How Can North Korea Achieve Peaceful Modernization?
Quite apart from North Korea’s need for a new and different kind of leadership, the North Korean system itself must undergo broad and deep modernization if North Korea is ever to have normal relations with the outside world. With this tenet in mind, the RAND Corporation and five institutions in five countries that have key interests in North Korea’s future—China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea—undertook a collaborative effort to determine how the North Korean system could move toward modernization over the medium to long term. The approach is viewed as “participatory systems analysis” in that the participants, in analyzing the North Korean system and how to motivate its modernization, fused their sometimes divergent but often overlapping and reconcilable perspectives on that system. The study first produced policy instruments that can contribute to the system’s modernization and provide a basis for concerted, collaborative efforts to stimulate peaceful change in North Korea. These inst
