Join us for a discussion with Dr. Jieun Baek, author of “Privileged but Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness.” In conversation with policy director Jonathan Corrado, Baek reveals a world of forbidden information, simmering resentment, and survival-driven masks, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with high-level escapees. Baek argues that this performative loyalty, born of fear and a desire to survive, obscures a critical vulnerability within the regime’s core. In other words: the officials 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.
The book is available for purchase here
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Privileged but Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness
Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 4 PM (EDT)
About the Speaker:
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Jieun Baek is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. She is the author of North Korea’s Hidden Revolution and "Privileged but Powerless," and researches elite discontent and regime instability in authoritarian states, particularly North Korea and Burma. |