Katharina Zellweger will share her insights into North Korea based on her experience as a development and humanitarian aid worker and a resident of Pyongyang. Closely interacting with North Koreans daily, Zellweger lived in Pyongyang for five years as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). She is a Swiss national with over 30 years of experience in humanitarian work from an Asian base. Her primary engagement has been with China and North Korea.

While heading the SDC program in Pyongyang, Zellweger focused on sustainable agricultural production to address food security issues, income generation to improve people's livelihoods, and capacity development to contribute to individual and institutional learning.

Before joining SDC, Zellweger worked nearly 30 years at the Caritas Internationalis office in Hong Kong, where she pioneered the organization's involvement in China and North Korea. Her humanitarian aid programs in North Korea were coordinated through Caritas-Hong Kong. In recognition of her work in North Korea, the Vatican made Zellweger a Dame of St. Gregory the Great in 2006. 

Zellweger holds a master's degree in international administration from the School of International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and a Swiss diploma in trade, commerce, and business administration. She also apprenticed with Switzerland’s national agricultural management program.

Zellweger joined the Korean Studies Program as the 2011-12 Pantech Fellow to conduct research on the transformation, especially social and economic change, of North Korea and its society.

Today nuclear negotiations with North Korea, begun twenty years ago, have returned to their starting point. The Geneva Agreement of 1994 collapsed as a result of North Korea’s clandestine uranium enrichment program, and the PRC-hosted Six Party talks have failed to halt nuclear tests by North Korea. Neither the engagement policy of the Clinton Administration nor the coercive policy of President Bush succeeded in resolving the North Korean nuclear conundrum. The North now claims it should be treated as a nuclear weapons state.

North Korea is currently waging a "peace offensive" to deflect criticism from the international community for its reckless military provocations against South Korea last year. The North may also need dialogue with the international community more than we do, to obtain economic assistance, since starving people would not support their regime and nuclear weapons cannot feed its people. The United States and South Korea agree, however, that under present circumstances, engagement with North Korea would be futile. They maintain that their refusal to resume talks with North Korea is a deliberate and strategic decision. Looking back on real-world experience, North Korea has consistently used provocations as "leverage" to arrive at negotiations on its terms. In most cases, it has gained considerable concessions, using its well-known brinkmanship tactics.

Now that North Korea has confirmed the existence of its uranium enrichment program and announced it will begin constructions of LWRs on its own, neighboring countries are deeply concerned about nuclear safety—not to mention nuclear security—in North Korea. This provides a reason for an unconditional dialogue with North Korea, apparently precisely the situation North sought. In this light, Mr. Yu will review the last twenty years of negotiations with North Korea to draw lessons for dealing with the regime in the future.

Mr. Yu is a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Korea. He served as Korea's Ambassador to Israel, Japan and Philippines.

Except for specialists working on the period, the Korean Empire's (1897–1910) project to develop Pyongyang as the "Western Capital" (Sŏgyŏng) is not all that well known even among Korea historians. From the perspective of international relations, there can be no doubt that the Russo-Japanese War sealed independent Korea’s fate. All the same, in the last two decades or so, Korea’s own effort toward modernization has received more attention among historians who no longer dismiss the history of the Korean Empire as the tail end of the Chosŏn Dynasty. For sure, the official rhetoric that empires old and new have had two capitals conceals imperial Korea’s self-perceptions about its place in the civilized world of the past, the present, and the future. Moreover, scrutiny of the circumstances in which the government undertook the project before it came to a halt allows insight into the Korean Empire’s understanding of geopolitical realities at the time.

Eugene Y. Park is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor in History in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of Penn's Korean Studies Program. Dr. Park completed his doctorate in East Asian languages and civilizations at Harvard in 1999 and has received numerous research grants and fellowships, including: a 2007–08 Seoul National University Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies Fellowship; a 2003–04 Korea Foundation Advanced Research Grant; a 1999–2000 Yale University Council on East Asian Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship; a 1996–97 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship; and a 1995–96 Fulbright Fellowship. His research interests focus on the sociopolitical history of early modern Korea, and his current work examines the chungin ("middle people") to address questions of modernity, identities, and agency. His book, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late Chosŏn Korea, 1600–1894, was published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2007. He has published chapters and articles in venues such as Journal of Social History and Yŏksa wa hyŏnsil.