Nuclear Negotiations of North Korea and Their Propaganda Strategy

• In Event: Arms Control

Abstract

How does a closed personalist regime such as North Korea communicate to the audience inside or outside of the regime while it negotiates with other countries? Autocratic regimes face commitment problems for international negotiations. The commitment problems become severe when it comes to ma jor security issues such as nuclear disarmament. We theorize that given the controlled information/signal to the public, the variation in the signal to the domestic audience can have significant implications for understanding the extent to which the country makes the commitment to the agreement. To test our theory, we evaluate a novel dataset consisting of more than 82,000 news articles from North Korea’s sole state news agency. We find that there exists a marked difference in their rhetoric before and after negotiates nuclear deals with major counterparts such as the United States and South Korea.

Authors

• Hyeonho Hahm, University of Mannheim

• John Seungmin Kuk, Washington University in St. Louis

• Inbok Rhee, University of California, San Diego