I study how authoritarian regimes stay in power. North Korea is my primary area of expertise, but my research extends beyond it.
Director of Research and Planning · UniKorea Foundation
Editor · Unification and the Future
Emerging Scholar Fellow · 38 North, Stimson Center (2026–27)
Korea Commentator · Al-Qahera News (Egypt)
Since December 2023 I have appeared sixteen times on Al-Qahera News, Egypt's state broadcaster, as a regular Korea commentator — providing live analysis from Seoul for Arabic-language coverage of the Korean Peninsula and wider East Asian security.
I edit the UniKorea Foundation's two public-facing platforms on North Korea and unification.
A Korean-language news platform on North Korea, inter-Korean relations, and unification policy, published by the UniKorea Foundation since 2021.
An open-access search platform for research reports, articles, and books on North Korea, unification, and regional security.
tongilnanum8000.com ↗My current research examines regime survival: how authoritarian governments manage elite competition, coup-proof their militaries, and accommodate the constituencies they cannot simply repress. As a 38 North Emerging Scholar Fellow for 2026–27, I am examining what North Korean public protocol — who appears at which events, and beside whom — reveals about standing within the regime.
My earlier work approached the same problem from the economic side, tracing North Korea’s counterfeit consumer market through the trademarks it registers and the foreign brands it imitates. A state that goes to the trouble of copying Dior has a consumer class it must now accommodate — which is a question of political survival rather than of commerce.
Interviewed and cited on North Korea's counterfeit economy, trademarks, and consumer brands.
My research asks how authoritarian regimes endure: how they manage elite competition, insulate themselves against military coups, and accommodate the constituencies they cannot repress outright. North Korea is the case for which I have the deepest evidentiary access, and I treat it as one authoritarian regime among several rather than as a category of its own.
I came to these questions through political economy rather than security studies. For several years I examined North Korea through its trademarks and brand imitation — the marks it files with WIPO, the foreign products it copies — and concluded that the analytically interesting question was not the counterfeiting itself, but what it implied about the emerging consumer class the regime now has to answer to.
I am Director of Research and Planning at the UniKorea Foundation in Seoul, where I also edit Unification and the Future, the foundation's North Korea and unification news platform. I write and speak in English and Korean, and I take commentary requests from international broadcasters.