Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness
On Thursday, September 3rd, the Asia Policy Program, the Clements Center for National Security, and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law are pleased to host a book talk with Dr. Jieun Baek on her new book, Privileged but Powerless. North Korea’s elite are often assumed to be the regime’s most reliable pillar of support — granted access to forbidden information, material comforts, and proximity to power that ordinary citizens can only imagine. Baek’s research tells a more precarious story: beneath the elite’s public displays of loyalty lie deep anxieties about status, security, and survival, sustained less by belief than by fear and a lack of alternatives.
Baek’s account is grounded in more than 230 hours of interviews with senior-level North Korean escapees. Her interviewees include former deputy and acting ambassadors, senior diplomats, high-ranking businessmen, and Korean Workers’ Party cadres. They also include a former bodyguard to Kim Jong Il and officers from Bureau 39. She supplements these accounts with government documents, state media, and analysis from academics, intelligence practitioners, and policymakers. Together, this research challenges the conventional view of North Korea’s elite as a monolithic, unshakeable base of support. Baek argues instead that the very people most invested in preserving the status quo may become the regime’s most consequential disruptors. Their motive would not be ideology, but simmering resentment and dwindling options.
Join us for a conversation on what these findings reveal about the durability and vulnerabilities of the Kim regime, and what they suggest for the future of U.S. policy toward North Korea.
Biography
Dr. Jieun Baek is a scholar of law, authoritarian governance, and international political risk whose work draws on mor than fifteen years of research, teaching, and advising on North Korea, Burma, elite behavior, information access, regime stability, and high-risk dissent in closed political systems.
She is the author of “North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society” and “Privileged but Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness,” both published by Yale University Press. Her Forthcoming books include “North Korea’s Provinces: Hidden Layers Beyond Pyongyang” and a co-authored volume on North Korea’s information ecosystem, media flows, and defector networks, and she has worked closely with policymakers, technology companies, journalists, and NGOs on information operations, dual-use technologies, and human rights ion closed societies.
She is a Nonresident Seior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Info-Pacific Security Initiative, a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. She is currently a JD candidate at Georgetown University Law Center and holds a PhD in Public Policy from the University of Oxford, an MPP from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA from Harvard College.