North Korea

The Korean Peninsula has been inhabited since the Paleolithic, with settled agricultural communities emerging in the Neolithic and the spread of bronze and iron working in the first millennium BCE. Traditional historiography traces the earliest political community to Gojoseon, a kingdom centered on the northern peninsula and parts of Manchuria, which Chinese sources record as existing by at least the fourth century BCE before its conquest by the Han dynasty in 108 BCE. From the resulting commanderies and the surrounding tribal confederations there emerged the Three Kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla, with Goguryeo in particular controlling much of the territory that today constitutes North Korea. Silla unified most of the peninsula in 668 with Tang Chinese assistance, and was succeeded by the kingdoms of Goryeo, founded in 918, and Joseon, founded in 1392, each of which governed a unified Korean state from capitals that included Kaesong and later Hanseong (modern Seoul).

The Joseon dynasty endured for more than five centuries, developing a Confucian bureaucratic order, the hangul alphabet under King Sejong in the fifteenth century, and a tributary relationship with successive Chinese dynasties. Joseon weathered Japanese invasions in the 1590s and Manchu incursions in the early seventeenth century, but in the late nineteenth century Korea was forced open to foreign trade and became the focus of rivalry among China, Russia, and Japan. The Korean Empire, proclaimed in 1897, proved short lived; following the Russo-Japanese War, Korea was made a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and formally annexed in 1910, ending dynastic rule and beginning thirty five years of colonial administration that suppressed Korean language and institutions while industrialising parts of the north.

Japanese rule ended with surrender in August 1945, after which the peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel into Soviet and American occupation zones. In the north, a provisional administration coalesced around the returned guerrilla commander Kim Il Sung, and on 9 September 1948 the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed in Pyongyang, three weeks after the establishment of the Republic of Korea in Seoul. In June 1950 Northern forces invaded the south, opening the Korean War; after Chinese intervention and United Nations counteroffensives, an armistice signed at Panmunjom in July 1953 froze the front roughly along the prewar line, leaving the two states technically still at war.

Under Kim Il Sung the DPRK consolidated a one party system around the Workers' Party of Korea and the official ideology of Juche, pursuing rapid heavy industrialisation with Soviet and Chinese assistance. The end of the Cold War and the loss of socialist trading partners produced severe economic contraction in the 1990s, including a famine known as the Arduous March. Kim Il Sung's death in 1994 brought his son Kim Jong Il to power, and a third generational transfer in 2011 placed Kim Jong Un at the head of the state. During this period the country conducted nuclear tests beginning in 2006 and developed long range missile capabilities, drawing successive United Nations sanctions.

The DPRK is constitutionally a socialist state but functions in practice as a single party dictatorship led by the Workers' Party of Korea, with executive authority concentrated in the office of the Supreme Leader and legitimacy framed through hereditary succession in the Kim family.