While the North Korean regime continues to expand its nuclear weapons program to secure its regime legitimacy and survival, the North Korean people are losing their faith in the government. Drawing from her recently published book, North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press 2016), Jieun Baek will discuss how outside information and media flows covertly into North Korea and how this phenomenon creates fault lines in the country’s attempts to seal its informational borders. She will also discuss the country’s growing cyber capabilities and its digital response to the influx of foreign information.

Jieun Baek is a DPhil candidate in Public Policy researching first movers of dissent in Myanmar. Previously, she was a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Baek also worked at Google, where, among other roles, she served as Google Ideas’ North Korea expert. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Government and master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard University.