NK 1: a new parameter

(Disclaimer: While I do have a keen interest in current events surrounding the Korean peninsula, I claim no expertise in politics or history of North Korea.  So, I apologize in advance for any misleading thoughts.)


Predicting the future of North Korea's regime is a challenging task for even the most learned experts of North Korean affairs.  Experts who had predicted an imminent regime collapse in the 90s were humbled by the unprecedented resilience of the current regime (the regime remains apparently intact today).  Perhaps because of this infamous prediction most experts are hesitant to paint any probable picture of North Korea's regime in the future.  Nonetheless, this has not prevented many from setting forth several scenarios.  From a layperson's perspective there are four (or some combination of):

1) Status quo: the regime remains intact unchanged
2) Apoptosis: the regime disintegrates slowly
3) Necrosis: the regime collapses suddenly (with inevitable 'debris' = unrest)
4) Differentiation: the regime transforms structurally and functionally

These scenarios have been debated to no end with analogies made to cases like China, Romania, Albania, Russia, Cuba, Germany, states that have undergone regime changes or failures.  I am in no position to judge how justifiable or informative these analogies and predictions are; all I can perceive is that there is a level of nervous uncertainty about future of NK as I try to illustrate in this diagram (the cloud being some expression of a confidence interval).

Recently, a new parameter has made an appearance in the prediction model.  Kim Jong Il's youngest son, Kim Jong Un [Un] has been appointed as the new successor to the NK regime.  This sent all the experts/journalists scrambling to speculate about how the NK regime will be affected by this unexpected and previously unknown factor (heck, they don't even know how old he is!).  What I can gather from the news is that rather than signaling a certain direction for NK's future, Un only adds to the uncertainty of the different scenarios.  Nonetheless, the new uncertainty offers some clues; it signals that some sort of change in the regime (as opposed to the status quo) is more likely than before, whether the agent be Un himself, or others, but that the direction of change remains uncertain with more stochasticity than before.

What this spells for the Korean peninsula is increased uncertainty, until more data on the new parameter can be gathered.  In the meantime, I just cross my fingers that 'necrosis' is not imminent.