The international society's sanctions and engagement strategies have hotly been debated by scholars. While some scholars argue that sanctions and engagement do not work, others advocate that North Korean behavior can be changed through sanctions and engagement. This paper is to analyze the international community's sanctions and engagement strategies toward North Korea and investigate their details and limitations. Thus, this paper sought to answer the following questions. First, are policies of economic statecraft such as sanctions and engagement effective strategies to change North Korea's foreign policy behavior? And second, if they are not effective, what are the reasons?
Through a holistic approach, this paper examines multiple aspects of the North Korean issue such as the international environment, domestic economy, the regime type and others. Chapter 2 starts with the historical background explaining how the nuclear development and ensuing negotiations have progressed. Chapter 3 reviews a growing theoretical literature on sanctions and engagement strategies. Chapter 4 analyzes the empirical literature on sanctions and engagement strategy and its impact in the case of North Korea. Chapter 5 examines North Korea's political ideology, culture and structure. By focusing on Pyongyang's power structure and ruling ideology, the chapter seeks to find out whether sanctions or inducements can affect the ruling elites in Pyongyang. Chapter 6 delves into North Korea's external environment and its relations with neighboring countries such as China, South Korea, Japan and the United States. The international setting significantly affects the success of sanctions and engagement. In the case of North Korea, sanctions were not effective because the policies of major donor countries were not coordinated. Chapter 7 examines North Korea's domestic economic policies, especially during and after the Great Famine period of the 1990s and how the leadership tried to deal with the national disaster. Facing the huge disaster, the North Korean regime initiated a few reforms, but all these reforms failed and even worsened the life of ordinary citizens in the North, fundamentally because the regime feared the loss of control over the market through the reform and wanted to keep a grip on power. Chapter 8 attempts to detail North Korean conventional and nuclear capabilities and North Korea's intention to build up nuclear weapons. The chapter concludes that it is extremely difficult to force or induce Pyongyang to discard its nuclear program, because its regime is strongly determined to build its own nuclear weapons.
Therefore, based on a review of previous research analyzing the economic as well as political and diplomatic aspects of policies of economic statecraft, this paper has shown the following reasons why sanctions and engagement strategies did not work in the case of North Korea: 1) the leadership and its core elite base were not much affected by the policies; 2) Pyongyang evaded sanctions effect by skillfully exploiting the coordination and bargaining problem of sender countries during the nuclear crisis; 3) the leadership in Pyongyang is not willing to surrender to foreign pressures, nor is it ready to open the country and reform its economy; 4) the leadership is determined to possess nuclear weapons.