Are there north korean rebels

North Korea has a bizarre set of rules that can hand one a disproportionately extreme punishment for innocuous crimes. Check out the crazy rules of North Korea and its Kim Jong-un. Key Highlights North Korea is a shut society, not open like its Southern counterpart. The North Korean leader rules the country with an iron hand and rules are bizarre to say the least. Neither Free Joseon nor the North Korean government has commented on the embassy break-in, leaving the rare diplomatic invasion subject to further speculation.

Pyongyang has long shared its suspicions of Washington's plots to end three generations of Kim family rule in North Korea, whose nuclear weapons have been treasured as a vital form of defense. But the two longtime rivals have publicly eased their harsh language toward one another amid the unprecedented peace process begun last year.

Even as U. South Korea's official Yonhap News Agency cited a Unification Ministry source Monday as saying that some North Korea officials had returned to their joint border liaison office following a days-long absence that accompanied the recent hiccup in peace talks. Newsweek magazine delivered to your door Unlimited access to Newsweek. When director James Jones set out to make a film about life inside North Korea, he decided early on that it would be pointless to go there himself.

Instead, he hoped to capture stirrings of dissent or, better yet, overt signs of rebellion from an isolated populace long oppressed by a dictatorial regime -- the sorts of scenes "people are always desperate to see" but don't expect to find, he said.

For that, he turned to Jiro Ishimaru , a Japanese journalist who operates an underground network of hidden camera reporters inside North Korea -- individuals who risk imprisonment and even execution to document life inside a country that has, for decades, been painstakingly hidden from view.

The resulting film, an hourlong Frontline documentary titled Secret State of North Korea , is a sweeping, disturbing peek into a misunderstood and rapidly changing society. For that, he turned to Jiro Ishimaru , a Japanese journalist who operates an underground network of hidden camera reporters inside North Korea — individuals who risk imprisonment and even execution to document life inside a country that has, for decades, been painstakingly hidden from view.

For those familiar as much as one can be with North Korea, much of the film will seem like a broad overview of what we already know about the heavily veiled country: Its citizens are rigidly controlled, its prison camps overflowing , and its government oppressive and volatile. But the undercover footage adds a deeper, sinister dimension to the usual narrative. The closed nature of North Korean society and high levels of isolation of the population vis-a-vis the rest of the world may also have something to do with citizens not rebelling.

North Koreans remain far removed from the processes of diffusion that allowed revolutions to domino from one country to the next in the MENA region. Additionally and I certainly am no expert on North Korea , maybe the absence of a popular uprising has to do with the fact that citizens of Pyongyang enjoy a relatively key word comfortable life compared to that of their rural counterparts. I may be wrong, but it would seem to me as if popular uprisings have the best chance of gaining momentum and influencing change if they benefit from mass gatherings of people, which are more likely to occur in heavily populated urban settings than in rural areas where people are more dispersed, less connected with one another, etc.

If the majority of grievances are held by the poorer, rural population in North Korea, but the bulk of the population lives more comfortably in the capital city and other urban centers, then this could also contribute to why we see no popular uprisings. One of the conditions that makes a popular resistance movement possible is the existence of civil society institutions, such as churches, universities, labor unions, or civic organizations, that exist beyond the direct control of the state.

These institutions help citizens to organize and mobilize collective actions to protest and resist a repressive regime. North Korea has few, if any, such institutions, because the populace is heavily policed and monitored by the totalitarian regime.

Combined with the regime imposed restrictions on freedom of movement and freedom of the press and the isolation of North Korean society from transnational advocacy organizations which could perhaps serve as proxy civil society institutions , the likelihood that citizens could organize against the regime is slim.

In short, rather than the effectiveness of state ideology or propaganda or an absence of discontent among key sectors of the populace as some suggested above , it is the structure of North Korean society, one defined by a weak and perhaps nonexistent civil society, that prevents effective resistance from emerging. I can shrink this whole article down to one word: Indoctrination.