We have ample examples of efforts to "engage" adversaries, from Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik to Kissinger’s conception of détente and Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine policy. Yet much more attention has been given to understanding the logic of sanctions than the logic of inducements. Drawing an array of new sources of information on the North Korean economy, from the direction of its foreign trade to two firm‐level surveys of Chinese and South Korean firms doing business in the country, we consider the political and economic logic of engagement. Like sanctions, the conditions under which engagement strategies are likely to work are subject to a number of constraints. Target governments appear well aware of the risks of engagement and there is only mixed evidence for claims that such engagement has transformative effects.

Dr. Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Distinguished Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies and Director of Korea-Pacific Program (KPP) at the University of California, San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.

Stephan Haggard works on the political economy of developing countries, with a particular interest in Asia and the Korean peninsula. He is the author of Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (1990), The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995, with Robert Kaufman), The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000) and Development, Democracy and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe (2000, with Robert Kaufman). His current research focuses on the relationship between inequality, democratization and authoritarianism in developing countries. 

Professor Haggard has written extensively on the political economy of North Korea with Marcus Noland, including Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (2007) and Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (2011). Haggard and Noland co-author the "North Korea: Witness to Transformation" blog at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.