Privileged but Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness

On Thursday, September 3, the Asia Policy Program will host a public book talk on Privileged but Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness with author Dr. Jieun Baek, a scholar of law, authoritarian governance, and international political risk whose work draws on more than fifteen years of research, teaching, and advising on North Korea.

Dr. Baek’s second book on North Korea is a deeply researched and sharply analytical account of the grievances harbored by the country’s elite. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with escapees from Pyongyang, Baek examines how members of this privileged class, granted access to forbidden information and superior material benefits, publicly uphold the regime despite their underlying discontent. She argues that this performative loyalty, born of fear and a desire to survive, masks a critical vulnerability within the regime’s core.

Grounded in firsthand testimony and enriched by insights from a global network of academics, intelligence analysts, human rights practitioners, and policymakers, Baek’s account challenges the prevailing view of North Korea’s elites as uniformly loyal actors. Instead, she reveals a complex and precarious reality faced by those closest to power.

This book sheds new light on how elite grievances may shape the trajectory of the regime’s stability and security. Baek offers a provocative argument: that those who seem most invested in preserving North Korea’s status quo may become its most dangerous disruptors, not for ideological reasons but because of simmering resentment and vanishing alternatives.

Dr. Jieun Baek is a scholar of law, authoritarian governance, and international political risk whose work draws on more than 15 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, both published by Yale University Press. She has worked closely with policymakers, technology companies, journalists, and NGOs on information operations, dual-use technologies, and human rights in closed societies. She is a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Indo-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.