure it was through reinforcing the power and privilege of Party members over and above the broader society. North Korean society was not, however, a historical and social tabula rasa. Regional differences, especially between the north-eastern Hamgyong provinces and the south-western Pyongyan provinces, remained salient even as they were attenuated by proactive regional redistributive policies.

Despite the social dislocation caused by colonial policies and the Korean War, Kim Il Sungist North Korea retained and embedded some very long-standing social conceptions, including a view of women as natural home-makers. Kim Il Sungist policy was to valorise women as mothers although not all of Kim Il Sungist social policy resonated with conservative, historically constituted social norms. Kim Il Sung was resolutely anti-Confucian in that he consciously implemented policies that sought to overturn social relations that had prioritised age and experience over youth. The mix of modernity and tradition in Kim Il Sungist social policy was demonstrated in the recognition of the family as the core unit of the national society but in Kim Il Sungist society the family was important as a micro-unit of Kim Il Sungist politics whose main function was to educate future generations of revolutionary cadres.

In the post-war era, Kim Il Sung's primary goal remained the national reunification of both Koreas under the leadership of the North. The ambition was to build a militarily powerful state based on a monolithic society in which, as a matter of daily practice, every individual would be subordinated to the Leader's political directives. Ideological suasion was meant to socialise the population into voluntary acquiescence but, failing persuasion, enforcement mechanisms were provided by a political system that formally and organisationally subordinated state, Party and societal structures to the Leader.

Political aims were explicit and formulated in the Juche ideology that was invented, sponsored and promulgated by the North Korean state. The most important goal of Juche ideology was to legitimate and uphold the Leader's autonomy in domestic and foreign policy. The North Korean state assigned exclusive authority and power to the ‘monolithic' Leader and explicitly stated that it was the Kim family dynasty that provided ‘continuity of leadership' that was essential to success in the building of the socialist state. The Juche ideology trumpeted the virtues of ideological and political education over material or economic rewards as a mechanism of state-building. In foreign affairs, the remit of Juche was to assert a rather innocuous notion of self-reliance and commitment to the principle of national independence in international affairs.

Post-war state-building was derived partly from Soviet models. It was also a product of what Kim understood as the lessons of practical experience of wartime mobilisation. Kim Il Sung set out to create ‘Socialism in our own style'. The aim was to institutionalise Kim's power and authority within an integrated state/Party/society complex in which the goals, aims and interests of the Leader were embedded and implemented. Points of view that differed from those of Kim Il Sung were thus inherently traitorous to the DPRK and the entire Korean nation, according to a North Korean ideology that proclaimed the exclusive national credentials of the Kim leadership.

Military-first governments did not abandon social policy but refocused on priority areas, including food security, public health and education. Living standards improved compared to the famine years but not enough to allow most of the population freedom from economic insecurity. The core of government social policy was designed to improve food security and the core social group to which food security policies were addressed was children. Nutritional standards improved so that the threat of starvation as measured by what nutritionists call ‘wasting', which is a measure of the ratio of weight to height, fell below that of East Asia and the Pacific Asia as a whole. Improvements in nutrition were partly due to government interventions and partly because access to market opportunities for some of the population provided a safety-net that had not existed in the famine years.

Life expectancy diminished for men as well as women but the physical burden of market participation was disproportionately carried by women, especially mothers of young children who worked in markets and bore the brunt of heavy physical work in the home. One consequence was the persistently high maternal mortality rate and infant mortality rate (the death rate of children under one year old) that correlated with the poor health of mothers. Nevertheless, the underfive mortality rate, a standard international indicator of child wellbeing, steadily improved and this was partially because of the successful campaigns against tuberculosis, malaria and the effective national immunisation campaigns.

The government expanded education provision but educational facilities were under-resourced and nurseries, schools and colleges became reliant on locally acquired inputs. Enrolment remained high but attendance suffered as the educational institutions were without sufficient material resources and enough staff, many of whom had disappeared into the market. Children bene fited from the decreased ability of the state to exert suffocating levels of social control in the education system but parents had extra burdens as they had to help provide resources for schools in lieu of state-supplied inputs.

In June 1950 the two Koreas went to war against each other to re-unify Korea. Kim Il Sung's aim was to rid the peninsula of United States troops and establish a communist, Kim Il Sung-led polity throughout the Korean peninsula. The aim of the President of South Korea, Synghman Rhee, was to unite Korea under southern leadership. China sent over a million troops and the Soviet Union provided military assistance to Kim Il Sung, while a United States-led United Nations coalition fought on the side of South Korea. Both Koreas suffered terrible physical devastation and millions died while the North suffered disproportionate loss of life and physical damage due to the bombing campaigns that targeted economic and military infrastructure, and that continued throughout the war. In July 1953 when the war ended, neither side had achieved wartime objectives. North Korea and South Korea remained politically divided in more or less the same territories that each had governed prior to the war.

Kim Il Sung used the excuse of the exigencies of war to build political, economic and social systems and structures whose function was to secure Kim's personal power and to carry out his directives in every sector of politics, economy and society. Opposition figures were purged and alternative perspectives eradicated. Kim built a mass Party whose job was to function as a transmission belt for the leader's directions and as a mechanism of control over the population. Kim institutionalised the policy and practice of ‘anti-bureaucratism' with the aim of preventing the opportunity for alternative political platforms or perspectives to have space to develop within the Party, the workplace and the society at large. Kim expanded mass mobilisation policies so that all of society was expected to participate in Kim-led, hierarchically organised support activities for the war effort. These organisational practices were dependent on and underpinned by the hard physical labour of the population.